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Video: Disinformation and what businesses can do about it

Video: Disinformation and what businesses can do about it
Disinformation & What Businesses Can Do About It
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Our Staff
By Our StaffNov 16, 2021
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
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It's no secret: America's electoral system faces a crisis of trust, driven by the proliferation of disinformation that threatens Americans' trust in elections. Businesses have a vested interest in a stable democracy, but what can they do to address these challenges? This Business for America webinar explores the risks facing our democracy, the state-of-play regarding state and federal elections policy, and practical actions the private sector can take to promote trust and transparency in campaigns and elections.

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Road signs labels Left, Center and Right
Governance & Legislation

It’s time for a tripartisan revolution

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Mark Zuckerberg holding a pair of glasses

Mark Zuckerberg, who is now worth more than $200 billion, shows off new wearabel tech at the Meta Connect developer conference in September.

Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images

We have extreme inequality in America, and it’s getting worse

Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.”

Bloomberg recently reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is now worth over $200 billion. He’s not alone. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and LVMH founder Bernard Arnault are also worth north of $200 billion.

The news is a searing reminder of the uneven distribution of wealth in America. In the same country as Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk reside millions of people without a reliable source of food. (Arnault lives in France.) Redistributing just a small portion of the richest Americans’ wealth could alleviate tremendous human suffering.

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Mobile phone listing Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft

Like black holes, the largest companies have a reach seemingly exceeds human capabilities, writes Frazier.

SOPA Images/Getty Images

Corporate black holes prevent fair play in the U.S. economy

Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.

NASA defines a black hole as “a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out.” This celestial abnormality can even distort space-time. Though invisible to the human eye, a black hole is detectable by the extent to which everything around it is morphed to its will.

The same is true of our biggest corporations. The total reach of companies like Amazon, Meta and Google seemingly exceeds human capabilities. Yet, the extent to which our laws, culture and daily lives revolve around these corporate black holes reveals a hard truth: Fair play does not characterize our economy. The best ideas may never come to fruition and the smartest people may never realize their potential — they lack the escape velocity necessary to operate beyond the pull of the black holes.

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Iceberg hiding money below
wenmei Zhou/Getty Images

The hidden iceberg: Why corporate treasury spending matters

Freed is president and co-founder of the Center for Political Accountability.

Too much media coverage and other political analyses focus on contributions by corporate political action committees but overlook the serious consequences of political contributions made directly from corporate treasury funds.

In talks with corporate executives, the default too often is almost exclusively on company political engagement through its PAC. This ignores what one political scientist has likened to an iceberg of spending, where disclosure is not required (and hence is “dark money”) or is partial (only by the recipient, not the donor) and totals are much greater than the amounts allowed for PAC spending.

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hand reaching out over an American flag
Nikolay Ponomarenko/Getty Images

Big Philanthropy to the rescue? Think again.

Cain has served in leadership roles at numerous foundations, nonprofits and for-profit corporations. He was a founding partner of American Philanthropic.

As the media and elites across America take up a fight to “save democracy,” Big Philanthropy is casting itself in the role of superhero. Since 2011, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy reports, some $5.7 billion has gone to programs supporting U.S. democracy, with grant announcements that often depict foundations as stepping up to forestall a doomsday.

The Carnegie Corporation, warning of a “fragility of our democracy ... unimaginable just a few years ago,” has pledged to strengthen social cohesion and combat polarization. The MacArthur Foundation is partnering with Carnegie and the Ford and Knight foundations, among others, in the $500 million Press Forward effort to “address the crisis in local news.” As Knight president Alberto Ibargüen put it to the New York Times: “There is a new understanding of the importance of information in the management of community, in the management of democracy in America.”

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