Introduction

This spring, Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein from the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative published a document they call the Civic Information Handbook, which they produced in collaboration with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Civic information—“important information needed to participate in democracy—is too often drowned out by viral falsehoods, including conspiracy theories.” The Handbook is intended as a resource to help knowledge-producing organizations in the “amplification of fact-based information.”

To learn more about the handbook and the ideas on which it is based, Justin Hendrix spoke to GMF research assistant Adrienne Goldstein, as well as Kathryn Peters, executive director of UNC CITAP.