Wayne State University Law School’s Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights received a $350,000 grant to expand a disinformation tool, “VERDAD: Verifying and Exposing Disinformation and Discourse.”

The AI-powered tool monitors U.S.-based ethnic radio stations for disinformation in Latino media.

VERDAD Founder and journalist Martina Guzmán says the tool will expand to all 50 states in multiple languages and also globally.

“Oftentimes, people think there’s going to be like, this commercial that’s complete disinformation. And what happens is on Latino radio stations, on ethnic radio stations, people have talk shows. And on those talk shows, it is often those people that host the talk shows that are spreading disinformation,” she says. 

Guzmán says the tool began monitoring Latino radio stations in battleground states ahead of the 2024 election.

“We felt that the election would be won or lost in those states at the time. And that was the capacity we had that we could do these eight battleground states and maybe a few more,” she says. 

The grant was awarded to the Wayne State University Law School’s Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to expand its reach of languages and locations.

Guzmán says the tool works as a civil rights safeguard to empower voters.

“The tool records 24 hours a day, and once it hears misinformation, right? And it hears it based on hundreds and hundreds of disinformation keywords that we’ve uploaded into its system. And once it hears one of those words, it begins to really focus… it has an analysis component,” she says.

Since the VERDAD tool’s inception last year, more than 320 academics and journalists have registered to use the free tool on Verdad.app to write articles and research trends of LatinX voters.

The tool will add several languages, including Arabic, Haitian Creole, and Vietnamese to inform voters.