There is more information – and access to information – than at any time in history, but the trusted institutions and information gatekeepers of the past are no longer able to contain harmful or deceptive information as effectively. Many of the information challenges we currently face, such as misinformation and the proliferation of hate speech and other deceptive content, are not new, but recent years have shown that there is a clear need for new research on these phenomena – and the impediments they pose to democracy in this age of many-to-many communication

In the past two years, Knight Foundation has made significant investments to support the development of a nascent field of cross-disciplinary research oriented around the spectrum of thorny issues in this space, including a founding investment in the Harvard Kennedy Center’s new HKS Misinformation Review. The recent launch of this new academic journal marks an important moment in this field’s development in the academy: by providing researchers from a variety of disciplines with a high standard of rigor, a locus of inquiry — and the validation that this inquiry is critical to our shared understanding of this moment.