What it means to you that we are a foundation
Maldita.es belongs to you (and to civil society)
Being a foundation means that we belong to all citizens and to the malditos and malditas who are part of our community. We are accountable to no one else. Maldita.es has no advertising and no paywalls. Verified information must be available to the whole society, and we count on you to make that possible.
Currently, 73% of our funding comes from grants, philanthropy, awards and technological partnerships (you can see the full breakdown here); contributions from the community account for less than 4% of our income.
Keeping an independent media outlet running without having to sell our community’s attention to advertisers requires members of the community to get involved in financially supporting the project. We need you by our side.
More transparency: review our accounts
At Maldita.es, transparency is essential: you have the right to know our structure and where our money comes from and how we spend it. In our Malditas Cuentas, we break down where the funding that supports our work comes from.
We answer to you, not to shareholders
Maldita.es is not a company: we are a non-profit foundation. All the financial resources we obtain are reinvested in improving and expanding our fight against disinformation, not in distributing profits, and you can verify this. But we do need financial resources to do our work: to pay the journalists and professionals who make Maldita.es possible, to buy the equipment we need, to maintain a workspace, to travel to give trainings…
These are some of the things we achieved in 2020 thanks to the resources we obtained:
- We launched Maldita Tecnología and expanded the teams of Maldito Bulo and Maldita Ciencia: we are more people than in 2019, and many more than in 2018, but there is also more disinformation circulating, so we need more hands to fight it. Thanks to this team expansion, we were able to face the challenge of combating the disinformation that spread during the pandemic: nearly 1,000 hoaxes debunked since it began and more than 1,000 explanatory articles.
- We strengthened Maldita Educa with new educational materials and media literacy projects.
- We launched the first verification bot in Spain to respond to questions about hoaxes much faster.
- We released the redesign of our website, which goes beyond aesthetics: internally we now have new tools that make our fight against disinformation more effective.
- We improved the working conditions of the team compared to the early years.
- We moved to a larger office better suited to the current needs of the team, updated our equipment, were able to hire professional designers — and move a bit beyond Paint — and brought in new staff in less visible but essential areas for Maldita.es to function, such as accounting, administration and management.