International Panel on the Information Environment

International Panel on the Information Environment

Established	December 2023 ( )
Coordinates

The International Panel on the Information Environment is an international consortium of over 250 experts<ref>IPIE (2024a).</ref> from 55 countries dedicated to providing actionable scientific knowledge on threats to our information landscape. The IPIE has said it is modeled after and learning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.<ref>Guardian Nigeria (2023).</ref> The concept was officially proposed in a 2021 virtual meeting by Dr. Sheldon Himelfarb, then President and CEO of PeaceTech Lab,<ref>Lawton (2021). See also Himelfarb et al. (2021).</ref> and Professor Philip Howard, Professor at Oxford University and then Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, during the first Nobel Prize Summit organized by the US National Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation.<ref>National Academies (2023).</ref> IPIE was legally registered in Switzerland in 2023.

Management

Sheldon Himelfarb is co-founder, chair and executive director of IPIE.<ref>IPIE (2024c).</ref> His proposal that became IPIE grew out of his work as Founder and CEO of PeaceTech Lab,<ref>Peace Tech Lab (2023b).</ref> which itself had been spun out of his work as the Director of the Centers of Innovation at the United States Institute of Peace.<ref>Wilson Center (2013).</ref> One of Himelfarb's publications is the 2011 US Institute of Peace publication on, "Evaluating media interventions in conflict countries: Toward developing common principles and a community of practice".<ref>Arsenault, Himelfarb, and Abbott (2011).</ref>

The CEO of IPIE is Dr. Philip N. Howard,<ref>IPIE (2024b).</ref> who is also the director of Oxford University's Programme on Democracy and Technology.<ref>University of Oxford (2024).</ref> Some of his related research is summarized in his 2020 book, Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives.<ref>Howard (2020).</ref>

Official launch

In May 2023 the panel was officially introduced during another Nobel Prize Summit.<ref name=Snyder>Snyder (2023).</ref> The Panel's inaugural announcement said,

Algorithmic bias, manipulation and misinformation has become a global and existential threat that exacerbates existing social problems, degrades public life, cripples humanitarian initiatives and prevents progress on other serious threats.

A New York Times report on this introductory meeting listed three key problems they are working to address:<ref>Meyer (2023).</ref>

• Explicit Deepfakes such as sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift generated by artificial intelligence that could develop a groundswell of political support for ill-advised governmental action.
• Election Misinformation amplified reportedly as companies like X (formerly Twitter) dismantle algorithms for flagging false election content ahead of elections to increase their profits. This seems particularly serious in 2024 as several billion people in different countries are scheduled to vote in major elections, notably the 2024 United States presidential election.

False information about vaccines have reduced vaccination rates, which increase the risks of disease even for people who have been vaccinated; vaccines are never 100% effective. And false information about climate change has delayed effective governmental action for years. These problems are expected to become dramatically worse as a result of recent improvements in generative AI. "The real problem isn’t people. It's the reward structure on social platforms," according to Gizem Ceylan, a behavioral scientist at Yale.

This Summit included comments by Hahrie Han, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins, who said that we now have more social interactions than social relationships, and that fuels echo chambers that amplify disinformation. If we fail to manage the social infrastructure effectively, any attempts to correct disinformation will also likely fail.

Sheldon Himelfarb, executive director of IPIE, said that misinformation is "so far-reaching that it is rapidly becoming an existential threat to the planet."<ref name=Snyder/>

Himelfarb and Howard also described "mobs in India, in South Sudan, in Myanmar, and in Mexico attacking and killing innocent people because of rumors and misinformation spread on Facebook, Snapchat and WhatsApp."<ref>Himelfarb and Howard (2023).</ref>