Between artificially generated fakes, character assassination campaigns and tactics with names like “crisis profiteering” and “cynicism bombing,” Black voters are encountering a host of disinformation efforts ahead of the November midterm election.
But public figures, organizations and others representing the powerful voting bloc — one long targeted by disenfranchisement campaigns — have been preparing a defense for months.
Black influencers, some with more than a million followers on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, warned against deceptive efforts to dissuade Black people from voting. The NAACP produced research and primers on race-based disinformation. Think tanks published playbooks to train voters to spot signs of manipulation and deception, while also calling for legislation to punish it.
Black voters, for years a reliable constituency for Democrats, are especially on edge following a series of legal and technological setbacks, political experts said. In the spring, the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights law, making way for Republican states to redraw their congressional maps and igniting fears of diluted Black representation.
Artificial intelligence is also improving at warp speed, enabling fake content — including racist and unflattering portrayals of Black politicians and celebrities — to spread more quickly.
“In 2026, not only are we going to see all of this at a velocity that no previous generation has faced, we are seeing this at a moment in time where we cannot assume that there will be larger forces that can help stem this,” said Esosa Osa, the founder of Onyx Impact, a registered nonpartisan nonprofit group that works to protect Black communities from digital harms. “It’s going to need to be community-driven.”
Ms. Osa, who has worked on several Democratic campaigns, spoke earlier this month at an online briefing about a “propaganda playbook” created by Onyx to address election disinformation. The 41-page field guide, which will be made public this week, is meant to help voters, social media creators and others recognize what the organization calls “the most dangerous moment many communities have faced in the information environment in a generation.”
Onyx is not alone. One civil rights group put out a “Black Voters Survival Guide”; another focused a podcast episode on media literacy amid an “infodemic.” A Black history organization arranged a town hall about disinformation and voter fraud claims.
Efforts to suppress or manipulate Black political participation predates social media, but are now operating at higher speed, scale and precision, said Danielle A. Canty, the director of technology policy at the Joint Center for Political & Economic Studies.
“Black Americans aren’t targeted because they’re uniquely gullible or susceptible to this — they’re targeted because the Black vote matters,” she said. “If we just let this information run rampant, to the point where it discourages voters or makes them feel like their vote doesn’t count, we’re essentially taking ourselves out of the game.”
Information manipulation is one technique, experts said, and A.I. is changing how it is carried out. A fake image of a polling location in a largely Black precinct closing early, for example, would be cheap to make, easy to spread and hard to authenticate, according to the Onyx playbook.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, while President Trump was courting Black voters, A.I. images circulated of him being supported by the community. A report this month from the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights and democracy group, found that “A.I. is now a standard feature of both influence operations and cyber operations.”
In previous election cycles, social media accounts created by Russian influence operatives and others tried to exploit racial tensions and Black sympathies. In 2020, right-wing political operatives tried to discourage Black New Yorkers from voting via a misleading robocall campaign.
This spring, the Virginia branch of the NAACP accused a conservative group opposed to a redistricting referendum of trying to deceive voters by distributing mailers with outdated quotes from the state’s governor and former President Barack Obama. The effort, according to the president of the NAACP branch, amounted to “disinformation designed to sow confusion and suppress the voices of Black voters.”
Onyx calls the tactic “context extraction,” where real footage is stripped of its original meaning and used to promote a different narrative. Another strategy is called “cynicism bombing,” which tries to tamp down Black voter turnout by weaponizing the community’s legitimate skepticism about voting, casting the act as pointless.
This is the “biggest all-encompassing threat,” Ms. Osa said.
In response to the Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, Black Democratic candidates across the South have been pushing Black voters to defend fair representation by turning out at the polls. Several civil rights groups arranged an emergency meeting online in April, in which the Rev. Al Sharpton said, “We going in the corner and coming back swinging with all that we have.”
At Onyx’s briefing, Ms. Osa told Black activists, students and others not to treat the playbook “as a reactive document that you take off the shelf when a crisis hits.”
“Making sure that you all are calling out some of these tactics super early is going to be huge,” she said.
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