From Resilient Information Ecosystem towards Resilient Democracy

On 8 April 2024 the Bertelsmann Foundation and Globsec hosted an event in Brussels entitled “From Resilient Information Ecosystem towards Resilient Democracy”. The primary aim of this gathering (by invitation only, under Chatham House rules) was to canvass and discuss key challenges and lessons learned for the next EU Commission. I delivered a talk in the session “When the Government Sleeps: Effective non-governmental approaches” in which I focused on how research and cooperation as well as the use of new technologies can contribute to the above aims, and what all this means for (public service) media. Participants invited to attend the event came from NGOs, the policy sector, industry and civil society, among others. Using my notes, I have tried to put together in writing some of what I talked about at the event at which I spoke primarily as a representative of the vera.ai project.

Below is an edited version of my contribution that has been compiled using my notes.

To start with, allow me to point out that as someone working for a (public service media) news media organization, this also means that I act within that space and its contexts.

In our case at Deutsche Welle (DW), we are in the business of information production and dissemination, aiming to contribute to an informed public in our target regions worldwide, reporting about events, canvassing perspectives and supporting values such as free speech, democracy, human rights and such like.

All this hasn’t gotten easier in the past years. In other words: it is in permanent transition and requires constant change and adaptation.

One such adaptation concerns the domain disinformation and fact-checking:

We, too, have established a fact-checking unit at DW. It works in a similar way and with similar approaches like

• what colleagues are doing organized under the EDMO umbrella,
• signatories of the EFCSN or IFCN,
• what colleagues do in other media organisations, be they publicly or commercially organised.

One could also argue that our daily journalistic business revolves around fact-checking and reporting as accurately as possible – as we are doing so all the time – also outside the work of the dedicated factchecking unit.

Next, let me zoom out a bit and allow me to turn to some of the bigger challenges faced by media organisations.

The journalistic business in general – and so-called legacy media in particular – have faced serious challenges in recent years. These include, but are not limited to

• Loss of trust and acceptance among certain groups (here it is worth stating that trust in media is usually higher than trust in content on social media – see e.g. the Reuters Digital News Reports);
• Fragmentation of audiences – and with it societies;
• Financial aspects (declining revenues, be this from advertising, license fees, subscription etc.);
• Competition issues (for audience time and money), especially from “newish digital players”;
• Advances in technological development, and the disruption caused by it (currently in everyone’s mouth: Artificial Intelligence – in short AI!)

Next, I want to briefly focus on this last aspect in particular, namely how to keep pace with technological advancements and try to stay on top of things, and utilize tech to the benefit of what news media organisations do: journalistic reporting, and do so as accurately as possible, also countering disinformation.

One way of trying to achieve this – generally – at DW over the past decades has been to actively participate in future looking Research & Development projects and initiatives.

The overall approach is simple:

• participate,
• develop and investigate,
• learn,
• fail, or ideally succeed,
• and possibly try again

Important to stress: we do so together in cooperation, with partners from all sectors and domains, often in an international context.

Ideally, as much as possible from all this work is fed into day-to-day operations of the organisation. This can be in the form of

• know-how,
• learnings and insights,
• prototypes,
• software code

and such like.

One such project in which we are currently doing all this is vera.ai. Its over-arching topic is using AI to analyse information and support in detecting disinformation. vera.ai builds on work that has been done in “forerunner projects” InVID and WeVerify.

This brings me straight to learning or message no. 1: often, a “long breath is needed”. Hence it is important, in my view, to have time and resources available also beyond individual project’s runtime. And be able to also build on successes and achievements if they exist.

Topically, as indicated before, one primary aim of vera.ai is to develop tools and services that support in disinformation detection. Especially the project’s researchers face a number of challenges in this field. A key issue here is access to data!

Making platform data available for research has featured in numerous calls to action and is addressed again and again. Among others, it also features in the 2022 Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation.

Subsequently, my message no. 2 is: if we are really serious about doing everything possible to a) better understand and b) combat disinformation, platforms need to do more and make access to data for researchers a reality.

And finally I want to address again the topic of cooperation.

I think cooperation is key!

• Cooperation between those who have and commit to certain values and belief systems (such as those who stand for democratic, pluralistic societies);
• Cooperation between different sectors (e.g. industry, academia and the public sector);
• Cooperation within individual sectors, (i.e. to avoid reinventing the wheel);
• Cooperation inside individual organisations: in our case at DW this means working closely together with e.g. our editorial factchecking unit:
  • involving them whenever possible in e.g. requirements gathering and the evaluation of tools and services;
  • feeding them with R&D outcomes.

So my message no. 3 is: Those who can support and foster cooperation (such as the EC):

• Please start doing so or continue to do so and make entry barriers as low as possible;
• Do not forget about sustainability, i.e. try everything possible in order for project results living on once a project ends (if there have been successes worth pursuing).

For organizations themselves I encourage them to not shy away from cooperation, sharing work, insights and experiences. While it can certainly be cumbersome and painful at times, there are so many benefits involved, some of them intangible and not always visible at first sight.

*****

Finally, and if I am allowed a more general statement on ways ahead regarding the bigger topic of dealing with disinformation and the role of the media: I am very much in favour of enhancing trust in reliable sources (this includes quality media that adhere to certain professional standards and ethical norms) over fostering distrust in unreliable sources. The reasoning behind it: interventions aimed at reducing the acceptance of misinformation are likely to have smaller effects than interventions increasing trust in reliable sources of information (for more on this this see e.g., the work of scholars like Acerb et al. (2022) , Altay et al. (2023) and Altay et al. (2022)).

Regarding avenues of future (social sciences) research in the domain, it may be worth to consider the following: Instead of focusing on the (comparatively small-ish) number of people who consume news from unreliable sources, it might be more fruitful to focus on the large share of people who are overly skeptical of reliable sources and rarely consume any news at all. (For more see e.g., Allen et al. (2020); Reuters Institute Digital News Reports (various years)).