IPIE featured by National Academies: Nobel Prize Summit Fuels Initiatives to Combat Misinformation and Disinformation and Build Trust in Science
National Academies | June 22, 2023
An explosion of misinformation and disinformation have weakened public deliberation and undermined confidence in science, even as the world faces interconnecting crises such as war, climate change, and the pandemic and other health emergencies. To take on this “misinfodemic,” the Nobel Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences hosted the Nobel Prize Summit Truth, Trust and Hope, bringing together Nobel Prize laureates, researchers, policymakers, and citizens for an in-depth exploration of how to combat misinformation and build trust in science, scientists, and the institutions they serve.
Held in Washington, D.C., and virtually, the three-day summit in May attracted more than 700 in-person attendees and over 10,000 online participants from more than 70 countries as experts across a range of fields offered insights on the impacts of misinformation and disinformation and proposals for how to combat them.
Over the course of the summit, attendees heard from esteemed speakers such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, who discussed her 10-point plan for combating disinformation and supporting journalism; U.N. Undersecretary for Global Communications Melissa Fleming, who spoke about the U.N.’s efforts to create a central capacity to monitor misinformation and disinformation; and technology ethicist Tristan Harris, who pointed to the need to upgrade society’s institutions to better address long-term cumulative harms from technology. In addition, the summit highlighted several new initiatives and ideas that will be tried and tested in the months ahead.
Speeding research on solutions
The summit was the launching ground for the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), a new global science organization committed to providing actionable scientific knowledge about threats to the world’s information environment. The organization — which was conceived in 2021 during a breakout session at the first Nobel Prize Summit organized by NAS and the Nobel Foundation — is bringing together researchers from around the world and across disciplines to analyze systems of information manipulation and bias, provide neutral assessments on the condition of the global information environment, and evaluate policy solutions for addressing threats to it.
The group has some 200 research scientists from 55 countries in its ranks, said Sheldon Himelfarb, president and CEO of PeaceTech Lab, during the 2023 summit. And it is already producing outcomes. The IPIE did a meta-analysis of over 4,000 scholarly papers about potential solutions, and it found that two measures have consistent positive effects: Flagging content before users go down the rabbit hole into misinformation, and providing the corrections — accurate information — at the moment the user encounters misinformation.
“These are the two most likely operational changes that we could make to social media to improve public understanding of key issues,” said Oxford University professor Philip Howard. The IPIE plans to release soon the results of a global survey of experts about pressing areas for policy action and further research.
In addition, spurred by the summit, the Digital Public Goods Alliance and the United Nations Development Programme teamed up to issue a global call for open-source solutions to combating misinformation and protecting information integrity. After receiving close to 100 submissions, nine were selected to present at the summit. The solutions — submitted from Kenya, France, Brazil, India, and other countries — focused on issues such as combating deepfakes, analyzing online news media, verifying crowdsourced data, and monitoring tech companies’ legal terms and their impact on users.
Building critical-thinking skills
Another new initiative introduced at the summit will focus on strengthening young people’s ability to recognize reliable information and understand how science works to develop it. Scientific Thinking for All: A Toolkit is a new curriculum that offers K-12 students a set of cognitive strategies to navigate real-world issues and to support the development of skills in reasoning and collaboration.
“The collection of approaches to how we can think about problems — the critical thinking, the scientific thinking … we can teach them at all ages,” said 2011 Nobel physics laureate Saul Perlmutter, who led the development of the toolkit. “These are the things that will allow you to ask questions about the world in any area and to make judgments when you are coming across new ideas that you’ll be teaching yourself on the web over your lifetime.”
The course was originally envisioned by Perlmutter, together with his colleagues in the social sciences and philosophy, as an offering for undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science is now adapting the college course to suit a younger audience — an initiative being carried out in cooperation with Nobel Prize Outreach. K-12 teachers have been testing the course this year, and more are currently being recruited to participate in field tests.
Summit attendees also learned about the Smithsonian Science Education Center’s collaborative action research program for high school students focused on sustainability and misinformation. Youth from Argentina, Mexico, South Korea, Mexico, and other countries worked with Nobel Prize laureates and other scientists over the course of three months, culminating in video presentations that were presented during the summit.
Fostering public deliberation
Multiple speakers at the summit pointed out that public policies governing misinformation need to be guided by the public’s values. To that end, the summit included an experiment in “deliberative polling” — a method that could potentially be used to understand public views about online misinformation and use them as input on policy decisions.
In an online session during the summit, over 650 participants from 74 countries joined small group discussions about the pros and cons of various proposals to improve the information environment and counteract misinformation. For example, should social media platforms limit the amount of content that is targeted to individual users based on their past behavior and interests? Should platforms make their data available to researchers and journalists, so that the risks and benefits of social media use can be studied more easily?
The participants deliberated in groups of eight to 12 using a special online platform, taking turns speaking, and they also had a chance to ask questions of subject-matter experts from academia, government, and industry. Participants were polled before and after their deliberations at the summit. While the participants were not a random sample — which limits the conclusions that can be drawn from the polling — the experiment demonstrated how the approach could be used to understand the public’s values and enable people to learn from both experts and other citizens.
“Deliberation, we’ve shown in controlled experiments, reduces extreme partisan polarization and opens up people to listening to the other side,” said James Fishkin of Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab, which ran the exercise. “In that manner, it corrects misinformation and disinformation, and it cools the temperature in the conversation so that people actually can come to informed conclusions.”