Information Disorder is the “crisis that exacerbates all other crises” — The Aspen Institute

“Understanding the root problems of information disorder requires understanding hard-wired human behaviors, economic and political policy, group psychology and ideologies, and the relationship to people’s sense of individual and community identity.”

Here are the big points from the Aspen Institutes newly released Commission on Information Disorder Final Report:

Disinformation is a symptom; the disease is complex structural inequities.

Mis- and disinformation do not exist in a vacuum. The spread of false and misleading narratives, the incitement of division and hate, and the erosion of trust have a long history, with corporate, state actor, and political persuasion techniques employed to maintain power and profit, create harm, and/or advance political or ideological goals. Malicious actors use cheap and accessible methods to deliberately spread and amplify harmful information…False narratives can sow division, hamper public health initiatives, undermine elections, or deliver fresh marks to grifters and profiteers, and they capitalize on deep-rooted problems within American society. Disinformation pours lighter fluid on the sparks of discord that exist in every community.

The absence of clear leadership is slowing responses.

Currently, the U.S. lacks any strategic approach and clear leadership in either the public or the private sector to address information disorder…Congress, meanwhile, remains woefully under-informed about the titanic changes transforming modern life and has under-invested in the staff, talent, and knowledge to understand and legislate these new realms, particularly given that it has never replaced the capability lost by the closure of the Office of Technology Assessment in the 1990s. The technology industry lobby also has outsized influence in shaping legislative priorities favorable to its interests…More than any single action or implementable recommendation we could make, it is necessary for our government, civil society, and private sector leaders to prioritize, commit to, and follow-through on addressing the worst harms and worst actors and to invest in their own capacities to understand and respond to the problems we face together.

Trade-offs between speech and misinformation are not easy.

Should platforms be responsible for user-generated content? If so, under what circumstances? What exactly would responsibility look like? These questions are deeply contested within legal and policy debates…Despite pleas by “Big Tech” to be regulated around speech issues, it has repeatedly sought to push the task back to lawmakers to devise rules and regulations that will respect free speech while protecting consumers from harm, often under the frameworks most favorable to the industry. This strategy also ensures that tech companies can continue to exploit the lack of such constraints to their benefit until new regulations are in place.

Disinfo doesn’t just deceive; it provides permission: supply meets the demand.

Understanding the root problems of information disorder requires understanding hard-wired human behaviors, economic and political policy, group psychology and ideologies, and the relationship to people’s sense of individual and community identity…One of the most challenging aspects of addressing information disorder is confronting the reality that “disinformation” and information campaigns by bad actors don’t magically create bigotry, misogyny, racism, or intolerance — instead, such efforts are often about giving readers and consumers permission to believe things they were already predisposed to believe. There is a “demand” for disinformation (amplified and driven by product designs, to be sure), but reckoning with our problems online will require taking a hard look at our society offline.

The platforms’ lack of transparency is hampering solutions.

Over a century ago, Justice Louis Brandeis promised that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” and online today, it’s clear we have far too little. Understanding both the behaviors of users, platforms, and algorithms and the resulting impacts of information disorder requires much more data. Critical research on disinformation — whether it be the efficacy of digital ads or the various online content moderation policies — is undercut by a lack of access to data and processes. This includes information regarding what messages are shared at scale and by whom, whether they are paid, and how they are targeted.

Online incentives drive ad revenue, not better public discourse.

[Targeted programmatic advertising] has proven fantastically profitable, and tech companies like Google and Facebook sit at the top of Wall Street markets, richly rewarded for their ability to translate consumer attention into dollars…Ads are not just about selling toothpaste or better mousetraps either; platform tools have made it possible to amplify content to narrow segments of the population, often for political purposes. Advertising tools provided by platforms can include or exclude specific users, creating a powerful, unaccountable, and often untraceable method of targeting misinformation.

Broken norms allow bad actors to flourish.

One of the most difficult areas to address in an American context is today’s shifting norms around falsehoods and misrepresentation of facts among prominent public figures. Politicians, CEOS, news anchors, talk radio hosts, and professionals can abuse their prominent roles and high degrees of reach for both personal and partisan gain. This trend is exacerbated by a political and business environment that offers fewer and fewer consequences for these actions. In short, in the public and business sphere at least, leaders have had to contend with the risk that they would be punished and distrusted by voters or consumers if caught in a lie. Today, though, they’re increasingly celebrated for their lies and mistruths — and punished, politically, for not ascribing to others’ falsehoods.

Local media has withered, while cable and digital are unaccountable.

A free and democratic society requires access to robust, independent, and trustworthy media institutions. The distrust we see today, which fluctuates across types of media, and different groups, has been decades in the making, for varied, well-documented reasons-from the decline of quality reporting in the face of the collapse of traditional economic models, to the rise of partisan or bad faith publishers at the national and local level, to the failures or reporting in the lead up to war, to a lack of diversity in newsrooms that may result in misrepresentation of the experiences of Black and other minority communities.