Who do you trust or: the return of the gatekeeper
Welcome to the tenth issue of my monthly newsletter
I'll be sharing analysis and short stories about digital transformation, practical recommendations, or recommended reading on this platform.
This time, let’s talk about the trust in media and the role of digital platforms and AI in informing – or disinforming – the public. One of the key challenges for democratic societies will be to figure out how to maintain free speech but also create the framework conditions for an informed political discourse.
Please enjoy!
This year has already seen countless elections in some of the most populated and conflict-prone countries and people around the world are anxiously looking to the USA for their upcoming and contested presidential election this November. With so many elections going on this year whilst artificial intelligence and especially freely available tools for generative AI are spreading and maturing, worries about the adverse effects of this technology on democratic processes run high.
This was also evident at a recent EPFL conference I was able to attend and where I moderated the first panel. While the scarce available research makes the case for looking beyond technology and simplistic fears driven by AI, it seems clear to many experts that disinformation is a pressing issue and that AI lowers the barriers yet again. Generative AI not only allows for faster content creation in all media forms at lower cost by more actors, other aspects of AI also shouldn’t be neglected. Automation makes it cheaper and easier to create fake accounts at scale and machine-learning systems are also impacting what we are seeing as they are used in the recommender systems that create our timelines and rank our search results.
What the discussion boils down to is a consensus that trust in institutions and especially media is a key factor for a resilient society that is able to handle “flooding the zone” and can drown out noise in favor of information. Nobody wants a “Ministry of Truth”, however tempting such policy proposals might sound, so the answer to turbocharged misinformation due to AI lies more on the demand side – i.e. media literate users – than the supply side.
Nevertheless, it seems important to understand how we ended up here as this might help us to work towards a better infosphere. Traditional media once enjoyed a position as gatekeeper of information together with other institutions like governments and universities. The internet broke up this monopoly and allowed for much freer and less controlled flow of information, flipping the game. Where once newspapers and their correspondents battled for speed and data points, the new challenge isn’t being fast: the internet and social media took care of that. The real challenge now in an age of information abundance is putting data into context and creating insights. You don’t need to get it first; you need to get it right.
But in line with a changing environment, the way we consume and interact with news has also changed, creating difficulties for established actors to engage in particular with younger audiences, see e.g this report by the Reuters Institute.
Feeling constrained, seeing better chances with social media or simply falling out of favor with previous employers, journalists, activists, and content creators are opting for newer digital platforms as their channels. Think of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon switching to X, formerly known as Twitter or the rise (and fall) of alternative media like InfoWars.
As I pointed out earlier, the supposed dismantling of gatekeepers is for the most part an illusion as the platform intermediating our access to information have themselves become gatekeepers. Arguably, the importance of these gatekeepers and their AI systems for curation will only grow as we are drowning in ever more content, a dynamic nicely captured in the book Automated Democracy.
Looking at the incentives that drive those platforms makes it clear, that they have no inherent interest in holding themselves to high journalistic standards. The ad-driven business model prefers engagement and interaction which in turn is most clearly achieved by appealing to emotions leading to a never-ending cycle of spreading viral posts and capitalizing on the reactions they spark, often amplified by traditional media that themselves try to catch at least some of the remaining online ad-revenue and attention.
That this dynamic can easily be abused for disinformation has been shown just this year by the uncovering of the Doppelganger campaign in Europe or the bought influencer network in the USA.
In addition to the incentive structure for digital platforms, their owners are a source of concern as well from the perspective of disinformation. Financially in a position to ignore at least some pressure from advertisers (while happily taking money from foreign states), experts worry about the outsized impact on public discourse individual figures like Elon Musk can have. While he often declares himself a free speech advocate, his actions (and inactions) paint a very different picture.
And so, maybe a first step towards a better infosphere would be to acknowledge that we do have gatekeepers for our information instead of pretending that we are all exposed to the same unbiased information and drawing our own conclusions. Consequently, we should apply the same critical standard to digital platforms that we used to judge traditional media and other information institutions. We should ask, who deserves our trust instead of simply falling for easy slogans and retreating to tribalism, selective news consumption and confirmation bias. Yes, previous gatekeepers might have abused our trust but the new ones first need to earn it.
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