About Reality Team
Reality Team is a project of Hacks/Hackers a 501(c)(3), which was founded to catalyze collaboration between journalists (Hacks) and technologists (Hackers).
Fighting disinformation where it lives: social media feeds.
Disinformation is seen by more people more often than credible information. Bad actors use propaganda techniques and digital marketing tools maliciously to push and amplify disinformation, target vulnerable or uninformed people, and exploit their individual concerns. This is how disinformation has become so influential, even among people without strong party or ideological attachments.
The U.S. and the world are facing existential crises of elections, democracy, health, and climate change driven by disinformation-induced confusion, rancor and radicalization. We can and must fight back. We must do it now and with the tools at hand.
Reality Team is reality's marketing team.
Founded in August 2020, Reality Team uses the tools and techniques of digital marketing to make credible information more visible and influential. We run factual ads with all of our sources of information. We do not attempt to fool people or use false information or pretenses of any kind, and we openly note our sources in our content.
Our targeted campaigns change the ratio of good to garbage information on people’s news feeds – denying disinformation a monopoly on what non-news readers know about complex issues, such as vaccines, elections and climate.
We make reality simple, visible and appealing. We put it where people are, using words they use. While as a society we have a very long, complex road from here to a disinformation-free world, our work shows we can take immediate and effective countermeasures right now, without waiting for new legislation or platform changes.
We have focused campaigns on combating election and vaccine disinformation, and are now embarking on an effort to combat climate disinformation (nicknamed “CODD” — Climate Online Disinformation Defense.)
Background Reading
To learn more, please visit contact:
Debra Louison-Lavoy
Executive Director, Reality Team
Nan Noble
Advisor, Funding and Partnership
Reality Team
Funding
We are proud recipients of a grant from Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Among the objectives of CNP is Promoting trustworthy journalism, including the ethics of news distribution to deny the amplification of disinformation.
Partners
Our mission is to create a network of journalists (“hacks”) and technologists (“hackers”) who rethink the future of news and information.
The Credibility Coalition serves as a nexus for addressing the issue of information credibility. Members of our coalition facilitate, organize and take part in a variety of activities to advance our goals.
Cogsec Collaborative is a non-profit that helps specialists form teams to combat disinformation. They bring together information security researchers, data scientists, and other subject-matter experts in order to create and improve resources for the protection and defense of the cognitive domain.
The CTI League is the first Global Volunteer Emergency Response Community, defending and neutralizing cyber-security threats and vulnerabilities to the life-saving sectors related to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Voter Communications Task Force
The Voter Communications Task Force, with support from the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, is a nonpartisan initiative to identify and help others implement the best ways to communicate reliable information to registered voters about where, when, and how to vote in the 2020 elections and beyond.
The Propwatch Project is a 501(c)(3) educational non-profit, whose core mission is to increase media literacy and raise public awareness regarding the rapid growth of propaganda and disinformation in mass media, as well as to promote non-partisan critical thinking regarding the biased and misleading nature of political speech.