Alicia Wanless is the director of the Information Environment Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which aims to foster evidence-based policymaking for the governance of the information environment. Alicia is the author of The Information Animal: Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality.
As part of her work at Carnegie, Alicia is developing the Institute for Research on the Information Environment, a multinational, multistakeholder research facility. Alicia created a multistakeholder network in partnership with the G7 Rapid Response Network to support information integrity efforts in Ukraine. Alicia was a technical advisor to Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder and is a founding member of its Global Cybersecurity Group. She is also an expert advisor to the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety. Alicia is a visiting researcher at the Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour in the University of Bath's School of Management. At King’s College London in War Studies, she completed her PhD combining strategic theory and ecology in a new approach to understanding conflict within the information environment.
Informed policy that leads to beneficial change is extremely challenging to develop without being able to measure the material impacts of GenAI.
Disinformation is one problem among many in the information environment. It’s also one that is extremely challenging to do anything about.
What does Prussian naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt have to do with cybersecurity?
Calls grow louder to regulate artificial intelligence, counter disinformation, and social media. But how can democracies govern the information environment if they don’t know how it affects people’s thinking and behaviour?
From COVID-19 misinformation to authoritarian crackdowns on democratic protests or hybrid warfare involving information manipulation, the negative impacts that crises have on the information environment can be challenging to reverse, threatening the physical safety of civilians and the democratic stability of societies.
A discussion on the links between information and technology, information competition through history, the need for a better understanding of information ecosystems, whether we’re in an information “civil war,” and much else besides.
A conversation about whether disinformation is something people can even fight and what it might end up costing.
The lines between fact and fiction have become easier to blur as new technologies create wild ecosystems of data.
Three criteria can help democratic governments assess whether an influence operation is acceptable or unacceptable.
The war on “disinformation” skates over important question: What are the collateral effects of anti-disinformation policies? How do interventions against information pollution operate in the real world?
