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?

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 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? 

It’s time to look at the problem differently. Those attempting to address the issue should move away from attempts to regulate disinformation and toward the ecology of the information environment more generally.

For nearly seventy years, CERN has been a center of gravity for physics and a model for how to support large-scale research collaboration across numerous different countries. Given the challenges facing democracy today related to the information environment, a similar level of effort is required for research on the information environment.