Social media owners, politicians and governments are the biggest threats to a trustworthy online news environment, according to a group of experts studying disinformation whose work is inspired by that of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) said social media platform owners topped a survey of concerns, followed by governments and politicians at home and abroad.
Philip Howard, co-founder of IPIE and professor of Internet studies at Oxford University, said the report showed the global information environment was at a “critical juncture”.
“One of the most pressing concerns highlighted by our survey is the influence of social media platform owners. Their control over content distribution and moderation policies significantly impacts the quality and integrity of information. The unchecked power of these entities poses a serious risk to the health of our global information environment,” he said.
The panel’s findings were based on responses from 412 academic researchers from fields including social sciences, humanities and computer science, with contributions concentrated in the United States and Western Europe, although China, India, Nigeria and Brazil were among the other countries included. Howard said the term “information environment” referred to the organizations, content and people that underpin the “daily news diet” of millions of people.
The report did not identify specific owners of the tech platforms, but Howard, a co-author of the report, said Elon Musk’s ownership of X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) had raised concerns, including reports of over-promotion of Musk’s own tweets, while Frances Haugen, a whistleblower on Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has claimed the owner of Facebook and Instagram places a lower priority on moderating content in a language other than English. Howard added that TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, was another source of concern after lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic expressed fears that it could be susceptible to pressure from the Chinese government.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said last year that the platform’s owner was “not an agent of China or any other country,” while Meta has said that Check content on Facebook and Instagram in over 70 languages. X has been contacted for comment.
Around two-thirds of respondents expected the information environment to worsen in the future, compared with just over half of respondents in the previous survey. IPIE was set up as a non-governmental organisation last year after warning that biased algorithms, manipulation and disinformation were a “global and existential threat”.
The report warns that many politicians have “instrumentalized” conspiracy theories and disinformation for political gain, with the side effect of eroding trust in reliable sources of information and democratic institutions.
Nearly two-thirds of experts surveyed felt that AI-generated videos, voice, images and text had had a negative impact on the information environment, and the same proportion were “convinced” that they magnified the problem of misinformation.
“Generative AI tools have offered new opportunities to produce propaganda on a large scale,” the report says.
The top concern related to AI was AI-generated video, followed by voice. The survey found that experts in developing countries were more concerned about the negative effects of generative AI than experts in developed countries. A clear majority of respondents also found a positive side to AI, being “moderately hopeful” that it could bring benefits such as helping to detect misleading content and helping journalists sift through large data banks.
The panel’s findings were based on responses from 412 academic researchers in fields including social sciences, humanities and computer science.
When asked how to counter the problems highlighted in the report, respondents recommended promoting free and independent media; implementing digital literacy campaigns; encouraging fact-checking; and labelling misleading content.
