Knight’s Initiative on Tech and Democracy Comes into Sharper Focus

In February, the Knight Foundation announced a $300 million initiative to strengthen journalism and democracy. Five months later, as part of this initiative, the foundation committed $50 million to support research to better understand how technology is transforming our democracy and the way Americans receive and engage with information.

Knight President Alberto Ibargüen laid out the initiative’s philosophical underpinnings, calling the proliferation of digital communications and social media “the most profound shift in how we communicate with each other since Gutenberg,” and that to “understand what is actually happening, we need independent research and insights based on data, not emotion and invective.”

Recently, Knight revealed the latest move in its ambitious plans—more than $3.5 million in new funding to generate research that equips federal lawmakers and other decision-makers as they attempt to govern and manage the evolving digital public square. Twenty-two universities, think tanks and advocacy organizations will study diverse, timely topics including content moderation by social media companies, antitrust enforcement in big tech, and online disinformation.

I recently checked in with Sam Gill, Knight’s vice president for communities and impact, and John Sands, director for learning and impact, on the initiative’s philosophical underpinnings and where things stand so far with this work.

“A Clear Need for Fresh Thinking”

Sands told me that the main principle underlying Knight’s initiative is the promotion of the “health of our information ecosystem.” Today, he said, “more and more information is mediated by digital technology— and with impacts that are not yet understood.”

A key part of the story here is the rise of unregulated digital information at the same time that established print media and trusted local outlets are in decline. The “information gatekeepers of the past,” Sands said, “are no longer able to contain harmful or deceptive information as effectively. Journalists and editors are no longer the principal arbiters of facts because the production and dissemination of information lie in the hands of anyone with an internet connection.

“Many of the information challenges we currently face, such as misinformation and the proliferation of hate speech, are not new, but in this age of many-to-many communication, there is a clear need for fresh thinking and research to inform a new generation of democratic institutions and norms that will promote an informed society and support democratic outcomes.”

Knight’s efforts come as other funders are grappling with how to stem the tide of misinformation. In 2017, a consortium of funders including Knight, Facebook, the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund, Ford Foundation and the Democracy Fund launched the News Integrity Initiative, a global consortium focused on “helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.”

A few months later, its managing director, Molly de Aguiar, presented a roadmap for the project moving forward. The initiative narrowed its focus to supporting activities that, among other things, “build enduring trust and mutual respect between newsrooms and the public through sustained listening, collaboration and transparency” and “demonstrate ways to improve community conversations and increase understanding and empathy among opposing viewpoints and experiences.”

Informing Policy

Despite all the work that funders have set in motion since the 2016 election to deal with misinformation, philanthropy is still feeling its way forward in this terrain, which is ever-shifting—with the internal policies of social media companies in flux at the same time that talk of regulation is evolving in both Washington and on the Democratic presidential campaign trail. While there’s plenty of agreement that private companies can adversely influence civic discourse—and maybe even sway electoral outcomes—by spreading misinformation online, a clear menu of policy options for curbing this problem has yet to gel.

Knight’s recent $3.5 million grant cycle seeks to provide decision-makers with guidance on that front. “The recent slate of 22 investments,” Sands said, “was focused on issues with real currency in policy conversations in Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley. These concern the increasing shift of the public sphere to a digital realm owned by private internet technology companies and the immense powers that these companies have assumed in recent years to mediate speech, commerce and information flows.

“Both houses of Congress are holding hearings about these issues, the DOJ and various state attorneys general have launched their own investigations into potential antitrust abuses, so there is real immediacy, real urgency. But given this urgency, the lack of clarity around potential policy remedies is worrisome, so the research investments we’re making are very intentional about the aim to inform debates happening today.”

Bottom line? “Our goal with this initiative is to ensure that policy decisions—both in government and in the tech companies—are made with the benefit of sound, independent research.”

Understanding Social Media’s Impact on Politics

Last October, when Knight issued a call for proposals, Gill said, “We aim to be intentionally broad. From access to information, to the proliferation of misinformation, to the nature of online speech to issues like anti-trust policy—we’re not setting limits.” A little over a year later, Knight has begun to fill in the gaps.

That same month, Knight awarded $5 million to New York University to launch the Center for Social Media and Politics. The center also received a $5 million matching grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. The Siegel Family Endowment, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will provide additional funding.

The center will bolster ongoing research conducted by NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation Lab, which explores areas related to social media’s impact on politics, such as the effects of exposure to misinformation on political beliefs and behavior, whether social media exacerbates or mitigates political polarization, and how authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition. The lab is currently funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation, Intel Corporation, the Democracy Fund, the Knight and the Hewlett foundations, and others.

This effort stemmed from a “recognition of the grave impacts of a decay in information quality at the societal level,” Sands said. “The symptoms are easily identifiable—misinformation/disinformation, the proliferation of hate speech, electoral interference, declining trust in journalism and media, etc.—but the underlying causes are considerably more difficult to diagnose.

“What is clear is that the internet, social media and other digital platforms are having far-reaching effects on how we encounter and process information, on communities, and on the structures of our democracy. These effects are not always visible, not always measurable, and therefore not well understood. And while there is no shortage of conventional wisdom about these challenges, much of it doesn’t hold up under rigorous scrutiny.”

NYU’s team, Sands said, “is led by political scientists and a computational biologist who are developing groundbreaking methods and tools for parsing social media data to gain insight into political behaviors.” The new center “gets at the heart of questions animating Knight’s interest in this space: How are people encountering information in the digital public sphere, and how are those encounters and engagements impacting democracy?”

A Question of Values

The institutions receiving the recent $3.5 million in support were selected through an open funding opportunity to “expand fundamental research on the norms, rights and responsibilities that govern digital services and social media in particular.” I encourage you to read the full list of grant recipients here to get a deeper understanding of the kinds of issues that Knight has deemed worthy of further exploration.

The biggest of the grants, for $400,000, went to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., to establish a new "digital governance project” at the conservative think tank that can be a resource for policymakers. Other grantees include the American Antitrust Institute ($100,000) to support new research that enables better understanding of the reach, capability and effectiveness of antitrust enforcement to promote competition in digital markets; Santa Clara University School of Law ($150,000) to support the continued development of a body of research and policy proposals with regard to intermediary liability for content on digital platforms; and the University of Iowa Law School ($100,000) to support legal research that applies principles from constitutional law and institutional political science to the challenges of platform governance. The Economic Security Project, co-founded by Chris Hughes, got $250,000 to support its new anti-monopoly work.

More grants are sure to follow this initial round. The funding opportunity is ongoing, since, as Sands noted, “these issues are not going away in the foreseeable future. We’re actively seeking other opportunities for collaboration and we welcome ideas and proposals.”

It’s also worth remembering that we shouldn’t view Knight’s initiative solely as a wonky exercise to suss out policy options. The accumulation of data and research is a means to a far more consequential and civic-oriented end. In a post on Knight’s blog last month with the ominous title “Big Tech Could Break Democracy,” Gill laid out a potentially dystopian future driven by unchecked tech giants and enumerated a number of pressing questions:

“Should a company like Facebook be able to host the majority of ‘public’ conversation in the digital age? Should it be able to do so without any responsibility for what its users are saying or doing? Should we allow business models that eviscerate the competitiveness of other community goods, such as local news? Should we tolerate algorithmically driven systems that focus on engagement and attention over other values like tolerance and understanding?”

Presumably—and hopefully!—citizens will collectively answer “no” to each of these questions. But it will take a lot more research and policy development before decision-makers can translate society’s values into new laws and regulations to govern the digital era.

In taking on this work, Knight and other foundations aim to shape an arena now dominated by some of the world’s most powerful companies. While that’s obviously an uphill climb—Apple alone is worth more than the endowments of all private U.S. foundations combined—some of philanthropy’s finest moments have come from similar David vs. Goliath battles.

“We think the commercial internet is a great thing that has unleashed incredible good in the world,” Gill told me. “We also think that we’re learning a lot about new challenges this technology is causing for democracy. Philanthropy has a strong track record in funding research, evidence and ideas. Then it’s up to companies, governments and citizens to put those ideas and that evidence to work in building the society we want to live in.”

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