How to better study—and then improve—today’s corrupted information environment

 

Social media has been a connector of people near and far, but it has also fueled political conflict, threatened democratic processes, contributed to the spread of public health misinformation, and likely damaged the mental health of some teenagers. Given what’s come to light about these platforms over the last several years, it is increasingly clear that current guardrails—both government regulations and the companies’ internal policies—aren’t sufficient to address the issues plaguing the information environment. But for democracies and their citizens to thrive, a healthy virtual ecosystem is necessary.

To get there, experts need an international effort to link policymakers to research by gathering, summarizing, and distilling relevant research streams. Two such initiatives, the International Panel on the Information Environment and the proposed International Observatory on Information and Democracy, have begun working towards that goal. Both are inspired by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a multinational organization that elects a scientific bureau to conduct evaluations of climate research and create policy recommendations. Since its founding in 1988, the IPCC has firmly established the anthropogenic origin of climate change and provided policy recommendations that formed the basis of two major international agreements, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015. Policymakers and researchers have called for similarly structured efforts to create research-informed, globally coordinated policies on the information environment.

For such efforts to work, though, they have to able to draw on a well-developed research base. The IPCC’s first report, written from 1988 to 1990, capitalized on decades of standardized measurements and research infrastructure, including atmospheric carbon dioxide monitoring, sophisticated measurements from weather balloons and meteorological satellites, and 16 years of satellite imagery of the Earth’s surface.


Experts simply don’t have that kind of depth of evidence on the information environment. There is little consilience in theoretical arguments about how this ecosystem works, and standardized measurements and research tooling are nearly non-existent. For an IPCC-style body on the information environment to reach its full potential, governments and other entities need to make substantial investments in data access, standardized measurements, and research tooling.

To examine what those investments should look like, it’s helpful to outline the current state of research on the information environment and the challenges of performing high-quality science under the current status quo.

The state of the information environment research. Our team conducted a survey of work published from 2017 until 2021 in 10 leading communications, economics, political science, computer science, and sociology journals, plus six major general-interest science research publications. We found that research is concentrated on two major social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter (now X).

Researchers could provide more reliable policy if they were able to characterize the entire information ecosystem. Our sample of relevant academic work, however, found that 49 percent of the papers used Twitter data exclusively, and 59 percent used it in some form, despite its relatively small base of 436 million monthly active users in 2021. Major platforms with large global user bases—including YouTube, WeChat, and Telegram—remain critically understudied. While there were approximately 22.4 and 1.4 published papers per 100 million active users for Twitter and Facebook respectively, YouTube, WeChat, and Telegram attracted far less research despite their substantial userbases. Some 2.3 billion people actively use YouTube each month. And WeChat and Telegram have 1.3 billion and 550 million active monthly users respectively.

Beyond limited platform coverage, existing research is also geographically and linguistically limited. Sixty-five percent of papers analyze only a Western democracy (the United States, EU countries, the United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand), more than half of which exclusively study the United States. Additionally, 60 percent of papers analyze only English-language data. This means the most populated regions of the world are the least-studied, indicating a severe need to enable research in and on Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In numerical terms, there were 27.22 papers per 100 million population in our sample focused exclusively on the United States, the European Union, and Oceania (mostly Australia and New Zealand), while the entire rest of the world is represented by only 1.39 papers per 100 million inhabitants.