Author Description

Today's information ecosystem brings access to seemingly infinite amounts of information instantaneously. It also contributes to the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation to millions of people. In response to this challenge and as part of the RAND Corporation's Truth Decay initiative, RAND researchers worked to identify and characterize the universe of online tools targeted at online disinformation, focusing on those tools created by nonprofit or civil society organizations. This report summarizes the data collected by the RAND team in 2018 and 2019 and serves as a companion to the already published web database. The report includes information on our inclusion and exclusion criteria, a discussion of methodology, a list of domains or characteristics that we coded for every tool (e.g., tool type, delivery platform), a summary of descriptive statistics that provides multiple different snapshots of both available tools and those in development, and a series of deep dives that describe each of the types of tools in the database and how each works to counter the disinformation challenge.