How To Fight Disinformation in the Black Community | Opinion

During Black History Month, we will hear stories about the power of Black voters and the challenges they've overcome to make our nation's democracy what it is today. For centuries, Black people have faced disenfranchisement, violence, and more while attempting to exercise their right to vote. In 2024, ahead of this year's presidential election, Black voters will face many obstacles meant to stifle their voices and dissuade them from voting. The most pernicious and least understood barrier being misinformation and disinformation. These deceptive practices present a major threat to not just Black people, but our nation as a whole. Adequately addressing these threats will ensure that our democracy remains intact even after this election year comes to a close.

Using disinformation to mislead Black people is nothing new in our nation. It was used during the reconstruction and civil rights eras to mislead, intimidate, and harm Black voters. While the methods, technologies, and sophistication has changed, the intent remains the same—to prevent, discourage, and dissuade Black voters from exercising their power at the ballot box. Modern-day voter protection strategies have adapted to fight misinformation with tools like voter protection hotlines and digital ads, but the online spread of disinformation and artificial intelligence has created a new battlefield that we are woefully unprepared to fight on.

There have been recent warnings that an "onslaught of disinformation" will target voters of color this year—specifically Black voters. The current political environment is ripe for the spread of disinformation in Black communities. Disinformation needs distrust and fear to spread, and current research shows Black voters are more dissatisfied with the current political landscape than in previous cycles. As such, this genuine Black voter discontent is creating the ideal social environment for disinformation to seed, grow, and ultimately disengage and disillusion voters.

Black voters are key to protecting democracy in 2024. Despite a long and well-documented history of disinformation targeting Black voters, we are currently unprepared to combat these efforts. Recent presidential election cycles have seen increasingly sophisticated levels of disinformation targeting Black communities by both foreign and domestic bad actors. In 2016, Russian troll operations aggressively targeted Black voters across social media to discourage voting, increase racial tensions, and decrease candidate support ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Just one Facebook page owned by these operations mimicking social justice activists received over 11 million engagements with Black voters being targeted with posts with titles like "Our Votes Don't Matter."

Despite this, social media companies have significantly rolled back policies meant to mitigate hate, harassment, and voter protection on their platforms ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Generative artificial intelligence has the capability to supercharge voter suppression tactics this year by creating online disinformation-fueled content and giving bad actors the ability to quickly create hyper-personalized persuasion messages. Social media companies must not be allowed to create environments of hate, harassment, and misleading information that disproportionately target communities of color. These platforms must be held accountable in real time for the harmful information they allow to flow unimpeded across their platforms.

So how can we fight back? You don't have to be an expert to push back against disinformation and misinformation. Here are best practices that can immediately help mitigate the spread of disinformation in Black communities:

—Empower Black media outlets with the resources they need to combat disinformation. Black media is a critical news source for Black communities across the nation with 64 percent of Black people turning to these outlets for news content. As the threat of disinformation targeting Black communities grows, arming trusted Black media outlets with resources to reach larger audiences, be trusted fact-checkers, and spread inoculation best practices is critical.

—Know the source and lean on news outlets that require some level of fact-checking. Whenever possible, check the source of the information you are reading or sharing to make sure it is reputable. The easiest way to do this is to try to share information from reputable sources and trusted messengers directly.

—Understand whether your post will spread fear or unnecessarily divide the Black community. The more times you hear something, the more likely you'll believe that it's true. Repeating or amplifying false narratives that unnecessarily divide the Black community creates an environment of distrust and fear and allows disinformation of any kind to spread broadly and quickly.

These are just a few ways we can all create healthier information ecosystems in our communities. Black voters deserve resilient information-sharing ecosystems that build trust, power, and community. Adverse information—information created to mislead or harm—doesn't just close doors, it builds walls of distrust and disillusionment. Fighting disinformation and misinformation this year is not just vital to strengthening and empowering our communities, it is imperative to saving our democracy.

Esosa Osa is the founder and CEO of Onyx Impact, an organization created to better serve and empower Black communities by exposing the harmful external information ecosystems targeting our community. Esosa is a native Ohioan and a graduate of Duke University.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.