The online information environment

How are digital technologies changing the way people interact with information? What technologies are there that can fabricate and detect misinformation? And what role does technology have to play in creating a better information environment?

The online information environment (PDF) report, published in 2022, addresses these questions, providing an overview of how the internet has changed, and continues to change, the way society engages with scientific information, and how it may be affecting people’s decision-making behaviour – from taking up vaccines to responding to evidence on climate change. It highlights key challenges for creating a healthy online information environment and makes a series of recommendations for policymakers, academics, and online platforms.

How are digital technologies shaping the information people encounter?

Patterns of information consumption are changing: individuals increasingly look to the online environment for news, and search engines and social media platforms play an increasingly important role in shaping access to information and participation in public debates. New technologies and uses of data are shaping this online information environment, whether through micro-targeting, filter bubbles, or sophisticated synthetic text, videos and images.

These technologies have great potential and are already being deployed in a range of contexts from entertainment through to education. At the same time, there are increasing concerns about new forms of online harm and erosion of trust that these could enable.

The report highlights how online misinformation on scientific issues, like climate change or vaccine safety, can harm individuals and society. It stresses that censoring or removing inaccurate, misleading and false content, whether it’s shared unwittingly or deliberately, is not a silver bullet and may undermine the scientific process and public trust. Instead, there needs to be a focus on building resilience against harmful misinformation across the population and the promotion of a “healthy” online information environment.

Key recommendations from the report:

• As part of its online harms strategy, the UK Government must combat misinformation which risk societal harm as well as personalised harm, especially when it comes to a healthy environment for scientific communication
• Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal as a solution to online scientific misinformation
• To support the UK’s nascent fact-checking sector, programmes which foster independence and financial sustainability are necessary. To help address complex scientific misinformation content and ‘information deserts’, fact checkers could highlight areas of growing scepticism or dispute, for deeper consideration by organisations with strong records in carrying out evidence reviews, such as the UK’s national academies and learned societies
• Ofcom must consider interventions for countering misinformation beyond high-risk, high-reach social media platforms
• Online platforms and scientific authorities should consider designing interventions for countering misinformation on private messaging platforms
• Social media platforms should establish ways to allow independent researchers access to data in a privacy compliant and secure manner
• Focusing solely on the needs of current online platforms risks a repetition of existing problems, as new, underprepared, platforms emerge and gain popularity. To promote standards and guide start ups, interested parties need to collaborate to develop examples of best practice for countering misinformation as well as datasets, tools, software libraries, and standardised benchmarks
• Governments and online platforms should implement policies that support healthy and sustainable media plurality
• The UK Government should invest in lifelong, nationwide, information literacy initiatives
• Academic journals and institutions should continue to work together to enable open access publishing of academic research
• The frameworks governing electronic legal deposit should be reviewed and reformed to allow better access to archived digital content

The full set of the recommendations is available in the report (PDF).

Our current Working Group included Professor Frank Kelly CBE FRS, Professor Michael Bronstein, Dr Vint Cerf ForMemRS, Professor Lilian Edwards, Professor Derek McAuley, Professor Gina Neff, Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt FRS FREng, Professor Melissa Terras.

References:

Anti-vaccine misinformation in the C20th (PDF)

Historic misinformation about water fluoridation (PDF)

The science behind how people navigate the information environment (PDF)

The evidence behind echo chambers and filter bubbles (PDF)

People’s capacity for deepfake detection (PDF)