Hewlett Foundation announces that it will donate $10M over two years to help fund research into the spread of disinformation on social media platforms
Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab : See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Hewlett's $10M pledge lands days after Google committed $300M over three years through its new News Initiative explicitly aimed at fighting disinformation, and a year after Facebook, Craig Newmark, Mozilla, and Betaworks seeded the $14M News Integrity Initiative at CUNY. Money for the information-integrity problem is arriving fast — but almost all of it so far has come from the platforms being scrutinized.
That is what makes Hewlett notable: it is an independent funder entering a field where [[a:937712|CJR has already argued that tech companies funding journalism projects deepens codependence]] and frames media as the exception shielded from tech's disruption. A philanthropic check gives researchers a patron with no platform business to protect.
First-order effects
- Researchers studying how disinformation spreads on social platforms gain a dedicated two-year funding stream from a funder with no stake in platform outcomes, complementing the platform-originated money from Google's News Initiative and the News Integrity Initiative.
- Social media companies now face scrutiny funded from two directions at once — their own grants and independent philanthropy — raising the odds that findings critical of platform design get published rather than buried in partner agreements.
Second-order effects
- Independent research sharpens the contrast with where ad money actually flows: the Global Disinformation Index later found sites spreading COVID-19 misinformation drawing at least $25M from ad platforms run by Google, Amazon, and others — exactly the kind of gap Hewlett-funded work is positioned to quantify and pressure platforms over.
- Platform grant programs like Google's $300M initiative may need to demonstrate measurable anti-disinformation results to justify continued spending alongside independent research that can contradict their self-reported progress.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, disinformation research consolidates into a standing field with two distinct funding tracks — platform-aligned initiatives and independent philanthropy — and the credibility of findings increasingly depends on which track produced them.
- The codependence critique extends beyond journalism funding to research funding itself: as platforms underwrite the study of their own harms, independent funders like Hewlett become the structural counterweight that keeps the field's conclusions contestable.
The trend: Philanthropy and platforms are racing to fund the same information-integrity problem from opposite sides of the independence question, making the source of research money as consequential as the research itself.