CCDH at the United Nations: Fixing the disorder in our information ecosystem
On September 22nd, CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed hosted the UNGA side-event “The Future of Information Integrity and the SDGs” at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. He was joined by experts Melissa Fleming (Under-Secretary-General for UN Global Communications), Anne-Marie Slaughter (CEO of New America), Marla Blow (President of the Skoll Foundation), and Renata Dwan (Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology).
“Whatever policy issue you care about, fixing the disorder in our information ecosystem is integral to the solution.
If you care about climate, then you worry about a tidal wave of climate disinformation designed to undermine the scientific consensus astride which our ecosystem of analysis and solutions sits.
If you care about gender inequality, then you worry that social media algorithms are promoting misogyny and being hijacked to spread disinformation about abortions.
If you care about conflict resolution and peace, then you worry about polarization and amplified hate speech, which make our societies feel less safe, more polarized, sclerotic, and harder to cohere.
So how is this happening?”, asked Imran Ahmed.
Read our CEO Imran Ahmed’s full opening speech:
I want to tell you a story of two revolutions.
The first was the Industrial Revolution, central to which was the carbonization of our economies—which has made our world more productive, prosperous, advanced than ever before.
However, an unintended externality—the slow, steady accrual of CO2—degraded our physical ecosystem, leading to the climate crisis today.
The second, the information revolution, is as profound, but much younger.
The digitization of our economies has also fueled an unparalleled improvement in our lives.
But, yet again, a systemic negative externality – the steady accrual of hate/ lies/ conspiracies in our information ecosystem…
Drip, drip, drip into our eyes.
Poisoning perceptions, cognition…
Leading to an epistemic crisis that today we can see imperils the values that allow open, prosperous societies to cohere and function.
Whatever policy issue you care about, fixing the disorder in our information ecosystem is integral to the solution.
If you care about climate, then you worry about a tidal wave of climate disinformation designed to undermine the scientific consensus astride which our ecosystem of analysis and solutions sits.
If you care about gender inequality, then you worry that social media algorithms are promoting misogyny and being hijacked to spread disinformation about abortions.
If you care about conflict resolution and peace, then you worry about polarization and amplified hate speech, which make our societies feel less safe, more polarized, sclerotic, and harder to cohere.
So how is this happening?
Good information is as vital to the body politic as nutritious food is to our biological bodies.
Consider.
Digital spaces have now become a, if not the, primary locus for a vast array of interpersonal and social – even societal and global – relationships.
They are where we exchange information, where we maintain and create new relationships, transact business, set our social mores – our norms of attitude and behavior – where we negotiate our values, even the corpus of information we call facts.
Take food as a metaphor.
If we handed over global food production to five companies – Meta, Google, Snap, TikTok and X.
Those companies compete by trying to make their food as addictive as possible.
Yes, they use all-natural ingredients.
Natural. Ha. Arsenic is a naturally occurring element. Snake venom is natural. That’s the hate speech and disinformation they include in their “all-natural” foods.
And then these corporations, of course, process these all-natural ingredients to heighten sensory overload, induce the reptilian side of our brain to crave more.
Once you pop… you can’t stop.
Our highly manufactured timelines, designed to addict us, to scare us, to trigger each of us to emotionally react, according to our unique psychology – that they track, evaluate, and monitor constantly.
The content that scares us, that makes us appalled, confused, or enraged – is also the most profitable.
Drip, drip, drip …
Keeping us hooked.
Watching ads.
For the oligarchs in Silicon Valley, this insatiable greed for profit at the expense of our communities, our kids, and our open societies — continues unimpeded.
Imagine that the foods these oligarchs exclusively produce started making neighbors revile each other.
Imagine they were implicated in a genocide in Southeast Asia.
That they caused our little girls to look at their bodies in disgust and whispered in their ears that they should go on a 500 calorie-a-day diet – as we discovered TikTok’s algorithm does to new accounts set up by 13 year old girls.
That it makes women believe that an abortion will render them infertile.
That it makes us believe climate change is a hoax.
That it makes us believe that men and women cannot co-exist with violence and domination characterizing those relationships.
That it makes people live in a waking nightmare in which blood-drinking pedophiles control our government.
That they persuade millions of people that a vaccine that might save their lives would do them harm instead.
And that hundreds of thousands of those people go on to choke to death in ICUs, begging – too late – for the vaccine they had once so feared.
We’d do something.
This is a broken market.
A global market.
That is harming people.
Who are powerless against this small cabal of ultra-wealthy oligarchs who simply do not understand or care about their lives.
This requires global action.
So what can we do?
CCDH’s argument is that we need checks and balances.
That’s it.
Social media has become a rare, uniquely potent, and fundamentally unchecked locus of power in our complex, interwoven world…
In a world in which we have realized institutions need checks and balances… and built our societies in that mold.
Unchecked loci of power are inherently dangerously corruptible.
In fact, our species history suggests that they inevitably, as an iron rule, become corrupted.
Social media has, thanks to US law, and the failure of lawmakers and policymakers around the world, become an unchecked locus of extraordinary power within societies, and particularly in open societies and democracies.
That’s why open societies and democracies need to act with alacrity to apply the principles of open societies to these platforms.
Those values of open societies are at the heart of our STAR Framework – counterhate.com/star
Transparency. A core democratic value.
Accountability. A core institutional value in democracies.
And Responsibility for dealing with harms not just placed on the victims but on the perpetrator. A core value of justice, of US jurisprudence too.
Through transparency of algorithms, rules enforcement, commercial advertising, we create informed discourse that allows for meaningful accountability and then markets and regulators can step into patiently, cautiously and judiciously address the most egregious and harmful market-regulatory failures.
This is a personal battle for me and many of our staff.
Growing up, my grandfather would tell me about Afghanistan, our home country, and how rapidly it descended from having women in government to becoming a failed state.
All people die. All civilizations fall.
All come from dust… and to dust shall return.
It can happen quickly.
I began to feel the ground shake under my own feet in Britain when I worked as a senior advisor in Parliament.
First, in the wake of Brexit and its rampant disinformation campaigns
Second, in the explosion of antisemitism in my own Labour Party
Third – and most painfully — in the brutal murder of Jo Cox, Member of Parliament and mother of two, who was shot, beaten and stabbed to death by a member of Britain’s far right who had been radicalized online.
In every election cycle since then, across the democratic world, we have realized that none of us are immune to the repercussions of accelerated hate, lies and conspiracy
That these are not just online problems
Social media companies have only given us a perennial reminder:
That the spaces which shape our ideas, our values, and our relationships have always been essential to the integrity of our open societies, to the safety of our communities, and to the enlightenment values of science, tolerance and democracy.
I mentioned that my work is rooted in grief – that is true. But I am also optimistic we will win, and that is mainly thanks to the people in this room, and on our panel.
From civil society, to government, to multilaterals, to philanthropy, we are seeing the seeds of bold, creative, urgent action taking shape.
The United Nations, which more than 40 years ago elevated the climate crisis to a place of global concern, is now doing the same for information integrity under the leadership of USG for Comms, Melissa Fleming, the Special Envoy for Technology and his advisor, Renata Dwan.
The Skoll Foundation, one of the world’s most well-known philanthropies, has now elevated information integrity to a grantmaking portfolio of its own, providing cutting-edge support for our growing movement, bringing some of the sharpest, brightest minds to work for our cause
Anne Marie Slaughter has brought the issues of disinformation, state weaponization of digital lies and hate, and its impact on democracy and global peace, to Washington’s power elites, broadcast studios and the most influential policy spaces in the world.
What a formidable panel – and all too short a time for such an important discussion. Which is why we must continue this discussion in the weeks and months ahead.
For the funders in the room: I want to celebrate you for being here today – and to challenge you to think strategically about information integrity, which affects every element of your portfolios but doesn’t normally have a home of its own.
For the civil society organizations in the room, I want to make a call for partnership: to speak to us about how we can strengthen this social movement and finish the job of systemic reform…
For the UN professionals in this room this is the fight of our times. Before we can fix the interlocking, dovetailing crises that affect our world, we need to end the disorder in our information ecosystem.
Elevating this issue as a parallel issue to climate, food, peace, disease and all the other crucial issues you address is essential.
For everyone in this room we are all victims, and yet we in this room also have loud voices, deep pockets, and real power.
Which is why we must have a unique responsibility to be the solution.
All problems, no matter how big, are solved bit by bit.
With endeavor, energy, intention…
I ask no more of you than this.
Let us each do our bit.