No matter their missions, nonprofits across every sector are experiencing heightened pressure. Democracy Fund’s Kalpana Simhan and Dan Gurmankin explain how we’re charting new territory to reduce the grant reporting burden from an average of 15 hours to 5 hours.
Dear Colleagues:
We know this is an unsettling time as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to progress around the world and throughout the U.S. The health and safety of all of our grantees, partners, and the communities we serve are top concerns for all of us at Democracy Fund. Now more than ever, our country needs champions for a more open and just democracy. We’re committed to doing what we can to continue to support you and your organization during these uncertain times.
We know many of you are facing difficult decisions about canceling or participating in events, transitioning your staff to remote work, and addressing new challenges to our democracy created by this public health crisis. As your partner, we want to assure you that we will be as flexible and helpful as possible as you make these adjustments in the coming weeks and months. Grantees will not be penalized in any way for cancelling events or travel related to grant deliverables, shifting in-person events to online forums, or making other changes to planned work to protect the health and safety of your staff and communities. We also recognize that none of us yet fully understand the ramifications that COVID-19 will have on our collective work. As you continue to evaluate the situation and modify your organization’s strategy, we invite you to reach out to your program officer to discuss any broader shifts to your goals and objectives that may be necessary.
On our end, grant payments will continue to go out as planned and we will be flexible with respect to deadlines around grants proposals and reports to free up your time to focus on your organization’s critical short-term needs. If your organization needs additional assistance as you navigate the uncertainty around the spread of COVID-19 and the accompanying economic challenges, please reach out to us. In the immediate term, we are exploring what technology and tools we could make available to grantees to help them better manage working remotely. If your organization is interested or has other ideas of ways we can be helpful, please let your program officer know.
Thank you for your continued commitment to the important work of strengthening our democracy and for your commitment to the safety and health of your staff, partners, and the communities you serve.
Sincerely,
Joe Goldman
President
Democracy Fund
Whether you’re in the for-profit or the nonprofit world, we all seem to be talking about risk. No one wants to “play it safe” or “hedge their bets.” Instead, we’re launching moonshots and embracing failure. The problems we face are so big and complex, the thinking goes, that the only way to tackle them is to put everything on the line and fully commit. But this “risk is good” mantra glosses over the fact that some risky decisions are just bad decisions.
So how should philanthropic organizations leverage risk in a more sophisticated way to achieve the kind of change we seek? The first step may be to acknowledge that much of our most consequential decision making happens in information-poor and ambiguous contexts, and risk taking is simply a strategy for managing this uncertainty. After all, when we describe a decision as “risky,” what we are actually saying is, “I am not sure what will happen if we decide to do X.”
The idea for this paper began with a conversation at Democracy Fund about how we, as a foundation, could take more and better risks. As we got further into this work, however, we realized that the conversation about risk was really rooted in the nature of decision making itself — in particular, what it means to make a good decision in a low-information/high-uncertainty context.
This document lays out the philosophical foundations of the approach we intend to take and what we think it means broadly for Democracy Fund’s work. We hope that by looking at risk taking through a broader lens of decision making, we can open up the conversation both internally and externally about what it means to be an organization that takes smart risks. This approach also provides an opportunity to look more critically at all of our internal processes to see whether they support good decision-making habits and how we might refine these processes to better leverage and mitigate risk to maximize our impact. In the coming months, we’ll be taking a deeper look at these processes — from the decisions we make about the systems we work in and what strategies will lead to the impact we hope to see, to what investments we make, to how we use evaluation and learning to assess and revisit those decisions, and everything in between.
Today we are pleased to unveil a new and improved electionline — America’s only politics-free source for election administration news and information.
In January 2018, we announced that electionline had become a project of Democracy Fund’s Elections program. We felt then, as we do now, that it is a vital platform for finding trusted news and information about the people and processes that guide our nation’s elections, and for sharing tools, best practices, and innovative ideas for improving the voting experience. Our simple goals for redeveloping the site were to enhance its capabilities and expand content — but our long-term plans are to create a place where readers are exposed to new ideas, opportunities for continuing education, and relationship building.
To do this, we started by thinking long and hard about the site’s current audience and their needs. Starting today, election administrators, academics, voting advocates and other regular readers of electionline will find new items of interest on the site, including:
Electionline remains the only place on the internet to find state-by-state curation of daily election administration news. In addition to publishing the classic electionline Weekly newsletter, we will also begin sharing original reports and exclusive content from leaders and experts in the field — making the site a must-read for local election officials, civic organizations, and journalists who cover elections.
While redeveloping the site, we learned two really insightful lessons that might be helpful for others who are developing virtual spaces for information sharing and engagement.
First, collaborate with your audiences and include some “outsider” perspective. As our team weighed important decisions about the look and feel of the website, we were grateful to receive insight and direction from many readers who already trust and rely on electionline.
Second, reflect your values. Redeveloping or creating a new platform is an opportunity to reinforce essential characteristics that inform readers who your organization is, and what they care about. For us it meant focusing on authenticity (even if it means publishing unflattering stories about ourselves or our partners); transparency about who we support with resources in the field; and cultivating greater interest for under-covered areas of importance like voting trends for overlooked communities.
Through this process, we hope we were able to successfully incorporate the feedback we heard from current readers. We also hope that the new electionline website more deeply resonates with all those who are interested in elections in America. We’re excited to hear your thoughts and reactions as you explore the new website. Please visit www.electionline.org and let us know what you think!
Even before the emergence of so-called “resistance tech,” investors, venture funds, and foundations were pumping money into tech tools that make it easier for citizens to express their opinions to their elected representatives. This support has empowered constituents with more ways to contact their elected officials, and as a result, a civic engagement has grown over the past decade, burying members of Congress with ever-increasing volume of emails, phone calls, tweets, texts, and even faxes (yes, faxes).
Although civic engagement is essential to our democracy, Congress sorely lacks the commensurate resources to keep up with the staggering volume of constituent communication. Several reasons exist for this disparity. For one, Congressional offices are a minuscule market when compared to the business opportunity that activating millions of constituents represents to start-ups. Institutional rules and security requirements further hamper product innovation. Vendors must go through rigorous and opaque certification processes with House and Senate administrators before they can release products to congressional staff. These administrators have forbidden common workplace applications like Slack for security concerns. Meanwhile, Congress doesn’t invest adequately in its own technological and communications capacity to the point that offices still have fax machines in 2018.
Democracy Fund and our affiliated social welfare organization, Democracy Fund Voice, recently awarded several grants to address the disparity between the tools available to congressional staff and the technological innovations of the digital advocacy industry. These grants will enable staff to gauge constituent sentiment quickly and efficiently, deliver more meaningful and satisfying replies, and save offices countless hours of staff time currently spent on menial tasks. They also pave the way for further innovation.
A grant to the Tides Foundation will support the Popvox LegiDash Fund to build “LegiDash,” a closed social network for constituents and member offices. This tool will give congressional staff a new way to connect with folks back home one-on-one, offer a clearer picture of district sentiment in the aggregate, and provide a trusted alternative communications portal to Facebook, satisfying a growing concern on Capitol Hill about what the tech giant does with the data generated on members’ official pages.
Congressional vendor Fireside21 will use a grant from Democracy Fund Voice to research machine-learning techniques that automate much of the rote, labor-intensive processes that member offices use to organize bulk constituent email. The resulting improvements of this research could save offices dozens of personnel-hours a week and make further advances – such as content analysis of constituents’ social media comments on elected representatives’ accounts – possible.
These grants follow the success of Democracy Fund grantee the OpenGov Foundation to develop and deploy Article One, a voice-to-text tool that saves offices many hours by transcribing constituent voicemails. Fireside21 recently partnered with the nonprofit to offer this service to members in the House of Representatives.
This approach is an experiment in using philanthropy to build technological capacity for congressional offices in ways the marketplace cannot provide. Importantly, these grantees are trusted partners of congressional stakeholders, with years of experience collaborating with Congress to understand the needs of members and staff as the foundation of product design. If the grants are successful, harried staff will have capacity to craft more meaningful responses to constituents in less time, rebuilding constituents’ trust that Washington is listening. They will also free up staff hours that offices can reallocate to researching public policy, drafting legislation, and conducting oversight.
Using technology to make the most labor-intensive parts of constituent service more efficient is an exciting prospect, but it’s not our only goal in funding this space. We will continue to explore other projects and tools that can rebuild congressional capacity to address the nation’s most pressing public policy issues. Lorelei Kelly at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center likens this lawmaking capacity to a technical stack, or the overlapping components that build a technological system or software platform. Right now, this stack is breaking down. Technology can assist members of Congress in a variety of ways, from helping to build relationships with subject-matter experts at the district-level, creating new venues for constituent-member discussion in real time, leveraging troves of data to formulate policy and evaluating whether those initiatives are meeting desired outcomes.
Building this capacity makes it more likely that constituent sentiment, now often channeled into mass advocacy campaigns, can actually produce desired policy change. Congress needs knowledge-building solutions, like quick access to high-quality, impartial information; situational awareness within the institution itself; visibility into staff networks working on shared issues; and – universally – more time to act upon constituent needs.
Ideally, Congress would give itself this capability with an in-house version of 18F or a Congressional Digital Service; until that happens, philanthropy and private investors have a civic obligation to reinforce the technological infrastructure of the first branch of government. The challenges are so fundamental that even modest levels of funding, if properly placed, can create transformative change within the congressional workplace. A stronger democracy will be the ROI.
We are excited to announce the new cohort of the Democracy Fund National Advisory Committee. This group of leaders from across the political spectrum brings expertise in politics, academia, media, culture, and philanthropy, and are committed to helping us find achievable solutions to our nation’s biggest problems.
Three years ago, shortly after Democracy Fund became an independent foundation, we established our first National Advisory Committee to help us think big, identify gaps in our work, and dig into the tough questions facing our political system. We are deeply grateful to our first cohort for their advice, candid feedback, and partnership. We look forward to elevating the expertise and ideas of our new committee, which includes new and returning voices, in our work to support a healthy democracy.
The Democracy Fund’s 2018 National Advisory Committee includes:
Hon. Robin Carnahan, National Advisory Committee Co-Chair
The Honorable Robin Carnahan leads the State and Local Government Practice at 18F, the team of digital technology consultants housed within the General Services Administration. Carnahan was twice elected Secretary of State of Missouri and served as senior director at the global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge Group.
Brett Loper, National Advisory Committee Co-Chair
Brett Loper is Senior Vice President, Global Government Affairs, for American Express. In that role, he coordinates the Company’s engagement strategy with policy makers in the United States and countries around the globe. Before joining American Express, he held the position of Deputy Chief of Staff to U. S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
Kristen Soltis Anderson, Member
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a researcher, pollster, and political analyst and co-founder of Echelon Insights, an innovative research and analysis data analysis firms. She is a leading expert on the millennial generation and is author of The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up).
Francis Fukuyama, Member
Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and the Mosbacher Director of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He is professor (by courtesy) of political science.
Lanhee Chen, Member
Lanhee J. Chen, Ph.D. is the David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution; Director of Domestic Policy Studies and Lecturer in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University; and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. Chen served as the Policy Director of the Romney-Ryan 2012 presidential campaign.
Cherie Harder, Member
Cherie Harder serves as President of The Trinity Forum. Prior to joining the Trinity Forum in 2008, and previously served in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and Director of Policy and Projects for First Lady Laura Bush.
Lisa Leingang, Member
Lisa Leingang has worked in the media and entertainment business for over 25 years and is currently Senior Vice President of Scripted Programming at First Look Media. With senior executive roles ranging from production to development executive, she has held posts at various media companies including HBO, NBC, CBS and Viacom, discovering, nurturing and developing creative talent from all over the world.
Kierna Mayo, Member
Kierna Mayo is the Senior Vice President of Lifestyle Content + Brands at iOne Digital, Inc. A veteran culture writer/editor and brand architect, Mayo has been recognized by Folio, The Root, and the NAACP among others as a modern media trailblazer.
Hon. Mellissa Mark-Vivierito, Member
Melissa Mark-Viverito is Senior Advisory to the Latino Victory Fund (LVF) and former Speaker of the New York City Council. In her current capacity, Mark-Viverito works with LVF to identify and recruit progressive Latino candidates, expand the Political Action Committee’s fundraising and state infrastructure, and help launch state chapters in Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. Her work will focus heavily on the 2018 midterm elections.
Raju Narisetti, Member
Raju Narisetti is the new director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economic and Business Journalism and professor of professional practice at the Columbia Journalism School. He was most recently the CEO of Gizmodo Media Group, a portfolio of digital journalism sites that included some of the web’s most beloved and authentic brands, including Gizmodo, Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, The Root. A media executive with a track record in creating, rethinking and managing major media organizations in North America, Europe and Asia, Raju was also previously Senior Vice-President of Strategy at News Corp.
Chip Sullivan, Member
Chip Sullivan serves as Executive Vice President, Communications, at NBC Entertainment where he is responsible for strategy, development and execution of public and media relations for the network and Universal Television.
Sonal Shah, Member
Sonal Shah is an economist and entrepreneur. She is the Executive Director of the Beeck Center of Social impact and Innovation at Georgetown University. She led policy innovation at the White House for President Obama and the Treasury Department for President Clinton.
Anthea Watson Strong, Member
Anthea Watson Strong designs and builds technology that supports our shared civic infrastructure as a Project Manager for News at Facebook. She leads a new program that establishes stronger ties between Facebook and the news industry. She previously lead the Civics team at Google and launched products in over 30 countries, reaching hundreds of millions of users.
Charlie Sykes, Member
Charles J. Sykes is a an author/commentator. He is a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard and a contributor to NBC/MSNBC. A former conservative talk show host, Sykes has been published in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, Politico, Newsweek, and other national publications. He is the author of nine books. His most recent book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, was published in 2017; an updated paperback edition will be published in October.
Geneva Overholser, Member
Geneva Overholser, an independent journalist in New York City, is a senior fellow at USC Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and Policy. She was until 2013 director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. She serves on the boards of the Rita Allen Foundation, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, the Women’s Media Center, and the Academy of American Poets.
Rev. Starsky Wilson, Member
The Reverend Starsky D. Wilson is a pastor, philanthropist and activist pursuing God’s vision of community marked by justice, peace, and love. He is pastor of Saint John’s Church (The Beloved Community), president & CEO of Deaconess Foundation and chair of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
Democracy Fund National Advisory Committee members serve for three-year terms and meet twice yearly to advise Democracy Fund on matters of organizational strategy. They play a critical role in helping the Democracy Fund develop effective strategies that ensure the American people come first in our democracy.
What motivates voters to participate? The love of a charismatic candidate? The disgust of a less-than desirable one? Passion for a specific ballot initiative? Habit? The answer is as varied as the voting population, as is the reason that voters do not participate. Research shows that while voters’ confidence in their own vote being counted accurately remains relatively constant, their belief that results at the national level are correct is in decline. The threat of interference in our elections by another nation-state has heightened this sentiment.
At Democracy Fund, we believe that our election system can remain both accessible and secure. We invest in organizations working to bolster public confidence in our elections through modern, voter-centric election administration and registration, as well as other projects that are helping to identify and elevate best practices and protocols to improve the American voting experience. With these goals in mind, Democracy Fund is launching the Election Validation Project which aims to increase trust in elections through rigorous audits, standards, and testing.
Jennifer Morrell, a nationally recognized election official with over eight years of experience managing local elections, has joined Democracy Fund as a consultant to lead this project. Jennifer’s work in Colorado was instrumental in the successful implementation of the first statewide risk-limiting audit and she has been an outspoken advocate of implementing election audit standards beyond just post-election audits and has a vision of creating uniform audit and testing standards for all critical components of the voting system.
According to Jennifer, “Many states do a tremendous job testing voting equipment and performing post-election audits, but the scope and method vary. Improving trust in elections requires a uniform set of audit standards that go beyond auditing ballot tabulation equipment.”
The Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) called for the review of testing and auditing being done by the states in their 2014 report as well as the need to replace aging voting equipment—another reason why testing and auditing is so critical. Jennifer has been a proponent of testing and audit standards as the next iteration of guidelines to boost confidence and trust in our elections—and the election administration profession. In her experience as an election official, PCEA served as the foundation for collaboration amongst the profession and transformed it into a field of public service.
As states purchase new voting equipment and implement improved audit requirements, our hope is that we can provide information and guidelines about risk-limiting audits tailored to election administrators as well as policy makers and the voting public through our work. Jennifer’s work will include:
This new project comes at a critical time in election administration, and Jennifer understands what needs to be done to be successful, “This is a complex project that will take some time and some trial and error before it is successful. But starting the discussion is the first step. I am optimistic that election professionals at all levels will be willing to collaborate and lend their ideas and expertise to this endeavor. The table for this discussion needs to be large. We need researchers, we need technologists, we need policy experts and statisticians, but most importantly we need election officials who understand the complexity of running a successful election.”
Democracy Fund is thrilled to engage with Jennifer on this project and to be able to offer additional tools and guidance for election officials to use. We are confident that the collaboration will serve to inform the field and make certain that our elections continue to demonstrate the validity and integrity of the Great American Experiment.
If you are interested in working with Jennifer, she is available to work with states and present at association meetings on these topics. For more information, reach out to jmorrell@democracyfund.org.
Journalism plays many roles in our democracy. At its best, it informs people about critical issues in ways that builds agency; it reflects the diverse lives of our nation back to us in ways that strengthen communities; it provides a public square where ideas can be debated; and it interrogates systems and institutions in ways that hold power to account.
Since Democracy Fund was founded, we have been investing in people and organizations who are working to strengthen journalism and local news to ensure a brighter future for our democracy. We are helping rebuild local news business models, fostering bold new collaborations, and reimagining the social contract between newsrooms and communities.
That long-haul work continues, but one year ago Democracy Fund announced a new effort focused specifically on bolstering and defending journalism’s ability to serve as a robust fourth estate. Alarmed by the escalating political attacks against journalists and concerned about what those threats meant for the public’s access to information, we made the largest grants in our organization’s history.
In March 2017, along with our colleagues at First Look Media, we committed $10 million over two-years to the Center for Investigative Reporting, Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and ProPublica. Recognizing the essential role of local and state investigative journalism we also contributed $1 million to NewsMatch, which helped 109 nonprofit newsrooms raise nearly $5 million in the last few months of 2017 (read more about the results of NewsMatch here). Together these grants make up our special project on investigative reporting, which seeks to ensure nonprofit newsrooms are prepared to face new and mounting challenges.
The last year has been a profound reminder of the critical role of a bold, trustworthy, and free press. Our grantees have produced hard hitting public interest reporting on the financial conflicts of interest in the current administration, social media’s impact on democracy, the rise of hate crimes, as well as on the upheavals and changes shaping education, environmental issues, and immigration.
These are just a few of the headlines from the past year. Our grantees also produced life-saving reporting on maternal health, revelations about housing discrimination, and an Oscar nominated film on the opioid crisis that was picked up by Netflix.
All of these investments were general operating grants, which means there were no strings attached to how the grants had to be used. Grantees had total freedom to use the funds as they saw fit for the unique needs of their organizations, communities, and beats. In addition, Democracy Fund has an editorial policy written into our grant agreements that mandates we cannot speak to our grantees about content decisions. We believe this kind of independence is critical, especially with grants of this size.
In the end, the freedom these grants provided didn’t just produce more journalism, but also created opportunities to rethink and reimagine how that journalism was done. In an era of dwindling trust for journalism, integrity has to be at the heart of newsrooms and foundations. Each of these newsrooms have opened up their process to their readers, engaging people in the reporting process, and bringing profound transparency to their process.
The Center for Investigative Reporting held community forums and opened up a text message line to answer questions from communities across the country about their investigation into modern day redlining. ProPublica built a crowdsourcing app called the Facebook Political Ad Collector which collects ads on Facebook to enable ProPublica to better monitor political ads on social platforms. The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University paired journalism students with NPR and Frontline journalists to investigate the housing crisis.
These are not just clever innovations, but critical interventions that put the public at the heart of investigative journalism. The ability of the press to serve as a check and balance on power is rooted in the legitimacy and trust bestowed upon it by the public. As such, to hold our leaders accountable, we need to hold our communities close and be accountable ourselves.
We look forward to continuing to share, and to be accountable, as this special project continues.
Grantees of the Investigative Journalism Project include the following:
Josh Stearns co-authored this piece with Teresa Gorman.
Local news is critical to a healthy democracy, and we believe that the future of local news is local. This simple idea has shaped the way Democracy Fund has thought about its work to support and strengthen the public square in America.
Today we are announcing two new locally-based and locally-driven funds — totaling more than $2 million — that will invest in ideas, people and organizations that are working to ensure people have access to the news and information they need in these communities. The funds will focus on building more vibrant news ecosystems as vital parts of just communities and a healthy democracy.
These funds are not focused on maintaining the status quo in local news, but on pushing forward changes that improve how journalism serves the public and makes news and information more resilient over the long term. Through these funds, we will work closely with local partners to increase giving to local news and invest in long-term solutions — over short-term fixes — especially in the areas of business models, collaboration and community engagement.
In New Jersey, we will build on our previous work in partnership with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Knight Foundation by establishing the New Jersey Local News Lab Fund with $1.3 million over two years. New Jersey has become a bold laboratory for new models of collaboration, revenue experiments, and community engagement (read more about previous work in New Jersey in this report). This new fund will continue that momentum and help broaden the work there beyond newsrooms to other civic information networks and institutions.
The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund is the start of a new multi-year commitment to the state. We are kicking off the fund with $700,000 for the first 18 months. The work we’ve done in New Jersey to strengthen their news ecosystem will inform our work, but we recognize that this new fund must be built to respond to the unique local context of North Carolina. To that end, we commissioned local journalist and community organizer Fiona Morgan to undertake a year-long research project on the strengths and challenges of local news and information in North Carolina.
The two funds, housed at the Community Foundation of New Jersey and North Carolina Community Foundation, will be managed by advisory groups made up of local stakeholders and Democracy Fund. As a national funder we recognize that we are guests in these communities and have set these funds up to ensure funding decisions are rooted in local knowledge and experience. We take seriously the advice from longtime philanthropy leader Pru Brown who wrote in a paper prepared for Democracy Fund, “ultimately, perhaps the most useful lens for place-based philanthropy is asking at every stage whether the decisions the national foundation is making and the way it is operating promote or undermine local ownership.”
A key goal of these funds is to catalyze new momentum locally around supporting local public-interest news that serves all communities. As such, both funds are built as open platforms for partnership with other funders and donors. We are working closely with local and regional foundations in each state to expand the size of the funds, leveraging even more dollars to support local news and information efforts. That work is ongoing, and we look forward to sharing more about the amazing partners we are working with in the coming weeks and months.
This work is just a piece of Democracy Fund’s broader work on local news, which includes the national NewsMatch campaign, revenue research, and shared services like Membership Puzzle Project and News Revenue Hub. Additionally, Democracy Fund supports bridge builders and network connectors in local regions who are on the frontlines of weaving together stronger news ecosystems through collaboration and capacity building.
We are thrilled and humbled by this work and by the people who are working with us. Democracy Fund is committed to working in deep partnership with local communities, to learning, and to operating transparently and openly. If you are interested in working with us reach out at LocalNewsLab@democracyfund.org and sign up for our weekly newsletter The Local Fix.
Today The Omidyar Group released a paper co-authored by me and two colleagues at Omidyar Network on the role of social media platforms on democracy and the public square. This paper – called “Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?” – comes at a moment when there is new scrutiny on the role Facebook, Google, and Twitter played in spreading misinformation and divisive propaganda during the 2016 election. Those debates loom large, however, our analysis goes well beyond any one election to try and understand how social platforms are disrupting core elements of a democratic society.
In June 2017 Facebook raised the question “Is social media good for democracy?” Like them, we have been wrestling with these questions for some time, and while we do not take for granted how these networks provide value to civic life, we are also deeply troubled by the dangers they pose. Their algorithms and their vast storehouses of data gives them fundamentally new capacities abilities to shape discourse, media, and civic and democratic life in American.
As my co-authors – Stacy Donohue and Anamitra Deb – and I reviewed the research of leading voices on this set of issues, we identified six key ways social media is threatening democracy:
There are no easy answers to the challenges represented above, and any group of potential solutions must account for the diverse interests of multiple stakeholders if we are going to have the public square we deserve. As our founder, ebay creator Pierre Omidyar, wrote today in The Washington Post, “Just as new regulations and policies had to be established for the evolving online commerce sector, social media companies must now help navigate the serious threats posed by their platforms and help lead the development and enforcement of clear industry safeguards. Change won’t happen overnight, and these issues will require ongoing examination, collaboration and vigilance to effectively turn the tide.”
For our part, at Democracy Fund, the potential effects of social media on democracy are closely tied to many lines of our work. This includes longstanding investments on issues ranging from combating hyperpartisanship with constructive dialogue to developing digital election administration tools, and from understanding the impact of fact checking to supporting communities often targeted online. A few examples of this work include:
In addition, we supported the Knight Prototype Fund on misinformation earlier this year, which focused on many of these issues. The full list of 20 projects can be found here, but the four projects we funded are:
We are going to continue to ask hard questions and support people and organizations who are working to create a robust public square that serves our democracy. We look forward to continuing this work alongside these and other partners. Please email the authors at inquiries@omidyargroup.com if you’d like to discuss how we might work together.