Ensuring Accountability for Disinformation

Ensuring Accountability for Disinformation

Our winter 2026 Buffett Symposium on disinformation convened global experts and practitioners from industry, public policy, academia, and civil society to address four urgent priorities: sustaining trust and credibility in information flows; strengthening accountability for platforms, governments, and users alike; advancing innovative tools and strategies to counter disinformation; and forging multi-sector collaboration to build resilient information ecosystems worldwide. This panel convened experts in advocacy, research, and industry to discuss mechanisms for ensuring accountability of platforms, publishers, and users. Panelists included: * Imran Ahmed [https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114299/witnesses/HHRG-117-IF17-Bio-AhmedI-20211209.pdf], CEO, Center for Countering Digital Hate [https://counterhate.com/about/] * Emily Vraga [https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/ekvraga], Don & Carole Larson Professor in Health Communication, Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota * James Warren [https://www.newsguardtech.com/about/team/james-warren/], Executive Editor, NewsGuard [https://www.newsguardtech.com/] * Moderated by Priyanka Motaparthy [https://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/profiles/priyankamotaparthy/], Clinical Professor of Law, Director of the Center for International Human Rights, Pritzker School of Law, Northwestern University Key Takeaways: * Platform accountability for disinformation is not absent — it has been deliberately displaced, and the legal framework that enables this must change. Ahmed argued that platforms maintain enormous power over what speech is amplified, monetized, and made visible to billions of people, while engineering systems that reward outrage and falsehood and insulating themselves from liability through Section 230. He described how CCDH research found 680,000 antisemitic posts on X viewed 193 million times in a single year — despite the platform's stated policies — with ads running alongside the content and revenues flowing back to the creators. He and Warren both pointed to the need for structural reforms: sunsetting Section 230 to restore liability, requiring risk mitigation for foreseeable harms, mandating transparency through legislation, and holding platforms financially accountable when their systems cause measurable harm to users and communities. * Reputational pressure and economic incentives, while imperfect, represent meaningful levers for accountability in the absence of regulation. Warren described how NewsGuard's reporting on misinformation sites exposed the role of programmatic advertising in funding harmful content — leading ad agencies and brands, concerned about being associated with pro-Putin or hate-driven sites, to change their practices. He also documented how straightforward transparency demands, such as requiring news outlets to disclose ownership and differentiate news from opinion, produced real changes at hundreds of sites. Vraga added that user corrections can reduce belief in misinformation, and that public pressure campaigns — from the Delete Facebook movement to advertiser boycotts following Musk's acquisition of X — have had genuine if limited financial consequences for platforms, suggesting that collective user behavior remains an underutilized accountability mechanism. * The organizations doing accountability work are themselves under attack, and defending their ability to operate is now part of the fight. Ahmed described being banned from the United States by the Trump administration — despite holding a green card and having a family here — in retaliation for CCDH's research documenting the surge in hate speech on X following Musk's takeover. Warren described a Republican amendment to the military appropriations bill that barred the Pentagon from working with NewsGuard by name. Both saw these attacks as a sign not of defeat but of progress: platforms and their political allies are fighting back precisely because accountability efforts are working. Ahmed expressed cautious optimism that the age of accountability is inevitable, pointing to Online Safety Acts in the UK and EU, growing state-level legislation in the US, and a new generation of systems-level thinking that focuses on algorithmic design and monetization rather than content moderation alone.

Countering State-Sponsored Disinformation and Ensuring Trustworthy Information Spaces

Our winter 2026 Buffett Symposium on disinformation convened global experts and practitioners from industry, public policy, academia, and civil society to address four urgent priorities: sustaining trust and credibility in information flows; strengthening accountability for platforms, governments, and users alike; advancing innovative tools and strategies to counter disinformation; and forging multi-sector collaboration to build resilient information ecosystems worldwide. This panel brought together leaders of populations targeted by state-sponsored disinformation and U.S. foreign policy to discuss approaches to countering such campaigns and to ensure trustworthy information spaces. Panelists included: * Ellen McCarthy [https://www.insaonline.org/detail-pages/person/ellen-mccarthy], Chairwoman and CEO, Trust in Media Cooperative [https://www.timcoop.org/]; former US Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence & Research * Shih-Hung Lo [https://telecom.ccu.edu.tw/p/405-1088-23008,c2258.php?Lang=en], Professor, National Chung Cheng University; Chairperson, Taiwan FactCheck Center [https://en.tfc-taiwan.org.tw/] * Viktoriia Romaniuk [https://msj.ukma.edu.ua/en/about-school/lecturers/viktoria-romaniuk/], Deputy Chief Editor, StopFake [https://www.stopfake.org/en/main/]; Director, Mohyla School of Journalism at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy * Moderated by Olga Kamenchuk [https://communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/olga-kamenchuk.html], Associate Professor of Instruction and Faculty Affiliate, Center for Communication & Public Policy, School of Communication Key Takeaways: Here's the trimmed version: Key Takeaways: * The most dangerous consequence of state-sponsored disinformation is not that people believe false things — it is that they stop trusting anything at all. Romaniuk described how Russia's decade-long information campaign against Ukraine has pursued a deliberate strategy of blurring the line between true and false, creating a climate in which people simply disengage from verification altogether. Lo echoed this from Taiwan's perspective, noting that Chinese influence campaigns during the 2024 presidential election were not designed to support any particular candidate but to convince citizens that democracy itself was broken and institutions could not be trusted. McCarthy reframed the threat in systemic terms: the strategic goal of adversaries is not persuasion but paralysis — polluting the information environment so that societies, governments, and alliances cannot think, coordinate, or act coherently. * Russia and China pursue disinformation with meaningfully different strategies, and effective responses must account for those differences. McCarthy characterized Russia's approach as focused on mass disruption and chaos, while China's is more targeted, long-term, and data-driven — what Lo described as cognitive warfare. Lo explained how Chinese-linked actors have built networks of lifestyle social media accounts that post about food and travel to gain trust before pivoting to political content at critical moments. Against chaos-based disinformation, the right response is clarity and rapid correction; against precision-based cognitive warfare, the response must be long-term resilience built through media literacy, trusted local voices, and early detection of coordinated inauthentic behavior. * Building resilient information ecosystems requires investing in trust infrastructure long before a crisis hits — and Ukraine and Taiwan offer hard-won models. Romaniuk described how StopFake spent years building a database of Russian disinformation narratives and cultivating a trusted public audience, so that when the full-scale invasion began, ordinary Ukrainians knew where to turn. Lo described Taiwan's civic technology community, where volunteer networks and professional fact-checkers use AI-assisted monitoring with final human verification, and where independent fact-checking has become authoritative enough that political parties now cite it to challenge each other. McCarthy argued that the broader lesson is the need to treat the information ecosystem as critical infrastructure — developing shared standards, provenance systems, and governance frameworks that function even when governments and platforms retreat from their traditional roles.

Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration for Countering Disinformation

Our winter 2026 Buffett Symposium on disinformation convened global experts and practitioners from industry, public policy, academia, and civil society to address four urgent priorities: sustaining trust and credibility in information flows; strengthening accountability for platforms, governments, and users alike; advancing innovative tools and strategies to counter disinformation; and forging multi-sector collaboration to build resilient information ecosystems worldwide. This panel convened leaders representing the global tech industry, journalism, and policy to explore how multi-stakeholder collaboration can collectively address the challenges of disinformation. Panelists included: * Angie Drobnic Holan [https://www.angieholan.com/], Director of the International Fact-Checking Network [https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/], Poynter Institute * Erin Saltman [https://gifct.org/team/dr-erin-saltman-2/], Senior Director, Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) [https://gifct.org/] * David Bray [https://www.stimson.org/ppl/david-bray/], Distinguished Chair of the Accelerator, Stimson Center [https://www.stimson.org/]; Principal/CEO, LDA Ventures, Inc. * Moderated by Nicholas Diakopoulos [https://communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/nicholas-diakopoulos.html], Professor and Director of the Computational Journalism Lab [https://www.cj-lab.org/], School of Communication, Northwestern University Key Takeaways: * Effective multi-stakeholder collaboration on disinformation is less a coordination problem than a problem of misaligned incentives — and that distinction matters enormously for how we respond. Holan argued that the current moment is not simply one of stakeholders failing to get on the same page, but of certain powerful actors — major platforms and political figures — actively benefiting from the persistence of disinformation. She pushed back against the narrative that fact-checking has failed, noting that Meta's third-party fact-checking program was still running in every country except the United States when it was curtailed, and that it was dismantled not because it didn't work but because it threatened profitable business models and political interests. The practical implication, she argued, is that coalitions for information integrity must be built around the sectors of society — science, education, journalism, civic institutions — whose core missions genuinely depend on accurate information. * Addressing disinformation requires understanding why people reach for false narratives in the first place, not just correcting the narratives themselves. Bray drew on his experience across national security and technology policy to argue that people turn to conspiracy theories when they feel anxious or purposeless, and that debunking false claims can feel like an attack on identity. He pointed to lessons from public health, where effective campaigns succeeded not by presenting facts alone but by working through trusted community messengers and giving people a genuine sense of agency. Saltman echoed this from a counterterrorism perspective, noting that violent extremist recruitment succeeds largely by offering belonging and purpose — and that counter-messaging works best when it starts from common ground rather than confrontation. * Tackling disinformation at scale demands cross-sector partnerships built around concrete, time-limited goals — and the GIFCT offers a replicable model. Saltman described how the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism was founded because no single platform or government could address cross-platform harms alone, and how its working groups bring together tech companies, civil society, law enforcement, and governments around specific shared problems with defined outputs and timelines. She noted that civil society organizations are typically the most resource-constrained partners in these collaborations and require deliberate structural support. All three panelists agreed that ground-truth knowledge about how harmful content actually circulates — including coded language, memes, and platform-specific behavior — almost always originates with civil society, making their inclusion essential.

Innovating Resilience to Disinformation

Our winter 2026 Buffett Symposium on disinformation convened global experts and practitioners from industry, public policy, academia, and civil society to address four urgent priorities: sustaining trust and credibility in information flows; strengthening accountability for platforms, governments, and users alike; advancing innovative tools and strategies to counter disinformation; and forging multi-sector collaboration to build resilient information ecosystems worldwide. This panel brought together leading voices from psychological science, industry, and fact-checking to explore cutting-edge strategies and innovation for strengthening societies’ resilience against evolving disinformation threats. Panelists included: * Gordon Pennycook [https://psychology.cornell.edu/gordon-pennycook], Associate Professor of Psychology and Dorothy & Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow, Cornell University * Andrew Pel, Head of Campaigns, Moonshot [https://moonshotteam.com/] * Laura Zommer [https://www.icfj.org/about/profiles/laura-zommer], Co-Founder and CEO, Factchequeado [https://factchequeado.com/]; Founder, LatamChequea [https://latamchequea.com/en/latamchequea/] * Moderated by Erik Nisbet [https://communication.northwestern.edu/faculty/erik-nisbet.html], Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis & Communication, Director of the Center for Communication & Public Policy, School of Communication, Northwestern University Key Takeaways * Psychological inoculation — exposing people to weakened forms of manipulation techniques before they encounter them — shows real promise as a scalable resilience intervention, but no single approach is sufficient on its own. Pel described Moonshot's video-based prebunking campaigns, which reached hundreds of millions of people across the EU, Indonesia, and Ukraine, and produced measurable gains in people's ability to detect manipulation techniques like scapegoating and fear-mongering. Pennycook added that AI-assisted debunking can also be remarkably effective: in a study published in Science, GPT-4 conversations reduced conspiracy belief in roughly a quarter of participants, with effects holding at both ten days and two months later. Both panelists acknowledged key limitations — prebunking effects can decay over time, and debunking addresses specific beliefs without making people more broadly rational — underscoring Zommer's point that these tools work best in combination with trusted, community-rooted information networks. * Reaching the people who most need accurate information requires investing in trusted messengers, not just better content. Zommer described how Factchequeado built a network of 141 local media partners and grassroots organizations to deliver fact-checked content to Spanish-speaking communities in the US through the platforms they actually use — WhatsApp, YouTube, and TikTok. A key insight is that trust must be built before a crisis hits: audiences are far more likely to engage with accurate information during elections or emergencies if a relationship with a trusted source already exists. All three panelists agreed that fact-checking by professional journalists remains indispensable, but that expanding delivery through content creators and community influencers is increasingly essential for reaching audiences traditional media cannot. * The most urgent near-term investment is in truth-tellers — and the most important long-term investment is in critical thinking education. Pennycook argued that all psychological and technological interventions ultimately depend on there being good, accurate information in the environment to begin with, making sustained investment in journalism and fact-checking the essential foundation. Looking further ahead, panelists converged on the need for media literacy education that begins in schools and reaches across generations — teaching people not just to identify specific falsehoods, but to develop habits of reflection and lateral reading that make them more discerning information consumers over time. Pel pointed to promising nonpartisan models in Canada and elsewhere, while Zommer cautioned that even the best educational interventions will struggle without platforms designed to support rather than undermine informed engagement.

Nadia Murad on Bearing Witness and the Long Road to Justice

Our fall 2025 Buffett Symposium on youth-led peacebuilding brought together activists, politicians, NGO leaders, and negotiators from across the world to explore how youth are transforming the future of conflict resolution and justice. This conversation brought together Nadia Murad, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and Northwestern University political science professor Wendy Pearlman for a wide-ranging discussion on survival, justice, and the responsibilities of bearing witness. Drawing on her experience as a survivor of the ISIS genocide of the Yazidi people — during which she lost her mother, six brothers, and other family members, and was herself taken into sexual slavery — Murad reflected on what it has meant to transform personal trauma into advocacy, and on the long road toward accountability for crimes against humanity that the international community continues to fail to prevent. Panelists included: * ⁠Nadia Murad⁠ [https://www.nadiasinitiative.org/nadia-murad], human rights activist, author, and founder of ⁠Nadia's Initiative⁠ [https://www.nadiasinitiative.org/], and recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize * ⁠Wendy Pearlman⁠ [https://polisci.northwestern.edu/people/core-faculty/wendy-pearlman.html], Jane Long Professor of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University Key Takeaways * Survivors who share their stories do so at enormous personal cost, and those who document or investigate conflict-related sexual violence have an ethical obligation to treat them with care. Murad described how survivors in displacement camps were repeatedly interviewed without informed consent, had their faces shared against their wishes, and were asked to relive their trauma by multiple interviewers in a single day — experiences that led many women to stop sharing their stories altogether. In response, Murad helped develop the Murad Code, a set of ten principles for anyone documenting rape as a weapon of war, co-created with more than 1,000 survivors. The Code has since been translated into multiple languages and adopted in conflict zones, including Ukraine. * Justice is not a complement to peace — it is a precondition for it. Murad described how, after escaping captivity, she deliberately sought an alternative to the cycle of revenge that has long characterized conflict in her region, finding it in international legal accountability. She has since pursued cases against individual perpetrators across multiple countries, as well as a lawsuit against the French cement company Lafarge for funding ISIS operations. While she acknowledged that the number of ISIS members held accountable remains far smaller than the losses her own family has suffered, she emphasized that each case delivers hope to survivors and communities — and that without accountability, minorities in Iraq have little basis to trust they will be protected in the future. * In a moment of moral crisis, doing nothing is also a choice. Murad reflected on the family that risked their lives to help her escape, and on the many more who turned fleeing Yazidis over to ISIS. She argued that bravery does not require being a victim — it requires using whatever tools one has, whether education, voice, or passion, to act against injustice rather than look away. On the nature of courage itself, Murad was clear that being brave does not mean being unafraid. She described her own fear as a constant companion throughout her journey — from her captivity, to the decision to go public with her story, to the ongoing work of pursuing justice — and said that what matters is not the absence of fear but the willingness to act in spite of it. She also insisted that bravery takes many forms: those who share their stories publicly are brave, but so are the survivors who carry their trauma privately, protecting themselves and their families in the only way available to them.