Last month, two hours after a car rammed into dozens of football fans in Liverpool, England, local police released the age, ethnicity, and nationality of the driver and quickly stated the incident was not a terrorist act. The speed of the disclosure was unprecedented. Learning from a nearby incident last summer, authorities moved to quell misinformation as quickly as possible. But until policymakers look at the information ecosystem where rumors and falsehoods exist, they’ll never be able to address the underlying causes that make the phenomenon start fires.

In July 2024, a day after several girls were stabbed outside a dance studio in Southport, riots erupted in the city and subsequently spread across the United Kingdom. The unrest was sparked by false information circulating online that the attacker was a migrant and a Muslim. In one claim published on social media three hours after the incident, a local man blamed the murders on a “migrant.” That post was picked up by a website in India and reshared by far-right influencers, which then many believed fueled the riots.

But misinformation wasn’t occurring in a void, and factors in the British information ecosystem have been changing. 

In years leading up to the riots, the country’s demographics have shifted. An influx of new people has arrived in the country. Literacy rates have dropped, while more and more technology has been introduced into the ecosystem, accelerating the processing and sharing of information. With those tools, outputs are changing: Local news is collapsing, while national tabloids have spent the past decade fanning fears over migration and stoking perceived grievances. The surrounding conditions are just as bleak, with an economic downturn and declining social services. In other words, the climate is welcoming for misinformation, be it spread by domestic or foreign actors.

As I discuss in my new book, The Information Animal, these shifts—in populations, in how we process information, and in the content we create from that information—have occurred in information ecosystems throughout history. Often these changes precede an “information competition,” where two communities joust to have their worldview adopted by the wider public—something that is already happening in the United Kingdom and that helped spark the Southport riots. In this information competition, a community in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, including those who own the technology used to spread misinformation about the incident, believes itself to be in a fight against progressive ideas threatening its conservative values. And members of that community see attempts to counter misinformation as part of that competition, adding further fuel to the fire.

Rushing to stamp out sparks makes sense. But policymakers need to prevent those sparks in the first place by assessing the surrounding information ecosystem with the aim of understanding what factors within it are creating conditions that make misinformation catch fire. In so doing, they can also begin to identify what might make their information ecosystem more resilient going forward.

This process begins by assessing factors related to core elements of information ecosystems and the conditions affecting them. This involves answer questions such as: Who are the people in an information ecosystem? What communities do they form around which languages, and where? What is their capacity for assessing information? What changes—such as economic or demographic—in their ecosystem might be impacting their decisions? Where do these communities get their information? What technologies and services are they using to access it? Who controls that information or those tools? And perhaps most importantly, how do these factors interrelate with each other?

This may seem complex, but it can readily be achieved by connecting experts already assessing these factors. To date, most of these measurements are happening in silos, across different disciplines and organizations. They simply need to be brought together. In many ways, figuring out how an information ecosystem works—and changes—is about structuring existing research, with each type of analysis building on others. These are the building blocks of information ecology, a field capable of unlocking the mysteries of the information environment and untangling problems like misinformation. To support this development, British policymakers should mandate a coordinating body to identify existing measurements of factors and build a team of researchers to collectively assess the national information ecosystem. This would provide a baseline against which future change could be tracked and identify gaps in knowledge that must be filled to fully understand the state of the British information ecosystem.

But building the information ecology field isn’t just important for the sake of research. Information ecology can address real problems, including ones the UK faces.

By taking a systems approach, British policymakers can develop a road map, identify who needs to be at the table for whole-of-society approaches, and create frameworks for better coordination between those groups.

Assessing national information ecosystems can also identify vulnerabilities, surfacing those that aren’t as obvious or receiving as much media attention as others—but could be more pressing. These could include overreliance on a particular service provider, such as a social media platform, or a gap in a fundamental skill, such as literacy.

Taking a systems approach will ultimately help identify what constitutes resilience or health in an information ecosystem, and if this work is done in tandem with other like-minded countries, the United Kingdom could become a leader in building an understanding of the global information environment—a much-needed step for the numerous countries around the world struggling with the perils of misinformation or threats of foreign interference alike.