MacArthur Foundation awards $350,000 to Damon J. Keith Center to expand artificial intelligence radio disinformation tool

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded $350,000 to the Wayne State University Law School's Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights to expand VERDAD: Verifying and Exposing Disinformation and Discourse, an AI-powered tool that monitors disinformation on Ethnic-language radio stations across the U.S.

MacArthur funded the development of the tool; this grant will fund major enhancements to the platform, including better detection that integrates real-time fact-checking, data export tools for researchers and journalists, trending analysis to spot emerging disinformation across regions, and features to track published stories using the platform. The grant will also expand VERDAD's reach beyond its current 14 states and add the capacity to monitor stations in Arabic, Haitian Creole, and Vietnamese.

"In today's information environment, disinformation functions as a barrier that discourages voter participation by sowing confusion," Martina Guzmán, who founded the tool, said. "VERDAD acts as a civil rights safeguard by verifying and exposing these barriers. This grant to build out VERDAD is directly connected to civil rights and empowering voters."

Guzmán is a nationally recognized, award-winning Detroit journalist and director of the Race and Justice Reporting Initiative at the Keith Center. She was inspired to create VERDAD after spending her career covering ethnic communities, listening to their stories, celebrating their resilience and documenting their challenges. There she discovered that foreign actors were buying airtime on Spanish-language radio to spread disinformation.

The platform automates transcription, translation and detection of mis- and disinformation on ethnic radio stations using AI.

Before VERDAD, journalists and advocacy groups relied on volunteers to manually monitor broadcasts, a process that took hours. The FCC prohibits broadcasters from intentionally distorting news but relies on listener reports to trigger investigations. Through VERDAD, researchers and journalists can monitor foreign-language radio for mis- and disinformation at an unprecedented scale.

"VERDAD is disruptive," Desirée Yépez, an award-winning journalist and managing producer at Radio Bilingüe, said. "A tool where you can say, 'OK, I'll go here and find a whole cluster of disinformation?' That didn't really exist before."

Since its launch in 2024, 320 journalists and academic researchers have registered to use the tool. It has been featured at conferences including the WGBH Media Summit, the Academy of International Affairs in Bonn, Germany, and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference.

The platform's advisory board includes veteran journalist Steve Henn, entrepreneur in residence at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University; Alex Goldmark, executive producer of NPR's Planet Money; and Yépez, who founded Ecuador's first fact-checking outlet.

After completing the enhancements, the Keith Center plans to implement a subscription model, charging for-profit newsrooms monthly while keeping the tool accessible to freelance journalists and nonprofit newsrooms. Academic researchers will pay a one-time fee for unlimited data access.

The center aims to increase VERDAD usage by at least 30% during the grant period, measured by growth in users and published work using the tool.

For more information on how you can support VERDAD and the Keith Center, contact Rob MacGregor at 313-577-4141 or [email protected].