Global South Researchers Challenge Billion-Dollar Counter-Disinformation Industry

A groundbreaking peer-reviewed paper published in “Information, Communication & Society” has exposed fundamental flaws in how the global counter-disinformation industry operates, particularly in its approach to Global South countries. Researchers Jonathan Corpus Ong from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Dean Jackson from the University of Pittsburgh conducted extensive fieldwork over two years, involving workshops and interviews with more than 100 civil society leaders, tech policy experts, and researchers across multiple countries including the Philippines, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and South Africa.

Their findings reveal a stark disconnect between the priorities of Global North funders and the actual needs of communities affected by disinformation. The researchers conclude that the counter-disinformation field—dominated by Global North donors, tech companies, and elite universities—has exacerbated power imbalances between funders and local practitioners.

The timing of these findings is particularly significant as USAID, a major funder of global information integrity work, faces severe budget cuts. A recent Lancet study projects these global aid reductions could result in 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030. The lessons drawn from this research extend beyond disinformation funding to highlight broader problems in international tech-for-good initiatives, including the emerging field of artificial intelligence governance.

The researchers identified what they call “the scalability trap”—a pattern where donors consistently favor projects promising wide-reaching, technology-driven solutions. Successful proposals typically feature dashboards monitoring millions of social media posts, multinational media literacy programs, or fact-checking databases with sophisticated interfaces that generate neat metrics for annual reports.

Meanwhile, community-based initiatives like trust-building exercises in rural areas, narrative change campaigns requiring years to show results, and grassroots organizing among vulnerable communities receive little support, despite being potentially more effective at addressing root causes of disinformation.

“Funders are obsessed with tools that are scalable. It’s not sexy to do community dialogues,” noted one Philippine participant in the study. A Brazilian researcher observed that organizations are often forced to shut down projects and dismiss staff after election cycles end, even when outcomes were successful—demonstrating how funding patterns follow election calendars rather than the slower process of rebuilding civic trust.

The financial scale of the issue is substantial. Between 2017 and 2021, private philanthropy directed more than USD 1 billion into information ecosystem work for aid-recipient countries, while the Biden administration allocated at least USD 267 million in federal grants for disinformation research. However, when study participants were asked what they actually needed, they emphasized more direct community engagement rather than additional monitoring tools.

A second critical failure identified in the research is the geopolitical hijacking of counter-disinformation efforts. The paper documents how Global North government funding has systematically directed researchers in developing countries away from addressing local concerns toward focusing on “foreign influence operations” and “malign authoritarian influence”—code for Chinese and Russian propaganda.

One Brazilian participant bluntly described such work as “a war that doesn’t deal with our problems… If I were making a list of priorities, this would probably be 73rd on my list.”

This prioritization overlooks the reality in most Global South countries, where the primary disinformation threats come from domestic sources rather than foreign actors. In the Philippines, homegrown troll networks serving local politicians represent greater threats than Russian bots. Similarly, in Brazil, domestic extremist networks caused more electoral damage than foreign intelligence services, while in India, the ruling party’s digital ecosystem far outweighs foreign influence operations.

The paper also highlights glaring contradictions in counter-disinformation funding, noting a Reuters revelation that the Pentagon ran a covert anti-vaccination campaign in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using hundreds of fake social media accounts impersonating Filipinos, the US military undermined confidence in China’s Sinovac vaccine—at a time when it was often the only option available and the country was experiencing one of Southeast Asia’s worst COVID-19 death rates.

Perhaps the most significant insight from the research is its reframing of what disinformation fundamentally is. The authors argue that practitioners in the Global South view disinformation not primarily as a content or technology problem but as a broader economic and social issue connected to inequality, resource extraction, and precarious labor conditions.

This perspective suggests that fact-checking, while valuable, cannot alone address disinformation if the underlying economic incentives remain intact. The researchers point to digital boycotts targeting advertising revenue streams of disinformation sites as more effective because they challenge the business model rather than simply responding to individual false claims.

As USAID funding faces cuts and the world rushes toward AI governance, the paper warns that the same mistakes are being repeated: treating the Global South as a testing ground, sidelining local voices, disguising commercial interests as development, and maintaining the fiction that better technology alone can solve problems rooted in power and inequality.

The researchers recommend funding longer-term initiatives beyond election cycles, supporting deeper community-driven approaches despite their slower results, encouraging South-to-South collaboration, and abandoning one-size-fits-all regulatory approaches that fail to account for local contexts where governments themselves may be the primary sources of disinformation.