The Onyx Impact founder documents 15,000 attacks on Black communities while fighting disinformation campaigns and demanding political accountability
Esosa Osa doesn’t just analyze information warfare, she documents it with receipts. As founder and CEO of Onyx Impact, the Duke University graduate has dedicated her career to fighting digital harm and amplifying Black voices in an increasingly chaotic information landscape. Her organization recently released comprehensive reports tracking threats to Black communities, including the Digital Green Book and the groundbreaking Blackout Report.
Armed with experience from Fair Fight Action and a background in finance from BlackRock and Morgan Stanley, Osa brings both strategic insight and fiscal understanding to her mission of protecting Black progress in the digital age.
What is Onyx Impact and why did you found it?
Onyx Impact is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to amplifying Black voices, fighting information threats, myths and disinformation, and really uplifting Black experiences in Black culture.
Is disinformation a real threat or do we just need better filters for information?
I fundamentally believe we are in an information war. We’re in a war for our own reality. Misinformation is any incorrect information that you may come across. Disinformation requires intent, it’s lies with the intent to lie. We are being inundated. Five or six years ago, it could be like these 10 lies that people are pushing online, we can debunk them. Now we’re just being swarmed with it. It’s nonstop misinformation, disinformation, true information that causes anxiety. It’s information overload in a broader environment of propaganda.
Where’s the scoreboard for tracking disinformation and its perpetrators in our community?
Folks have attempted it. Really, what I think the most important thing to try to do is make sure folks are armed and equipped with good information consistently. Make sure people are following Black news, Black media, Black organizations that are far less likely to be spreading harmful narratives about our community and far more likely to be uplifting the data and points of view that we understand. At Onyx Impact, one of the things I can guarantee you is that we will always come with receipts.
Why create a Digital Green Book?
We launched the Digital Green Book earlier this year. Everyone remembers when we were being hit with 20 executive orders a day at the end of January, early February. Nobody knew what was going on. As an expert in this field, it was very easy to recognize that tactic that we have seen be pushed in other countries moving towards more authoritarian-type governments. How do we overflow or flood people with entirely too much information so that they pause, they freeze, they can’t make any decisions? We wanted to make sure Black communities had a way to expose these tactics, understand when this is happening, and know exactly how to fight back.
What is the Blackout Report?
This is the most comprehensive analysis that has been done to date on the harms that have been inflicted on Black communities specifically in 2025 as a result of this disinformation campaign around the term DEI. They have redefined that term and attacked it. While they are launching this culture war disinfo campaign, they want you to focus on that smokescreen, that Trojan horse argument, while they cut $3.4 billion in investment in Black communities just this year. $70 million from flood protections for Black communities.
$31 million in programs meant to help Black kids with asthma in neighborhoods that have poor air quality. We’ve documented over 15,000 direct impact points of attempts to erase, distort, and suppress Black progress. Because it is so clear that they are trying to black out our history, black out our data, black out our opportunity and our future, that’s why we went with the title Blackout Report.
How can our community develop a plan to address this coordinated attack?
I think we’re well on our way. The first step is to make sure we are all equipped with that knowledge of what is actually happening and are able to call out that tactic whenever we see them trying to talk about DEI. Every single thing they’re cutting, using that as a Trojan horse is affecting Black communities. Can you equip folks with that information? Can you make sure that they are able to call out the tactic, and can we make sure to organize, to stand up, to demand better?
Do you see the intellectual culture war raging inside our community?
I see a culture war that is calling some folks elite, some folks not elite, some folks real, some folks not real. That’s happening across communities, across the internet. The algorithms are hypersensitive to narratives of division, especially division within communities, and they’re going to uplift and amplify that quite a lot.
How does repetition factor into disinformation’s effectiveness?
Disinformation works on everybody regardless of your education, your background, your income. Our brains work in a very similar way, and that is that the more times we hear something, the more likely we are to believe it’s true and the more likely we are to believe other people believe it’s true as well. Our brains will substitute repetition for truth. You can see the same false message 20 times in a day or listen to a podcast and have it be repeated multiple times in an hour, and if it sounds good, then it must be true.
Who’s behind the narrative that voting doesn’t matter?
There have always been naysayers as it relates to the power of civic engagement. I would offer a question for those folks, if voting didn’t work, why would they be trying so hard to stop us from voting? If voting wasn’t the move, why does the top 1% of the country vote in almost every single election that they are able to?
But I also want to be clear that the overwhelming majority of our community gets it. We saw on Tuesday in Georgia, the first Black woman elected statewide, Alicia Johnson. We saw Black voters literally break the Republican supermajority in Mississippi. In Virginia, almost 90% of Black folks came out and supported.
Should there be accountability for how political money is spent in our communities?
Voting is not a solution. It’s step three in a 10-step process. We need receipts before and we need receipts after. It cannot be that we showed up and are the backbone of an entire ecosystem coalition of progressives that is built on a 1960s coalition that is afraid to stand up for equity in this moment.
If the committees are not willing to make a significant investment in Black media, and I will say Black media, one of the very few willing to stand up to fascism, to autocracy, that has not fundamentally and aggressively changed how they report based on this current administration. If that is not supported, uplifted, and upheld, the committees, all of the top funds, they’re going to need to be held to account in a very serious way next year.
Find the Blackout Report at blackoutreport.org and the Digital Green Book at digitalgreenbook.org. You can find Onyx Impact at onyximpact.org and follow on social media @TheOnyxImpact.