Sebastián Valenzuela: “Access to quality information is more complex today than it was before”

At the Nobel Prize Summit 2023, the principal investigator of the Millennium Nucleus on Digital Inequalities and Opportunities (NUDOS) and the Millennium Institute Foundations of Data (IMFD) participated in the launch of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), an organization where the UC academic heads the methodological unit.

The latest version of the Nobel Prize Summit was held in May and this time the summit focused on installing the debate on the importance of combating disinformation and restoring confidence in science. “How can we build trust in truth, facts and scientific evidence in order to have a more hopeful future for all?” was the question discussed by Nobel Laureates, scientists, business leaders and youth at the 2023 version of the event.

One of the guests was UC academic and senior researcher at NUDOS and IMFD, Sebastián Valenzuela, who was part of the official launch of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), a new independent global organization that seeks to gather scientific evidence regarding threats to the world’s information environment.

What is the International Panel on the Information Environment?

It is an international consortium of scientists and academics who are concerned about the various threats to the information environment worldwide. Access to quality information is more complex today than it was before, there are more actors producing misinformation or false information, toxic hate speeches are more popular and more visible, contaminating the information context in which we operate. So we know that there are all these threats, but it has been difficult for us to gauge their impact and how to deal with them.

In this sense, what is the contribution that you intend to make through the IPIE?

We believe that this consortium can synthesize in a global way the scientific evidence on these different elements with the aim of being able, on the one hand, to be a center that synthesizes this information, but also to transfer it to public policy makers and tell them “look, this is the evidence we have on how this works so that when you make regulatory decisions you have an empirical basis on which to operate”.

This empirical base is today disorganized, it is not ordered, it is difficult to access and even academics themselves often do not know, for example, how much is known about something and how much is not known, so we also want to try to support or shed light on where worldwide research on these issues should go, what are the things we still need to know because without a good diagnosis, very bad remedies can be produced.

When were you invited to join this organization?

In 2022, after the ICA (International Communication Association) of that year, Philip Howard – one of the managers of this initiative – contacted me directly, he wrote to me and told me that he was creating this international panel on the information environment, that I was interested in participating and that he was contacting many academics on this topic. I told him that I had already been investigating disinformation issues for quite some time, that I thought it was a great initiative and that he could count on me. Soon after, he formally invited me to take charge of the methodological unit within IPIE, which was going to be very important at the beginning because I was going to try to organize a little bit how we could carry out the work, what kind of work to do, etcetera. I will probably continue working for one or two more years in my current position, but then I will simply become a member because the idea is that there will also be rotation.

URGENT TASKS: MISINFORMATION, IA AND ALGORITHMIC BIASES

The IPIE was conceived as an idea at the Nobel Prize Summit 2021 and since that time has been organized independently by researchers around the world. Sebastian Valenzuela was convened in 2022 to chair the IPIE scientific panel.

What work have you done as chairman of the scientific panel?

What we have been doing in this first stage is to commission certain studies that we considered very important to do. One was a systematic review of the literature on disinformation and social networks. We did an analysis of almost 5,000 articles that have been published in Scopus and Web of Science, in indexed journals, on how to combat disinformation in digital terms. Parallel to that we also commissioned a meta-analysis, that is, a purely quantitative analysis, which compiles the same studies that we analyzed qualitatively and extracts what is the effect of studies to reduce disinformation. The third issue we commissioned was an exercise that mixes quantitative and qualitative. It is a global survey of all the world’s information experts. For this we formed a database of all academics who have published anything on disinformation in the last eight years and contacted them for the survey. The questions were aimed at finding out what threats they see in their respective countries, the information environment in which they live, what solutions they think could be adopted, and so on.

To understand the relevance of an organization like this, what are the main threats generated by disinformation in political and social terms?

Disinformation contributes decisively to polarization and conflict, in addition to causing a terrible loss of confidence in public institutions; and I am not only referring to the government and the state, but also to journalism, justice, science itself. When there is a lot of disinformation, people begin to doubt what is true and what is a lie. When people start to doubt, it also generates distrust towards truthful information: as it is known that disinformation exists, people even doubt the contents that are verified, that are good information.

The problem when a lot of suspicion is generated is that not only does governance becomes more difficult, but we even run the serious risk of making very bad decisions. I have no doubt that disinformation has generated deaths, but how much? It is difficult to quantify this, and the objective we want to achieve is to try to gauge this.

In addition to misinformation, what other lines of research will IPIE have?

One that is very clear has to do with algorithmic biases. We live in a world where platforms are very important in people’s daily lives and these platforms work with algorithms, which although sometimes make the distribution of content more efficient, they also entail and reinforce many social biases. Algorithms are not neutral in terms of race, in terms of stereotyping, in terms of rewarding content that has more viralization, but the problem is that many times what is viralized is toxic content, highly emotional content, and so on. So, one area that needs to be investigated more is algorithmic manipulation, so to speak, because sometimes algorithms are disrupted by agents who want to cause harm.

Another topic that is under consideration is artificial intelligence, although it is still half undefined because we are just thinking about how we are going to deal with it. Finally, another issue that is also on the horizon and in which there are many stakeholders within the consortium is incivility, toxic speech and hate speech.

“I think there are a lot of expectations placed on this, now we have to meet those expectations”, concludes the academic.