Text: Co‑authored by students participating in a course jointly organized by the University of Helsinki, DECA, and NORDIS

Information integrity concerns whether the information around us is reliable, transparent, and accountable. From the perspective of information creators and users, it is about epistemic agency and epistemic rights — our ability and our opportunities to make sense of the world and act with confidence. The concept has become a benchmark for organizations like the United Nations (UN)  and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the kind of information environment we need for democratic societies, and against which we assess the harms that we face. Also, the European Union stresses the need for information integrity in its Democracy Shield (2025). A recent global meta-analysis of research has focused on the media structures, journalism and trust, Artificial Intelligence, datafication, as well as governance and other measures that seek to curb information disorders – mis-, dis-, and malinformation – and other information harms.

Drawing on existing conceptualisation and research, but from differing national and regional empirical contexts, our course documented 40 problem cases of information integrity. The result highlights the pervasiveness of the global information ecosystem and related problems. Despite economic, political, cultural, societal, and technology-based differences, common themes emerge that require urgent attention from decision-makers, media and technology industries, civil society organisations, and individual information consumers alike.

The big picture: societal structures and politics challenging information integrity

A key, somewhat expected, lesson from the cases is that extraordinary situations bring about new problems and reveal hidden ones: In different national contexts, crises, conflicts, natural disasters, and war communication complicate communication both by hindering flows of trusted information and heightening rumours, propaganda, and disinformation. In such cases, the diminishing access to information may be justified by national security needs, while information integrity is seen as a key component of societal security. Elections provide a similar context, whether in presidential elections or contested-issue referendums.

Unfortunately, several cases illustrate how political, legal, and economic corruption erode information integrity. Political populism and the extremism of certain groups and communities can be identified as culprits, and state-led disinformation is alive and well today, even if it is not a new phenomenon.

Stakeholder challenges: problems of content-creating organisations

When analysing cases pertaining to knowledge institutions, such as journalism, and other content-creating contexts, such as the arts, both the political-societal burning issues and the developments in technology are highlighted. While digitalisation may amplify the impact of structural-political, anti-democratic trends in information dissemination, its role in weakening formerly trusted institutions, such as journalism, is multifaceted, encompassing economic and political pressures. Religion, minorities/immigration, and climate change discourses become polarized and harsh when legacy media organizations must compete with viral, loud social media tropes.

Similarly, while artificial intelligence creates many opportunities in newsrooms for efficiency and audience targeting, its potential to weaken human-moderated information gatekeeping and, hence, audience trust is significant. Existential questions about what journalism is, or what counts as art in the AI era, have not been sufficiently debated in the public sphere.

Against this backdrop, stakeholder support for information integrity is difficult to secure. Public media organisations in many countries operate independently of the government and serve as partners in emergency communications, but are now facing political pressures and resource constraints. Also, new skills, most importantly fact-checking, are needed from both legacy media and fully independent watchdog organisations.

We all: users as violators of information integrity

From our case studies, it is clear that problems of information integrity cannot be attributed solely to political or media elites. To be sure, political interests fuel disinformation in individuals and groups – but the latter form online communities, social media armies to spread, for instance, transphobia, incel ideology, health disinformation, and other information ills – that can result in concrete actions, some of them harmful.

Several cases highlight the vulnerabilities of young people due to a lack of social media and AI literacies. The broader question is how to secure and enhance young people’s engagement, participation, and agency in society.  

All in all, on the one hand, citizens’ participatory agency and, on the other, self-censorship in contexts where information integrity has broken down, are questions of life and death for democratic societies. As the saying quoted in the book based on the global report goes:

If “the right to know is the right to live”, then securing inclusive, open, tolerant, and respectful online spaces is imperative.

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