In June 2024, the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) introduced the UN Global Principles For Information Integrity, a framework designed to guide multistakeholder action toward establishing a healthy information ecosystem. These Global Principles are built on the ideas from Our Common Agenda report and the UNSG’s Policy Brief 8 titled ‘Information Integrity on Digital Platforms’. Calling attention to the severe threat posed by disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech to international peace and security, human rights, and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Secretary-General described strengthening information integrity as “one of the most urgent challenges of our time.”
This came close on the heels of the UN Summit of the Future which produced the Pact for the Future, which lays out a vision for multilateral cooperation across a range of global issues, including information integrity. The Global Principles are expected to guide the Member States’ efforts to promote information integrity, tolerance, and respect in the digital space as envisioned by the Global Digital Compact, an annex to the Pact.
“It’s very hard to have a democratic society if people can’t believe the things that they see and hear with their own eyes.” This telling remark by Robert Weissman, copresident of Public Citizen, sums up the crisis of today’s information ecosystem. Our public discourse is increasingly mediated by profit-driven digital platforms and their algorithms, often prioritizing falsehoods, sensationalism, and populist narratives over truth and democracy. Disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech have become some of the core features of social media platforms. However, the collusion of the governments and platform companies means that any regulatory response to address these is applied selectively and to serve the interests of those in power. With our information diet being influenced, and constrained by algorithms, profit motives of platform companies, and governmental priorities, our capacity as citizens to participate in public discourse and democratic deliberations in a critical and agentic manner is at stake.
Are the UN Global Principles equipped to address these structural issues?
Pluralistic Media, Public Empowerment, And Incentive Structures
‘Information integrity’ is a highly contested term. The Global Principles define it as entailing “a pluralistic information space that champions human rights, peaceful societies, and a sustainable future.” This contrasts with the narrow definition in the UNSG Common Agenda Policy Brief, which focuses on “the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of information.” Critics have pointed out that this limited view overemphasizes individual pieces of information while neglecting the broader ecosystem of actors and the economic, political, and social factors that shape the production, legitimization, dissemination, and consumption of information. Further, a parochial focus on accuracy and reliability also risks the goal of information integrity being co-opted for ‘centralized and illegitimate state control over permissible digital content.’
By emphasizing pluralism, trust, knowledge, and individual choice in the information space, the definition of information integrity given by the Global Principles highlights the need to empower people to exercise their rights to seek, receive, and share information freely, form opinions without interference, and navigate the digital environment safely with privacy and freedom.
By emphasizing pluralism, trust, knowledge, and individual choice in the information space, the definition of information integrity given by the Global Principles highlights the need to empower people to exercise their rights to seek, receive, and share information freely, form opinions without interference, and navigate the digital environment safely with privacy and freedom. This signifies a broadening of the understanding of information integrity than previous definitional attempts. This can pave the way for a more holistic assessment of the challenges in today’s information landscape by not only looking at individual units of information, but also the wider economic, social, political, and technological factors that shape the structure and multidirectional flow of information today. The definition is also broad enough to address challenges across the entire communication cycle. This includes not just imparting and receiving information, which often becomes the sole concern of information integrity debates, but also the ability of individuals to engage with information shared, express their own opinions, and be understood by others.
The inextricable linkage that UNSG makes between strengthening information integrity and achieving SDGs sets the context for the framework that the Global Principles put forth to address the issue.
The framework outlines five principles for enhancing information integrity:
(i) Societal trust and resilience
(ii) Independent, free, and pluralistic media
(iii) Transparency and research
(iv) Public empowerment
(v) Healthy incentives
These principles correspond to some of the key challenges posed to the concept of ‘information as a public good’ by the platform-driven, algorithmically mediated information spaces.
Digital platforms and their algorithms have reshaped the public sphere by prioritizing engagement over accuracy for their profit motives. This has led to the widespread consumption and production of misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech. This risks deepening societal divides and eroding trust in democratic processes. Although these platforms seem to offer freedom of expression, they subtly manipulate user choices through algorithms that reward sensationalism and harmful content. Traditional media, struggling to adapt, has compromised fairness and accuracy to fit the attention-grabbing logic of these platforms.
The dominance of companies like Facebook and Google in advertising has further weakened the financial stability of independent journalism, adversely affecting local media. Moreover, the lack of transparency around how these platforms and their algorithms operate hinders efforts to combat disinformation.
The dominance of companies like Facebook and Google in advertising has further weakened the financial stability of independent journalism, adversely affecting local media. Moreover, the lack of transparency around how these platforms and their algorithms operate hinders efforts to combat disinformation. Meta’s recent shutdown of its CrowdTangle tool has raised concerns about researchers’ access to essential data on these issues. CrowdTangle was a popular social media monitoring tool used to track misinformation on Facebook and Instagram and analyze social media trends.
To address these challenges, the Global Principles offer recommendations to a range of stakeholders—including technology companies, AI actors, advertisers, news media, governments, and the UN—on operationalizing the five principles. Some of the noteworthy recommendations include exhorting the platforms to re-evaluate their business models that incentivize harmful content and urging advertisers to establish human rights-responsible advertising. Enhancing user agency and choice through measures like interoperability, calling for transparency of platforms, and government requests made to platforms are also included as recommendations. These suggestions underscore the need for actions at an unprecedented scale and intensity to build public trust and foster a diverse and resilient information environment.
High on Ideals, Low on Conviction
A broadened vision of information integrity, which goes beyond accuracy and reliability to include plurality, trust, and public empowerment, calls for structural change in the digital public sphere. This necessitates moving beyond conventional approaches like fact-checking, platform due diligence, and the identification and removal of illegal content. While these measures may help combat disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech, they often operate without a positive vision for the kind of information system we want to construct. Journalist and advocate for freedom of expression, Courtney Radsch astutely observed, “We cannot fact-check our way out of polarization, distrust, and skepticism.”
Instead, there is a need to reimagine and build the institutions, norms, and technological frameworks that will foster a pluralistic, resilient, and healthy information ecosystem that will enable quality and useful information to flourish.
Instead, there is a need to reimagine and build the institutions, norms, and technological frameworks that will foster a pluralistic, resilient, and healthy information ecosystem that will enable quality and useful information to flourish. Despite correctly identifying the fundamental challenges facing the information ecosystem, the Global Principles recommendations, unfortunately, adhere to familiar approaches, relying on a combination of state regulation and the voluntary goodwill of technology companies. The interventions engender little political will to create the enabling conditions that will allow for a truly pluralistic and resilient digital information system.
Challenging Abusive Business Models
The recommendations do not adequately confront the abusive business models of dominant digital platforms rooted in surveillance capitalism nor their structural power, even though these are identified as major threats to information integrity. The re-evaluation of platform business models and incentive structures is left to the discretion of the platforms themselves, with no call for governments to create regulatory disincentives for harmful platform behavior. To be sure, some of the action recommendations for platforms put forward by the Global Principles such as ensuring consistent content moderation practices, conducting human rights impact assessment, and incorporating safety and privacy by design are significant to achieving trust and safety online. Further, the recommendations to enforce human rights-respecting advertising policies and put limits to algorithmic amplification and monetization of identified harmful content can help in mitigating harms from virulent speech.
Nevertheless, these measures are symptomatic remedies, largely operating within the surveillance capitalist paradigm, and only tend to reinforce Big Tech’s immense gate-keeping power. They neither significantly impact platform business models nor alter the incentives for actors, such as advertisers and purveyors of disinformation, as the content that gains currency will still be determined by platforms’ commercial interests. The Global Principles’ reliance on the voluntary goodwill of Big Tech extends to its recommendations for AI actors and advertisers without suggesting any accompanying regulatory action or state oversight.
Can More User Choice Strengthen Information Integrity?
The Global Principles’ emphasis on public empowerment also requires further consideration. Public empowerment is described as giving individuals control over their online experience, enabling informed decisions about content, fostering freedom of expression, and ensuring access to diverse and reliable information sources. The document notes how digital platforms allow individuals very little control over their data, how it is used, and what factors determine the content that is curated for them. To address this, it urges platforms to use tools, functions, and features that ensure informed consent and enhance user control and choice, including through interoperability with other services. Mandating interoperability and data portability, as seen in the EU’s Digital Markets Act, is an important step toward breaking Big Tech’s gatekeeping power and fostering competition that could enable the rise of alternative recommender algorithms and new platforms. By creating an interoperating social media environment, it is expected that users will be able to choose among different recommender systems and platforms, thereby enhancing choice and control over their information diet.
However, the effectiveness of giving users more choices through interoperability to strengthen information integrity or to make the digital public sphere more inclusive and pluralistic is questionable. First, there is the classic problem of choice burden and user fatigue, which ultimately leads to many users sticking to default recommender settings. Second, assessing and selecting different recommender systems requires a certain level of digital literacy, which remains a challenge for many groups and regions.
Lastly, in a world already afflicted with polarization, encouraging each individual to tailor their algorithms thereby making it easier to find voices that echo their own views may be the last thing we want.
Lastly, in a world already afflicted with polarization, encouraging each individual to tailor their algorithms thereby making it easier to find voices that echo their own views may be the last thing we want. In short, this over-emphasis on individual agency may not resolve the collective problems of sensationalism and divisiveness, and could even exacerbate them. Finally, empowering users should not become an excuse for platform companies to shirk their responsibility to improve their default recommender systems and platform design to address the proliferation of harmful, divisive, and hateful content on their platforms.
Strengthening Local Journalism
The Global Principles also fall short in providing concrete recommendations for realizing one of its core goals—supporting “independent, free, and pluralistic media”, beyond calling on states to safeguard journalists and media workers. There is strong evidence to show that the decline of high-quality local journalism, especially in the last two decades with the rise of social media platforms, has increased the susceptibility to disinformation by eroding civic engagement, knowledge, and trust. Hence, a long-term strategy to strengthen information integrity requires reviving local journalism along with promoting public service, non-profit, and community-owned media. The UNSG missed an important opportunity to bring this issue to the forefront of the stakeholder agenda.
Overall, the Global Principles provide a sharp analysis of the structural issues underlying the information integrity crisis. However, they fail to offer a transformative vision for the digital public sphere—one that moves beyond the Big Tech paradigm and creates spaces that can sustain meaningful and diverse conversations that strengthen democratic processes.
Structural Changes Are The Way Forward
The recently concluded Global Digital Compact and the G20 Ministerial Declaration on Digital Inclusion have recognized information integrity as a priority issue requiring global collaboration. This is a critical moment for countries to define what they aim to achieve under ‘information integrity’ so that it does not become another buzzword that passes off without any consequential outcome. Efforts must go beyond merely responding to threats to the information ecosystem and instead articulate a vision of what a healthy and robust digital information system should entail and what it takes to build it.
Recent research from the Latin America and the Caribbean region, for example, has presented collective visions for strong information ecosystems from their regional context. These visions brought out the importance of addressing people’s most pressing information needs, especially for historically marginalized communities. They also help to foster spaces for open dialogue and civic debate to counter polarization, including diversity of actors and thriving local, community-led information initiatives, and ensure the safety of communicators and journalists. Insights from regional perspectives like these are essential so that information integrity debates break free from the narrow trappings of its original discipline of information security. The focus then needs to be on creating the conditions and infrastructures that will foster a digital public sphere where the power of information production, dissemination, and consumption is decentralized and empowering for the diverse sections of the masses.
While measures like fact-checking, content moderation, and platform transparency may help in mitigating harmful content, they do not squarely address the platform business model that has created an information ecosystem that prioritizes quantity over quality, sensationalism over reasoned deliberation, and relevance over diversity and serendipity.
Achieving such a decentralized and democratized public sphere looks bleak in today’s platform-dominated information ecosystem. While measures like fact-checking, content moderation, and platform transparency may help in mitigating harmful content, they do not squarely address the platform business model that has created an information ecosystem that prioritizes quantity over quality, sensationalism over reasoned deliberation, and relevance over diversity and serendipity. Measures to enhance competition among digital platforms and services –such as interoperability and data portability – while significant, also do not guarantee a shift away from the extractive, surveillance-oriented, and attention-grabbing conversations. Even user empowerment measures struggle to promote content diversity in a polarized environment, where entrenched platform designs make it challenging to exercise choice even for tech-savvy users.
Challenging the default business model may seem daunting, as we have been made to believe that there is no alternative way of structuring the digital public sphere. This is, however, far from the truth. Platform regulations by governments should focus their efforts on reorienting platform incentives so that they promote diverse, mindful, and quality interactions over sensationalist, abusive, and impulsive interactions. This would require changes in the platform techno-design as well as the values driving their content curation algorithms, two aspects that legislative efforts have shied away from so far. Platform companies should be mandated to use their tools and insights to create environments that make it harder for divisive content to go viral, for trolls to derail discussions, and for diverse perspectives to be suppressed.
Regulations should also push platforms to reduce reliance on algorithms driven by the logic of the attention economy, requiring them to consider factors beyond “relevance” to promote content that is diverse and serendipitous. Many successful use cases show that algorithms can serve content that is both relevant and diverse, countering the platforms’ binary narrative. Platforms could also be required to employ value-sensitive recommender algorithms tailored to platform type (social media, video platforms, news aggregators), specific topics (like climate change or public health), and critical events (elections, pandemics, civil war).
Along with reorienting platform incentives, efforts are also needed to enable the emergence of diverse, alternative media and communication platforms that do not follow the surveillance capitalist business model.
Along with reorienting platform incentives, efforts are also needed to enable the emergence of diverse, alternative media and communication platforms that do not follow the surveillance capitalist business model. This does not mean their business models have to completely ditch the benefits of ‘digital value’. A sustainable business model can also ill-afford to do it. Rather, it involves making different choices concerning where the targeting power of content lies, whose interests it serves, how data is collected and stored, the user’s control over data use, and how they derive value from their data. For instance, BlueSky, which recently saw a large inflow of users from X, promises decentralization and allows its users to host their data on servers other than those owned by the company and provides greater user control over the targeting of content. Some platforms, like Social.Coop, have experimented with organizing discourses on a cooperative model basis on federated social networks like the Mastodon that operates on open-source infrastructure and completely avoids the ad economy. While not without problems, these examples demonstrate that an alternative mode of organizing conversations on the Internet is indeed possible and could be made sustainable with appropriate technical architecture, funding, and regulatory interventions.
Besides, there is a strong case to be made for encouraging public services and community media with a civic mission of providing citizens with a diverse and global view of the world, through adequate public funding and favorable policy environments. For example, recently, the government of Kerala, a southern state of India launched India’s first government-owned OTT platform, named CSpace, to bring out and promote films with artistic and cultural values. There is, of course, the possibility of public service media being used by the state to further its agendas, but past trends show us that the risk of that in the dominant social media platforms is no less. It is hoped that the emergence of diverse digital publics will pose a counterweight to any dominant narrative.
Furthermore, local journalism desperately needs revival and even alternative business models to sustain. Local journalism is expected to counter disinformation by providing real and quality news, informing democratic deliberation, and restoring feelings of trust and community. Reviving local media would require long-term government support in terms of funding and policy tools. Different models of government financing that secure adequate monetary support along with independence from the state are being explored. Likewise, policy tools like tax exemptions (see, Canada and USA examples) and mandating equitable revenue-sharing by platforms with news publishers (e.g. Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code) have been implemented by some countries. Notable to mention is the fact that despite apprehensions of its positive impact, in its first year of existence, the Australian bargaining law raised more than USD 140 million for news outlets, and now the law is being emulated by others like Canada and California. It is important to ensure that such revenue-sharing arrangements are conducted in a transparent manner, and do not unduly benefit larger media organizations at the cost of smaller ones, and the revenue thus raised is invested back into journalistic activities.
Addressing the chaos in today’s information landscape requires structural reforms targeting platforms’ business models and the unhealthy incentives they create.
Big Tech-led digital platforms have fundamentally reshaped the way we understand the world around us and have turned us into algorithmically manipulated users to maximize the profits of these platforms. Addressing the chaos in today’s information landscape requires structural reforms targeting platforms’ business models and the unhealthy incentives they create. Regulatory and accountability measures, while imposing obligations on platforms, can inadvertently strengthen their control over discourse. Therefore, reclaiming a decentralized and democratic vision of the Internet, through diverse, inclusive, and alternative media avenues, should be central to national, regional, and global efforts to enhance information integrity. The UN Global Principles, unfortunately, was a missed opportunity to do this.
