Originally written for the Bled Strategic Forum
Disinformation is a disturbance in an information ecosystem. However, to enhance resilience to it, policymakers need to look past it as the problem. While tracking influence operations helps to understand the problem, it provides little insights into why disinformation is salient in different contexts, much less what to do about it. What’s more, popular counter measures like fact checking and content moderation are easily politicised as censorship, a perspective encouraged by the current United States’ administration and its key officials such as Vice President J.D. Vance. To get ahead of a problem like disinformation, policymakers need to look beyond the phenomenon to understand the space where it exists, namely, their information ecosystem. Leaders must find strategic interventions that are less likely to be politicised to address threats like foreign interference. The key is to understand what underlying factors and conditions are making an ecosystem susceptible in the first place, and address them such that disinformation, regardless of the narrative, is less likely to flourish. This can readily be done by connecting data from across various factors and disciplines to produce benchmarks and prioritize interventions.
Despite major investments to counter disinformation, it remains a problem. It’s unknown just how much money democratic governments have spent on efforts to counter disinformation. Initiatives are spread across departments and militaries, making it difficult to track. That said, the European Union has spent at least €50 million since 2015, while in the United States the Pentagon alone awarded a single contract to a company “to counter misinformation” for nearly $1 billion in 2021.
A major challenge with rooting out disinformation as an approach is that it exists as manifestations of ideas or narratives. It’s a lot like pulling weeds, there must be something to weed out, making the approach inherently reactive. The definition of “misleading or false information that is deliberately shared” provides a theoretical framing for identifying disinformation, but to do so a claim must already be expressed against which the concept can be applied. This means that many current efforts to counter disinformation are by nature reactive attempting to counter instances of the phenomenon already present in an information ecosystem, shy of programs that focus more generically on helping citizens better critically assess information, like media literacy. But even there, questions remain about the efficacy of such programs and their ability to scale to a wider society. What if the problem needing solved isn’t disinformation at all, but addressing factors that allow it to thrive in the surrounding ecosystem?
Humans have faced similar challenges in other complex systems, and learning from those experiences can inform alternative approaches for addressing problems in the information environment. Weeds and other pests have plagued farmers since the dawn of agriculture. To address them, people have turned to pesticides. Such direct problem-solving has led to unintended consequences, much like counter measures to disinformation have in being politicised. For example, to deal with a tiny bug called an aphid that kills cotton – the direct solution is to kill the insect with pesticide. Sure, it might eradicate the pest, but the knock-on effects can include destabilizing that ecosystem with pollution killing species up the food chain. The aphid can also grow resistant, increasing costs to kill it.
Desires to avoid these negative effects led to an alternative approach called Integrated Pest Management. The approach uses multiple interventions based on how ecosystems work, including planting pest-resistant varieties, disrupting mating with pheromone traps, adjusting agricultural practices, and supporting natural aphid predators, like beetles and spiders. It takes more effort, but the approach is working. It’s led to an 10-15% increase in yields in cotton and 20-30% savings in pest control, to name some benefits.
To find such alternatives in the information environment, one must first understand what that system is and how it works. It’s difficult to do that if problems like disinformation continue to take up most of the research and policy focus. A first step forward, as I outline in my book The Information Animal: Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality, is to articulate shared concepts across disciplines and policy silos that would galvanize stakeholders within a country or across the European Union around a shared strategic policy goal. This starts with a shared understanding of the space in question – the information environment and ecosystems within it. Much like in the physical world, the global information environment provides the conditions for information to exist – it includes all the systems supporting this, be it economy, infrastructure, electricity, education. Within that space, distinct information ecosystems form through interactions between people, tools and information in relation to the wider information environment.
Focusing on disinformation or awareness raising, without having a systemic understanding of the national ecosystem and factors behind its resilience is only scratching the surface. We will continue making guesses about what might foster resilience until we understand how the information environment and ecosystems work, with obvious implications for wasted time and resources. Currently, much of the discussion around healthy information ecosystems assumes that democratic values like having a pluralistic independent media and internet freedom are the key to resilience. Others still jump straight to desired outcomes, pinning hopes on trust and social cohesion as a measure of resilience. The problem is without scientific study of the system that is the information environment, at best these are just hypotheses. At worst, democratic values are dimming guiding lights growing ever distant to the very people those championing this approach are hoping to reach, along with the hypothesised end state. For people who feel their economic needs are not met or that politicians are doing little to address public concerns, authoritarianism has allure – for example, as it does among 37 percent of British adults.
Underlying issues like drops in traditional literacy rates, changing demographics, news trends, economic strains, and declines in social services might be creating a climate that makes disinformation salient in countries like the United Kingdom. Tracking disinformation, raising awareness, or trying to instil democratic values on a population who is struggling day-to-day, isn’t likely to address that overarching climate. Stepping back and assessing the national information ecosystem, could though.
This means looking at multiple factors in tandem – not just at narratives or news media. Understanding the information ecosystem entails looking at the people within it, who are they, what communities do they form around what languages, identities and in what spaces, but also assessing changes in their ability to understand information changed over time. It also requires assessing the means available to those people for creating, sharing and accessing information, what tools and services are involved, who controls them and how? And yes, it requires assessing what informational outputs are available and consumed by these communities – but this goes beyond social and traditional media and should be considered in the context of people’s skills, accessibility, language, location, and what’s expected of them in that information ecosystem. Taking a systems approach requires putting all of this data into the context of the wider information environment, which in turn is shaped by conditions like the economy, state of education, and governance. It might sound daunting, but it is doable. For most national information ecosystems this process will take months rather than years.
To support this development, policymakers should mandate a coordinating body to identify existing measurements of factors and build a team of researchers to collectively assess the national information ecosystem. This would provide a baseline against which future change could be tracked and identify gaps in knowledge that must be filled to fully understand the state of that information ecosystem.
By taking this systems approach, policymakers can develop a road map, identifying who needs to be at the table for whole-of-society approaches, and create frameworks for better coordination between those groups. Assessing national information ecosystems will also identify vulnerabilities, surfacing those that are not as obvious or receiving as much media attention as others—but could be more pressing. These could include overreliance on a particular service provider, such as a social media platform, or a gap in a fundamental skill, such as literacy. Taking a systems approach will ultimately help identify what constitutes resilience in an information ecosystem. And, if this work is done in tandem with other like-minded countries, a coordinated approach by democracies will advance an understanding of the global information environment—a much-needed step for the numerous countries around the world struggling with informational issues.
Ultimately, taking an ecosystems approach enables leaders to be strategic. Strategy is about making the best possible decisions from an array of options to achieve an aim. This means considering multiple factors to prioritise a series of choices with a clear aim. It’s highly unlikely a silver bullet will be the answer for a complex problem. Quite the contrary, if the cotton aphids teach us anything, it’s that multiple interventions in concert with each other are likely to lead to resilience in the information environment.
