Global Survey Shows Social Media Owners And Governments As Biggest Threats To Misinformation Spreading Online
According to an expert group which studied misinformation, social media owners, politicians, and governments are the biggest threats to maintaining an honest and truthful online news environment. The work of the group has been modeled on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) stated that “owners of social media platforms topped a survey of concerns, followed by domestic and foreign governments and politicians,” according to the Guardian.
“The report showed the global information environment was at a critical juncture,” the IPIE’s co-founder Philip Howard said.
“One of the most pressing concerns highlighted by our survey is the influence of social media platform owners. Their control over content distribution and moderation policies significantly impacts the quality and integrity of information. The unchecked power of these entities poses a grave risk to the health of our global information environment,” he said.
The findings were found based on responses from 412 academic researchers across a multitude of fields such as social sciences, humanities, and computer sciences.
The US and western Europe is where a lot of the data came from, with other information coming from China, India, Nigeria, and Brazil.
Howard, a co-author of the report, said “Elon Musk’s ownership of X – the platform formerly known as Twitter – had raised concerns including reports of excessive promotion of Musk’s own tweets, while Frances Haugen, a whistleblower at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has claimed that the owner of Facebook and Instagram gives a lower priority to moderating non-English-language content,” according to the Guardian.
Howard also said that “TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, was another source of concern after lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic voiced fears it could be susceptible to pressure from the Chinese government.”
The report stated that politicians are “instrumental” in the spreading of conspiracy theories and misinformation for their own political gain.
Additionally, around two-thirds of the experts involved stated that AI generated material has caused misinformation to become an even greater issue.
“Generative AI tools have offered novel opportunities to produce propaganda at scale,” the report said.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
