NSF Convergence Accelerator Track F: An Algorithmic Observatory to Address Financial Misinformation and Disinformation in Minoritized Communities (LOI ID: L02616265)

Smartphones and other mobile platforms are increasingly being used to access financial services. This is especially the case for the underbanked population who rely on prepaid cards and mobile applications to send and receive funds. In this process, financial service platforms are also becoming content platforms, while banks and credit unions continue to lose ground to financial technology (fintech) services and apps, and to other fringe services.

Unfortunately, this shift is also contributing to the spread of disinformation about finance. This project seeks to address a particular harm to minoritized communities arising as a result of disinformation, viz, the harm of being excluded from financial services.

Almost all extant research on disinformation has focused on political communications. Most studies have also focused on the white population—in particular, younger white men as producers of disinformation and the older white population as consumers and spreaders of political disinformation. New research suggests that there are racial asymmetries in the circulation of disinformation.

Recognizing that humans are social creatures who learn in social groupings and epistemic communities, modeling the spread of disinformation in networks of varying structures provides insight into which social structures best provide resilience against bad information. Social learning models can also help explain how groups can place trust in other group members on widely divergent topics or domains of knowledge or belief.

Such models can inform the design of new epistemic communities. This project focuses on disinformation and misinformation about money, banking, and finance among racialized and marginalized communities in the United States. It seeks to address such dis- and misinformation through a convergence science approach.

New forms of cooperative organizational structures will be explored to address the issue, proceeding from the notion that disinformation is a social problem requiring a societal response, including new institutions to track and confront disinformation and new forms of inclusive democratic participation in the process. The project will partner with the U.S. credit union system as a laboratory for cooperative democracy and will pilot a community-driven forum for a) monitoring misinformation and disinformation and developing appropriate approaches to counter it; and b) empowering people to deal with the rapid rise of digital credit scoring and other algorithmic processes in financial services.

In doing so, the cooperative model of the credit union system will be harnessed for modeling trustworthy and authentic information sharing as part of democratic practice.

Project partners include community organizations focused on racial economic equity who will provide their expertise and assist in the development of new models for understanding and addressing disinformation. A model infrastructure for digital inclusion will be piloted, that will ensure that it does not itself become a form of predatory inclusion. Trusted information flows will be developed that deal with issues of mistrust.

In addition to the credit union network, the project partnership also includes PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity, and the Filene Research Institute for enhancing the financial capabilities of minoritized households.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.