International Panel on the Information Environment

Last updated
International Panel on the Information Environment
EstablishedDecember 2023 (1 year ago)
Website www.ipie.info  

The International Panel on the Information Environment is an international consortium of over 250 experts [1] from 55 countries dedicated to providing actionable scientific knowledge on threats to our information landscape. The IPIE has said it is modeled after and learning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [2] The concept was officially proposed in a 2021 virtual meeting by Dr. Sheldon Himelfarb, then President and CEO of PeaceTech Lab, [3] and Professor Philip Howard, Professor at Oxford University and then Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, during the first Nobel Prize Summit organized by the US National Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. [4]

Contents

Himmelfarb and Howard (2021) reported several motivations for launching IPIE including the following:

IPIE was legally registered in Switzerland in 2023. [5]

Management

Sheldon Himelfarb is co-founder and chair of the IPIE. [6] The proposal for the IPIE grew in-part out of his work as Founder and CEO of PeaceTech Lab, [7] which itself had been spun out of his work as the Director of the Center of Innovation at the United States Institute of Peace. [8] One of Himelfarb's publications is the 2011 US Institute of Peace publication on, "Evaluating media interventions in conflict countries: Toward developing common principles and a community of practice". [9]

The CEO of IPIE is Dr. Philip N. Howard, [10] who is also the director of Oxford University's Programme on Democracy and Technology. [11] Some of his related research is summarized in his 2020 book, Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives. [12]

Jenny Woods is the Executive Director and COO of the IPIE. [13]

Official launch

In May 2023 the IPIE was officially introduced during the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit. [14] The Panel's inaugural announcement said,

Algorithmic bias, manipulation and misinformation has become a global and existential threat that exacerbates existing social problems, degrades public life, cripples humanitarian initiatives and prevents progress on other serious threats.

At the launch, Sheldon Himelfarb said that misinformation is "so far-reaching that it is rapidly becoming an existential threat to the planet." [14]

A New York Times report on the Panel's launch described its initial plans to "issue regular reports, not fact-checking individual falsehoods but rather looking for deeper forces behind the spread of disinformation as a way to guide government policy." [15]

Related Research Articles

Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through attacks that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies."

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Fact-checking is the process of verifying the factual accuracy of questioned reporting and statements. Fact-checking can be conducted before or after the text or content is published or otherwise disseminated. Internal fact-checking is such checking done in-house by the publisher to prevent inaccurate content from being published; when the text is analyzed by a third party, the process is called external fact-checking.

National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) is an Indian non-governmental trade association and advocacy group that primarily serves the Indian technology industry. Founded in 1988, NASSCOM operates as a nonprofit organization and serves as a key entity within the Indian technology sector.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Craig Newmark</span> American entrepreneur, Craigslist founder

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<i>The Epoch Times</i> Far-right media company affiliated with Falun Gong

The Epoch Times is a far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement. The newspaper, based in New York City, is part of the Epoch Media Group, which also operates New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television. The Epoch Times has websites in 35 countries but is blocked in mainland China.

Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. Misinformation can exist without specific malicious intent; disinformation is distinct in that it is deliberately deceptive and propagated. Misinformation can include inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, or false information as well as selective or half-truths.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maria Ressa</span> Filipino and American journalist (born 1963)

Maria Angelita Ressa is a Filipino and American journalist. She is the co-founder and CEO of Rappler. She previously spent nearly two decades working as a lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN. She will become Professor of Professional Practice in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University on July 1, 2024, and has been a Distinguished Fellow at Columbia's new Institute of Global Politics since fall of 2023.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), formerly Brixton Endeavors, is a British not-for-profit NGO company with offices in London and Washington, D.C. with the stated purpose of stopping the spread of online hate speech and disinformation. It campaigns to deplatform people that it believes promote hate or misinformation, and campaigns to restrict media organisations such as The Daily Wire from advertising. CCDH is a member of the Stop Hate For Profit coalition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute for Strategic Dialogue</span> Think tank

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is a political advocacy organization founded in 2006 by Sasha Havlicek and George Weidenfeld and headquartered in London, United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Damian Collins</span> British politician

Damian Noel Thomas Collins is a British Conservative Party politician who formerly served as a junior Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport between July and October 2022. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Folkestone and Hythe since the 2010 general election. From 2016 to 2019, Collins was chair of the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. In 2021, Collins chaired the UK Parliament Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill.

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Philip N. Howard is a sociologist and communication researcher who studies the impact of information technologies on democracy and social inequality. He studies how new information technologies are used in both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. He is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute from March 2018 to March 26, 2021. He is the author of ten books, including New Media Campaigns and The Managed Citizen, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up. His latest book is Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Maher</span> American media executive

Katherine Roberts Maher is an American businesswoman. She is the chief executive officer (CEO) and president of National Public Radio (NPR) since March 2024. Prior to NPR, she was the CEO of Web Summit and chair of the board of directors at the Signal Foundation. She transitioned to the role of non-executive chairperson at Web Summit in March 2024. She is a former chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fake news</span> False or misleading information presented as real

Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term fake news was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common. Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information presented as news. It has also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavorable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text. Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term.

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Disinformation attacks are strategic deception campaigns involving media manipulation and internet manipulation, to disseminate misleading information, aiming to confuse, paralyze, and polarize an audience. Disinformation can be considered an attack when it occurs as an adversarial narrative campaign that weaponizes multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value-laden judgements—to exploit and amplify identity-driven controversies. Disinformation attacks use media manipulation to target broadcast media like state-sponsored TV channels and radios. Due to the increasing use of internet manipulation on social media, they can be considered a cyber threat. Digital tools such as bots, algorithms, and AI technology, along with human agents including influencers, spread and amplify disinformation to micro-target populations on online platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube.

This timeline includes entries on the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. This includes investigations into the origin of COVID-19, and the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 which is caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2. Social media apps and platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Telegram, and YouTube, have contributed to the spread of misinformation. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) reported that conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 began on "day one". CAHN reported on March 16, 2020, that far-right groups in Canada were taking advantage of the climate of anxiety and fear surrounding COVID, to recycle variations of conspiracies from the 1990s, that people had shared over shortwave radio. COVID-19 disinformation is intentional and seeks to create uncertainty and confusion. But most of the misinformation is shared online unintentionally by enthusiastic participants who are politically active.

Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is a not-for-profit organisation based in the United Kingdom which aims to mitigate the spread of disinformation on the internet. The group utilises a system of ratings of news sources and websites to determine risk of disinformation. The group's efforts also include investigations into internet advertising, and the alleged use of disinformation in relation to COVID-19 featured on various websites. The group has faced scrutiny over potential political bias, and has been categorised as a political left think tank by the group AllSides.

References

Notes

  1. IPIE (2024a).
  2. Guardian Nigeria (2023).
  3. Lawton (2021). See also Himelfarb et al. (2021).
  4. National Academies (2023).
  5. Myers (2023).
  6. IPIE (2024c).
  7. Peace Tech Lab (2023b).
  8. Wilson Center (2013).
  9. Arsenault, Himelfarb, and Abbott (2011).
  10. IPIE (2024b).
  11. University of Oxford (2024).
  12. Howard (2020).
  13. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2024-03-28. Retrieved 2024-03-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  14. 1 2 Snyder (2023).
  15. Myers (2023). https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/24/business/researchers-study-misinformation.html Archived 2024-03-05 at the Wayback Machine