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.
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