Imagine a world where good intentions, backed by billions of dollars, inadvertently make things worse. This isn’t some dystopian novel; it’s the stark reality revealed by a groundbreaking study from Jonathan Corpus Ong and Dean Jackson. For years, I, and many others in newsrooms across the Global South, have had this gnawing feeling: all this effort and money pouring into fighting misinformation, yet it often felt like hitting a moving target blindfolded. Ong and Jackson’s new paper, “Information, Communication & Society,” finally puts a name to this unease. They spent two years talking to over 100 civil society leaders, tech experts, and researchers from places like the Philippines, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and South Africa. Their conclusion? The dominant approach to fighting disinformation – funded mostly by wealthy Western donors, big tech companies, and elite universities – is utterly out of touch with the real struggles on the ground. Worse still, it’s actually widening the gap between those with money and those doing the crucial, often thankless, work. This isn’t just about how we’re tackling online lies; it’s a symptom of a much larger breakdown in international “tech-for-good” initiatives, even as we blindly rush into the complex world of AI governance. The recent gutting of USAID, a major funder of global health and information integrity, only underscores the urgency of these findings. Losing such a vital funding source, as a Lancet study ominously predicted, could lead to millions of additional deaths by 2030. It’s a clarion call that we need to stop, listen, and fundamentally rethink our approach before more damage is done.
One of the biggest problems, they explain, is what they call “the scalability trap.” Picture this: a big donor, be it a Silicon Valley foundation or a government agency, announces a funding opportunity. What kind of projects win? Almost always, it’s the ones that promise eye-popping scale. We’re talking about fancy dashboards that can track millions of social media posts, media literacy programs designed to be rolled out in 15 countries at once, or sleek fact-checking databases. These are the projects that look fantastic in a PowerPoint presentation and churn out neat, quantifiable metrics for annual reports. But what about the less glamorous, yet fundamentally more effective, work? Things like intimate community dialogues, trust-building exercises in remote villages or urban favelas, or slow-burn narrative change campaigns that take years, not months, to truly bear fruit. These deeply human, on-the-ground efforts are rarely funded. A Filipino participant in the study put it bluntly: “Funders are obsessed with tools that are scalable. It’s not sexy to do community dialogues.” We’re talking about connecting with indigenous communities or fisherfolk, who are often the most vulnerable to manipulation but least likely to show up on some abstract Facebook monitoring tool. A Brazilian researcher lamented that once elections are over, despite successful outcomes, organizations are forced to shut down and lay off staff because funding is tied to election cycles, not the patient, sustained work of rebuilding civic trust. Despite over a billion dollars poured into “information ecosystem” work in aid-recipient countries between 2017 and 2021, and hundreds of millions in federal grants for disinformation research, the people on the front lines aren’t asking for more dashboards. They’re asking for more human-to-human interaction, more sustained presence in the communities where disinformation hits hardest. It’s truly twisted: we fund fancy monitoring tools for elections, then pull the plug once the votes are counted, as if the disinformation, the grievances, and the troll farms magically disappear. They don’t. Only the money does.
Beyond the scalability trap, Ong and Jackson uncover an even more insidious problem: the way counter-disinformation efforts are being hijacked by global politics. They observed how funding from Western governments often steers researchers in developing countries away from their most pressing local concerns and towards chasing “foreign influence operations” – thinly veiled references to Chinese and Russian propaganda. A Brazilian participant captured this frustration perfectly, calling such work “a war that doesn’t deal with our problems… If I were making a list of priorities, this would probably be 73rd on my list.” This makes perfect sense when you consider the reality in most Global South nations. In the Philippines, the biggest disinformation threats aren’t Russian bots; they’re homegrown troll networks serving local politicians, commercial click farms, and media manipulation driven by patronage. Brazil’s 2022 elections saw devastating disinformation coming from internal extremist groups, not foreign intelligence. In India, the ruling party’s own vast digital ecosystem completely overshadows any efforts from Moscow or Beijing. Yet, when Washington and Brussels dictate the agenda, the money flows to their geopolitical anxieties, not the urgent, local needs. Scarce research capacity gets diverted to tracking Chinese state media in Southeast Asia, while critical questions about local political dynasties weaponizing Facebook or agricultural disinformation crushing commodity prices remain unanswered.
And then there’s the breathtaking hypocrisy. In a shocking revelation in 2024, Reuters exposed that the Pentagon ran a covert anti-vaccination campaign in the Philippines during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They used hundreds of fake social media accounts to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine, at a time when it was the only option for most Filipinos, and the country faced one of Southeast Asia’s highest death rates. This campaign likely contributed to unnecessary deaths, as confirmed by former Philippine health secretary Esperanza Cabral. Ong and Jackson’s paper highlights the almost total lack of outcry or investigation into this incident. Why? The chilling effect is real. It’s incredibly difficult for researchers and officials in US-allied countries to challenge American information manipulation when they feel, as the paper suggests, “obliged to be grateful” for financial aid. How can we credibly fund “information integrity” in the Philippines when our own military is actively undermining public health there with fake accounts? It’s a glaring contradiction, one that those holding the purse strings seem unwilling to confront.
The most profound realization in Ong and Jackson’s paper isn’t about funding mechanisms or geopolitics; it’s about fundamentally redefining what disinformation actually is. Practitioners in the Global South see it not merely as a problem of false content or faulty technology, but as a deep-seated economic and social issue intertwined with inequality, exploitation, and precarious labor. This shift in perspective is monumental. If disinformation is fueled by poverty, resentment, exclusion, and social media business models that profit from outrage, then merely fact-checking individual claims is like treating a fever with cold compresses while ignoring the underlying infection. While fact-checking is a valuable tool, it’s far from a panacea. The paper highlights successful initiatives like digital boycotts, such as “Sleeping Giants Brazil,” which target the advertising revenue that keeps disinformation sites afloat. These movements work because they attack the commercial incentives behind the spread of lies, rather than playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with individual falsehoods. They strike at the business model itself, not just its symptoms.
Furthermore, consider the human cost of this struggle. Global South countries are the source of low-wage, often precarious, labor that sustains both commercial disinformation operations and the very content moderation systems meant to combat them. Indonesian click-farm workers churn out political propaganda for international clients, while Filipino content moderators, paid a fraction of their Silicon Valley counterparts, are exposed to the internet’s most traumatic material every day. The very nations that suffer the most from disinformation are also supplying the cheap labor that props up our global information economy. This isn’t just about what people see online; it’s a profound structural injustice. Ong and Jackson, while acknowledging the limitations of their own Carnegie Corporation-funded project, offer a roadmap for a better future, a framework to guide us. First, they urge us to “fund longer.” Short-term, election-cycle funding creates a destructive boom-and-bust cycle, crippling organizational capacity and preventing genuine resilience from taking root. We’re effectively “renting” resilience, not building it. Second, we must “fund deeper.” Community-driven approaches, while harder to measure and slower to yield immediate results, are the only way to tackle the erosion of trust that makes communities vulnerable to disinformation. Funders need to embrace longer timelines, more flexible theories of change, and a greater appetite for risk. Third, “fund sideways.” This means fostering South-to-South collaboration – Brazilian activists sharing insights with Filipino journalists, Kenyan researchers comparing notes with Indonesian civil society. These horizontal exchanges generate invaluable knowledge that top-down, Global North-to-Global South initiatives can never replicate. Finally, “stop exporting one-size-fits-all regulation.” The success of Brazil’s partnership with its electoral court stands in stark contrast to the fears of abusive “anti-fake news” laws in Southeast Asia. In countries where the government itself is often a primary source of disinformation, granting it more power to police online speech is not reform; it’s a dangerous surrender. The paper concludes with a chilling warning: as funding priorities shift and the world rushes into AI governance, we are on the verge of repeating the same mistakes. The Global South is again becoming a testing ground, local voices are silenced, commercial interests are disguised as development, and we cling to the comfortable lie that technology alone can fix problems deeply rooted in power imbalances and inequality. We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. The only question now is whether those with the power to fund will finally be willing to change the script.