When California spent $300,000 buying online advertisements to promote monkeypox prevention measures, it was the latest in the state’s multi-year public education effort to combat misinformation and disinformation.
This summer’s outbreak led the Department of Public Health to spend hundreds of thousands on ads placed on Meta, Grindr, Jack’d, Scruff and Hornet — the latter four being dating apps popular with men who have sex with men, a group that that has been disproportionately affected by monkeypox.
Over the past few years, amid a rise in misinformation, California officials have spent hundreds of millions on similar outreach campaigns, focusing on topics including COVID-19, the 2020 census, elections and drought resilience.
In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom created the Office of Community Partnerships and Strategic Communications — now housed under the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research — to coordinate public education and community engagement efforts across several state agencies.
“The point is to be able to respond to some of the state’s most pressing issues and crises,” said Ashley Clark, a health department spokesperson.
The Office of Community Partnerships and Strategic Communications was created “using the lessons learned from the Census 2020 campaign and the COVID-19 vaccine outreach effort,” Clark said. The office received enough money to hire 33 staff members and will be funded through the fiscal year ending in 2026.
Clark is involved with the new office’s COVID-19 efforts, to which the state budget allocated $230 million this year. The money will be used to promote the use of vaccines through media, outreach and education campaigns, according to budget requests from the Department of Finance.
“There are definitely several different misinformation and disinformation narratives that are circulating throughout the state, the country, the world,” Clark said. “In the vaccine landscape, we’re partnering with media organizations and other folks to share with people the science showing how the vaccine is effective and safe.”
The effort comes as more and more people access vital information through devices and online networks. In a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 53% of people said they primarily use social media to get information.
Starting in 2018, the Secretary of State has received $2 million each year to monitor misinformation and disinformation around elections, which peaked with former President Donald Trump’s lie that he was cheated in the 2020 campaign. Some of the money goes to training county election offices and buying ads to help voters cast their ballots, said Deputy Secretary of State for Communications Joe Kocurek.
“We’re not going to cherrypick tweets, but we’re making a constant effort to ensure the public is accurately informed,” Kocurek said.
The project took form after concern rose about the influence of “foreign actors, particularly on social media,” he said.
Government efforts to combat growing misinformation aren’t limited to California. New Mexico, North Carolina and Connecticut recently launched websites to fact-check information and debunk popular myths around elections, according to the Brookings Institution.
“I think of misinformation and disinformation in two prongs. The first is the defense side — trying to limit how much of that information is actually pumped out,” said Brookings fellow and University of New Mexico Professor Gabriel Sanchez. “The other, limiting the information already out there, that’s much more challenging.”
Sanchez, who has been studying misinformation’s effects on the Latino community since 2012, said that Spanish-speaking Latino voters are much more likely to believe myths and misconceptions around topics like election integrity and the safety of vaccines.
“We know that Latinos rely much more on digital content for their information,” Sanchez said. “When we ask them where they get their information about politics and policy, they say social media platforms.”
State officials share the worry that bad actors will use disinformation schemes to target certain communities, Clark said. The Department of Public Health partnered with Meta to create a WhatsApp chatbot to detect misinformation in both English and Spanish; the messaging app is widely used by Latinos throughout the state and elsewhere.
One of the most promising routes forward is to allow community leaders to correct misinformation they see online, Sanchez said. After speaking to thousands of Latino voters, Sanchez found that most trust their local community organizations more than they do elected officials.
“You look at trust in Congress and trust in the Supreme Court, and we’re pretty much at all-time lows across the board,” Sanchez said. “If you have local community members putting out their narratives to correct information, which is free to do online, people might listen to that closer than they would to their elected officials.”
The Office of Community Partnerships and Strategic Communicationsh has partnered with more than 250 ethnic media organizations and will allocate $25,000 to community journalists through a new fellowship program.
“We just want to make sure that we’re bringing together all of the various partners and stakeholders,” Clark said, “because these are issues that impact everybody in the state.”
Camryn Pak is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: camryn.pak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @camrynpak
