With the Climate Panel as a beacon, Global Group tackles misinformation

Two years ago, at a virtual meeting hosted by the Nobel Foundation, Sheldon Himelfarb outlined the idea that the world’s leading scientists should join forces to study disinformation as scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documented the global effect of carbon emissions.

That new group met on Wednesday for its official launch in Washington, uniting more than 200 researchers from 55 countries with a similar sense of urgency and alarm as the threat of global warming. In the group’s first report, the researchers questioned the effectiveness of combating falsehoods online with content moderation, one of the most common strategies for combating misinformation, and said other tactics had more scientific evidence.

“You have to approach the information environment the same way scientists approach the environment,” said Mr Himelfarb, the group’s executive director and the CEO of PeaceTech Lab, an advocacy group affiliated with the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.

The group, the International Panel on the Information Environment, has registered as a non-governmental organization in Zurich at a time when the fight against disinformation is increasingly bogged down in a broader erosion of trust in government, news organizations and other public institutions.

“Algorithmic bias, manipulation and disinformation have become a global and existential threat that exacerbates existing social problems, degrades public life, cripples humanitarian initiatives and prevents progress on other serious threats,” the panel wrote in its inaugural announcement.

The panel was introduced at a three-day meeting hosted by the Nobel Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences dedicated to the erosion of public understanding and trust in science.

Speaker after speaker at the meeting described an onslaught of disinformation that has become a daunting fact of public life around the world and that, with the recent explosion of artificial intelligence, could soon get worse.

Maria Ressa of the Philippines, winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize a manifesto demanding that democratic governments and Big Tech companies become more transparent, do more to protect personal data and privacy, and end practices that contribute to disinformation and other threats against independent journalism. It has 276 signatories representing more than 140 organizations.

One of the challenges facing these efforts is overcoming the increasingly heated arguments about what exactly constitutes disinformation. In the United States, efforts to combat it have stalled on the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. The biggest companies have now shifted their focus and resources away from fighting disinformation, even as new platforms appeared promising to abandon policies that moderate content.

On Wednesday, the panel’s researchers presented the summary of the first two studies, which reviewed 4,798 peer-reviewed publications that examined misleading information on social media and pooled findings on the effectiveness of countermeasures.

The findings suggest that the most effective responses to false information online are to label content as “disputed” or flag state media sources and publish corrective information, usually in the form of debunking rumors and misinformation.

Much less certain, the report argues, is the effectiveness of public and government efforts to pressure social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter to remove content, as well as internal corporate algorithms that suspend or downplay objectionable accounts. The same goes for media literacy programs that train people to identify sources of misinformation.

“We’re not saying information literacy programs don’t work,” said Sebastián Valenzuela, a professor at Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University who oversaw the study. “What we’re saying is we need more evidence that they work.”

The panel’s inspiration model, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was founded in 1988, a time when climate change was equally contested. Its scientists, working under the auspices of the United Nations, toiled for decades before its assessments and recommendations were recognized as scientific consensus.

When it comes to the digital landscape and the impact of abuses on society, the science of disinformation would be even more difficult to measure concretely. Climate change is “hard science,” says Young Mie Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who serves as vice chair of a committee focused on research methodology.

“So, relatively speaking, it’s easier to develop some common concepts and toolkits,” Ms. Kim said. “It’s hard to do that in the social sciences or the humanities.”

The new panel shuns government involvement – at least for now. It plans to issue regular reports, not to check individual falsehoods, but rather to look for deeper forces behind the spread of disinformation as a way to guide government policy.

“It would be too difficult to get a bunch of scientists to evaluate the truth claims in any given piece of junk,” said Philip N. Howard, director of Oxford University’s Program on Democracy and Technology and chair of the new panel.

“What we can do is look for infrastructure interference,” he continued. “What we can do is check an algorithmic system to see if it has bad or unintended results. It remains difficult, but I think that as a research goal that is within reach.”