New playbook battles 2026 midterm election propaganda

There’s a moment, right before an election, when the air starts to feel thick with claims that don’t quite add up. A screenshot with no source. A headline that makes your chest tighten before you’ve even read the first sentence. A familiar name suddenly attached to a story that feels wrong, but somehow keeps showing up in your feed. That’s the atmosphere Onyx Impact is trying to help us navigate. In anticipation of the 2026 midterm elections, the organization—founded in 2023 with a mission to protect Black communities from propaganda—has released “The Propaganda Playbook,” a 41-page field guide designed to help journalists, content creators, and community organizations understand how disinformation works and, more importantly, how to push back against it. The playbook is not a dry academic report. It’s a practical, grounded survival manual for a moment when information warfare has become faster, more automated, and more personal than anything we’ve seen before. Eosa Osa, founder and CEO of Onyx Impact, put it plainly: “We are currently living in an era of propaganda, and the 2026 election cycle will see information warfare deployed through tools no previous generation has faced at this scale or speed.” That warning sits at the heart of the playbook, which argues that we don’t just need better fact-checking in the moment—we need to build the kind of infrastructure that can outlast a single election cycle and protect communities for years to come.

To understand why this playbook is landing at this particular moment, you have to look at the “propaganda storm” it describes. The playbook points to a perfect convergence of threats: the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the rapid spread of AI-generated content, and social media platforms that increasingly reward engagement over accuracy. The Court’s ruling, handed down in April 2026, determined that the creation of a majority-Black district as a remedy for racial vote dilution was unconstitutional. Onyx Impact and the Legal Defense Fund have both described the decision as an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one that directly threatens the voting power of Black citizens. That legal blow is happening alongside a technological shift: AI tools can now produce convincing fake images, audio, and video in seconds, and they don’t carry warning labels. Meanwhile, social media platforms have learned that outrage drives clicks, and clicks drive ad revenue, so the systems that shape what we see are increasingly hostile to careful, verified information. The playbook argues that this storm is exactly why journalists, creators, and organizations need to get ready now. And it makes an important historical point: the experience of being targeted by disinformation is not new for Black communities. For generations, Black citizens have identified and resisted the ways false information can be used to suppress votes, undermine trust, and divide communities—long before the phrase “information warfare” existed. The playbook suggests that this inherited knowledge is a kind of strength, one that can now be shared with everyone who suddenly finds themselves living inside the same propaganda machine.

The Playbook is structured around four distinct phases, each one designed to meet a different stage of the disinformation cycle. The first phase is about understanding propaganda during election cycles—learning to recognize the patterns and narratives that are used to confuse, distract, and demobilize voters. The second phase shifts to preparation: what should journalists, content creators, and organizations do before the worst of the disinformation hits? This includes building source networks, establishing credibility, and creating response plans so that staff and audiences aren’t caught off guard. The third phase is about reaction—what to do once a false story has already started circulating. This is where many well-meaning efforts break down, because reacting in a panic can amplify the very story you’re trying to correct. The playbook offers tools for responding calmly, accurately, and without accidentally spreading the disinformation further. The fourth phase is about building long-term infrastructure: the relationships, systems, and resources that help communities resist disinformation not just during one election season, but over many cycles. This structure matters because it treats disinformation as something you can prepare for, rather than a random storm you can only hope to survive. It also takes the burden off individuals, recognizing that the fight against propaganda is not about teaching every single person to be more skeptical. It’s about creating an environment where the truth has a better chance of reaching people before the lie does.

The playbook also breaks down the specific tactics that will be used to sow confusion in 2026, and each one is named with unsettling clarity. The first is “manufactured narratives,” which target reality itself through AI fabrication, context extraction, and character destruction. This is the tactic that creates a fake video of a candidate saying something racist, or takes a real quote and strips it of all context until it looks like the opposite of what was meant. The second tactic is “infrastructure destruction,” which goes after journalists, creators, and institutions through harassment, attacks on credibility, and content suppression. The goal here isn’t just to spread a false story; it’s to make the people who tell true stories afraid to keep doing so. The third tactic is “wealth extraction,” which targets community trust networks like Black-owned businesses through fake business directories, fraudulent fundraising campaigns, and other scams designed to drain money and faith from the institutions people rely on. And the fourth tactic is “cynicism bombing,” which aims directly at Black political participation by weaponizing earned distrust. This is perhaps the most insidious tactic, because it doesn’t invent a completely new lie. Instead, it takes the very real reasons why Black Americans might feel skeptical about the political system and amplifies that skepticism until it becomes hopelessness and disengagement. These tactics are not abstract theories. They are the machinery of a modern election cycle, and each one is designed to exploit a different vulnerability—in technology, in institutions, in community trust, and in individual psychology.

Disinformation during elections is not a hypothetical threat, and the playbook points to plenty of evidence that these tactics are already being used. It cites Russian disinformation campaigns targeting Black voters in the 2016 and 2020 elections as a clear example of how propaganda can be used to manipulate a specific community. Those campaigns didn’t just spread silly memes; they used fake Black activist accounts, targeted ads, and stolen identities to create confusion about voting dates, polling locations, and candidates’ positions. And the conditions for 2026 are even more concerning. The Brennan Center for Justice has warned that federal cuts to programs supporting election security, combined with efforts by the Trump administration to use federal agencies to spread false voting information, could create a season in which disinformation is not just coming from foreign actors, but from trusted corners of American government itself. In the middle of all this, the playbook offers a simple but powerful set of guardrails. It poses three questions that it says can “limit risk and ensure you remain a credible source for your community.” First: can you verify the sources independently? Second: what does this content ask you to feel before it gives you facts? And third: who benefits from this story circulating right now? These questions won’t stop every false story from spreading, but they create a pause—a moment of critical thinking that is often all it takes to break the spell of a well-crafted lie. They are designed not just for journalists, but for anyone who shares, posts, or talks about politics in their daily life.

Ultimately, the playbook is not content to simply describe the problem. It ends with a call to action, offering a list of immediate and long-term priorities for lawmakers, election officials, and organizations. In the short term, the playbook calls for funding Black-owned and local media organizations, which are often the most trusted sources in their communities but are also the most under-resourced. It also demands limits on AI-generated content in elections, so that voters aren’t left to guess whether the video they’re watching is real or fabricated. In the long term, the playbook argues for federal civil rights legislation that specifically targets online suppression of Black content and ensures that platforms are held accountable for the role they play in spreading disinformation. The closing message is clear: “We cannot build safer information ecosystems by relying on communities to clean up the damage after it happens. Lasting change requires regulatory and legislative action both at the state and federal level that shifts accordingly upstream.” In other words, the job of fighting propaganda shouldn’t fall entirely on ordinary people who are already exhausted by how much disinformation they encounter every day. Something has to change structurally. But until that change comes, the playbook is a reminder that there are still things we can do—individually and collectively—to protect ourselves, our neighbors, and our democracy. It’s not a promise that we can stop every lie, but it’s a map for how to make the truth just a little bit louder. And in a time when lies travel at the speed of a click, that may be the most important work there is. The full playbook is available at propagandaplaybook.org.