Live from the Buffett Reading Room

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.

Youth Architects of Peace

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 panel brought together three young peacebuilders whose work spans Belarus, Colombia, and Uganda to explore how the next generation is transforming the theory and practice of peacemaking. Each panelist came to the work through personal experience with conflict, repression, or injustice in their home country, and each has built organizations or movements that center youth leadership as essential — not peripheral — to lasting peace. The conversation examined how young activists break into national-level conversations, build coalitions across lines of difference, and sustain their commitment in the face of setbacks and slow progress. Panelists included: * Alana Gebremariam [https://prisoners.spring96.org/en/person/alana-gebremariam], a Belarusian pro-democracy activist and elected member of the Coordination Council facilitating a democratic transfer of power in Belarus * Amos Kiyingi [https://www.obama.org/programs/leaders/africa/2018/amos-kiyingi/], Founder and National Director of Uganda Unites [https://ugandaunites.org/] * Cristina Rosero-Arteaga [https://law.mpg.de/event/climate-change-and-health/], Senior Legal Adviser for the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Latin America & Caribbean Program [https://reproductiverights.org/regions/latin-america-the-caribbean/] * Moderator Giavanna Chopra [https://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/undergraduate-opportunities/undergraduate-research-fellowship-program/cohorts/], fourth-year undergraduate student in the School of Education and Social Policy and a Buffett Undergraduate Research Fellow Key Takeaways: * Meaningful youth participation in peace processes requires more than representation — it requires ownership. Kiyingi described how Uganda Unites deliberately involved young people from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds in developing the curriculum for its Peace Clubs, rather than delivering a top-down program. Rosero-Arteaga echoed this, tracing how young Colombian feminist lawyers and activists did not simply join the peace process but drove the inclusion of gender mandates into the 2016 peace agreement — a historic first — by building trust with grassroots communities, mobilizing in the streets, and strategically placing themselves inside transitional justice mechanisms. * Expanding the scope of what counts as a peace issue is itself an act of peacebuilding. Rosero-Arteaga described how Colombian feminist movements connected reproductive rights to the armed conflict by documenting previously invisible forms of reproductive violence — including forced abortion, forced contraception, and forced pregnancy — across more than 68 civil society reports. By naming these patterns, advocates were able to bring reproductive justice into peace negotiations and eventually into the final report of Colombia's Truth Commission, the first in the world to recognize reproductive violence as a distinct category of gender-based violence warranting comprehensive reparations. * Courage in the face of fear and persistence in the face of failure are the defining qualities of effective young peacebuilders. Gebremariam, who was imprisoned for her activism in Belarus, reflected that courage is not the absence of fear but the refusal to be ruled by it — a lesson she described learning concretely in prison when she chose to help a fellow prisoner who had repeatedly betrayed her. Since her release, she has continued to take personal risks in the service of peace, including negotiating with the U.S. State Department and European authorities on behalf of Belarusian political prisoners. Kiyingi offered a complementary vision of resilience, describing peace work as laying bricks in a building you may never see completed, and finding sustenance in small wins, in the stories of young people whose lives have been changed, and in the knowledge that peacebuilders around the world are laying their own bricks alongside you.

Claire Hajaj on the Challenges and Possibilities of Peacemaking

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 panel discussion featured a conversation with Claire Hajaj, a specialist in conflict and post-conflict dynamics with experience working on the United Nations Security Council and the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee, on the evolving landscape of peacebuilding in the 21st century. Drawing on her career supporting UN-led negotiations in Myanmar, Lebanon, and Iraq, Hajaj explored how the meaning of peace has shifted — from the optimism of the post-Cold War era to today's fragmented, transnational conflicts shaped by misinformation, digital polarization, and the declining authority of large multilateral institutions. The conversation also examined the distinctive and underutilized role that young people can play in creating the conditions for lasting peace. Panelists included: * ⁠Claire Hajaj⁠ [https://www.inter-mediate.org/our-people/our-team/claire-hajaj/], Executive Director of Inter Mediate [https://www.inter-mediate.org/] and author of Ishmael's Oranges [https://www.amazon.com/Ishmaels-Oranges-Claire-Hajaj/dp/1780746091] * Moderator ⁠Liana Liu Ioannides⁠ [https://buffett.northwestern.edu/programs/undergraduate-opportunities/connect-with-us/#:~:text=EMAIL%20KATHRYN-,LIANA%20LIU%20IOANNIDES,-Liana%20Liu%20Ioannides], a second-year undergraduate studying journalism and math, is a leader of student-led speaker events at the Roberta Buffett Institute. Key Takeaways * Being "in the room" is not the most powerful position available to young peacebuilders. Hajaj cautioned against the tokenistic inclusion of youth delegations in formal negotiations, arguing that such gestures can function as exclusion dressed up as participation. The greater leverage lies outside the negotiating room — in young people's ability to generate public demand for change, set parameters for what a just resolution should look like, and hold decision-makers accountable in ways that make certain political choices difficult to ignore. * Peacemaking requires persistence, humanity, and a willingness to learn from failure. Reflecting on her work at Inter Mediate, Hajaj emphasized that successful peace processes — from Northern Ireland to Colombia to Mozambique — have unfolded over years or decades, and that agreements often emerge from the bones of earlier failures. She also stressed the importance of mediators maintaining genuine empathy for all parties, including leaders who have done terrible things, as trust is the precondition for any progress at the negotiating table. * The tools being used to sow conflict are the same tools that could be turned toward peace — and young people are best positioned to make that turn. Hajaj described the current moment as a transition between eras that peacemaking institutions have not yet navigated well, with disinformation and digital organizing now capable of mobilizing violence across borders. She argued that solutions will come not from diplomats but from young inventors — technologists, storytellers, and networkers — who can harness platforms, AI, and the power of narrative to build the demand and legitimacy that political leaders need to take risks for peace.