In the final months before our last national election in 2024, a vicious lie targeting Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, raced across social media and into the presidential campaign. Donald Trump repeated it during a nationally televised debate. JD Vance amplified it. Days later, Vance told CNN that if he had to “create stories” to force media attention onto Springfield, “that’s what I’m going to do.” Springfield officials said there was no credible evidence for the lie. Social media influencers and politicians spread it anyway.
I haven’t repeated the lie here. You may already know it. If you don’t, I’m not going to help it reach you. Not knowing more might make you feel curious, and that curiosity is exactly what those who generate disinformation intend to target. Disinformation targets all of us: around elections, extreme weather, and other events when we’re paying attention. Our attention is valuable. It can generate profit, shape public opinion, and swing votes. With the 2026 midterms approaching, we’re all targets. And we can all prepare.
We know when disinformation is coming
Climate disinformation is my beat, and extreme weather has taught us something useful: disinformation is easier to fight when we prepare for it.
Earlier this year, I wrote about an anti-disinformation “safety chain” for Danger Season, the months when North America experiences its worst climate impacts. We know Danger Season is coming. We know people will be urgently seeking information. And we know bad actors will try to exploit their attention.
My colleague Jennie King has just published an excellent toolkit for information resilience amid disasters that takes this idea much further. Jennie tells us: Don’t wait until a crisis hits and then chase lies around the internet. Build trusted networks. Make reliable information easy to find. Anticipate the ways people are likely to be manipulated.
I’ve also written about what to do—and what not to do—when you encounter disinformation. Don’t repeat false claims. Don’t send them more traffic. Do look at who is spreading them, who benefits, and what they want you to do.
Prepare before someone wants your attention
1. Warn people before the lies arrive
Start now. Share this post—or other reliable sources about election disinformation—with your friends, family, colleagues, and communities. Tell people what to expect: between now and November, people will deliberately try to capture their attention, provoke strong emotions, deepen divisions, and influence their votes.
This is called “prebunking”: warning people about disinformation and the techniques used to spread it before they encounter them. Research suggests that advance warnings can help people recognize and resist manipulation when they see it.
I won’t be limiting my warnings to lies about voting. Election disinformation can come at us sideways, through subjects people already care deeply about: immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, extreme weather, public health. The point may be to make us angry or afraid, to erode our trust in institutions or other people, to make money from our attention—or to affect what we do with our votes.
2. Choose your sources before you need them
If we see a frightening claim about voting on Election Day, that’s a bad time to start figuring out whom to trust.
Instead, we can find our state and local election officials now and use their official websites and published election information as primary sources for rules, deadlines, and procedures. Bookmark reliable local news sources. Do the same for other subjects where bad information can cause real harm: for instance, extreme weather; civil, LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, public health, immigration. We can build ourselves a short list of places to check when something alarming appears in our feeds.
Remember that expertise is specific. The person we trust for hurricane forecasts may know nothing about election administration. The person who understands election law may be a terrible source on climate science. Trustworthy information depends not just on who is speaking, but on whether they have a reliable way of knowing what they’re telling us.
3. Learn the tricks, not the lies
We don’t need to imagine every false claim we might encounter. We couldn’t if we tried.
Instead, we can learn to notice how information is being manipulated. Sometimes evidence is fabricated. Sometimes real photographs, statistics, or events are stripped of context or given a false explanation. A genuine problem may be presented without the safeguards or remedies designed to address it. A small incident may be exaggerated into evidence of widespread failure. Intent may be invented and assigned to someone without evidence.
And we don’t have to let spectacular AI deepfakes distract us from much cheaper tricks. A deceptively edited video, an old photograph with a new caption, or a real event presented as evidence of something it doesn’t show can work perfectly well.
4. Don’t help disinformation travel
If something makes us instantly furious, frightened, or triumphant, let’s not immediately give it a larger audience.
Repeating a false claim—even to debunk or ridicule it—can make it more familiar. Linking to it can send it traffic. Sharing it can expose people to a lie they hadn’t encountered before. Check first. When we do need to correct false information, lead with what is true and send people toward reliable sources.
Remember when I didn’t tell you the lie about the Haitian immigrants? This is why I didn’t.
The people who create disinformation don’t have to distribute every copy themselves, if they can get the rest of us to do some of the work for them.
5. Follow the money—and the power
Your attention has value. That’s why we talk about an “attention economy,” and why corporations and political actors work so hard to capture it.
Advertising helps finance the online information systems through which disinformation travels. In a new UN issue brief on advertising, artificial intelligence, and information integrity, my colleagues Harriet Kingaby, Charlotte Scaddan, and their coauthors point out that global advertising spending now exceeds $1 trillion a year. Advertisers’ decisions help determine what gets produced, amplified, and monetized online. AI is making it cheaper and easier to generate content at an enormous scale while becoming increasingly embedded in the systems that decide which content reaches us.
Who makes money when we keep scrolling? Who benefits when we’re angry or afraid? Who paid to put something in front of us? Who designed the system that decided we should see it? Is what’s best for them good for us?
6. Know where the levers are
Harriet and Charlotte make another important point: advertisers aren’t powerless passengers in this system. Their money gives them leverage. They can demand transparency from technology companies, support high-quality journalism and information, and insist on safeguards as AI becomes part of the advertising ecosystem. And we can demand the same thing of advertisers, social media platforms, and search engines.
We have leverage too, but it looks different. We can support independent journalism, choose platforms and services with better practices where meaningful alternatives exist, pressure advertisers not to fund harmful content, and demand more transparency from the companies deciding what reaches us.
We can also see that politicians, nations, and the fossil fuel industry work together to fund disinformation, promote authoritarianism, and fuel the climate crisis. Their lies do harm. The system that keeps producing and rewarding them harms us more. Please support UCS as we work to change that system.