Current understanding of the information environment is hyper-focused on specific technologies like artificial intelligence or threats, such as disinformation undermining election processes or threat actors like Russia. This focus, in turn, emphasizes responses that aim to counter threats, with little understanding or consideration of the impact those interventions have on the broader information environment. These responses include measures like banning the use of deceptive media. Often, these measures are limited to foreign actors as if their activities in the information environment can easily be isolated from those of other domestic entities. In this problem-focused approach, an attempt to address issues present in the wider system—the space where people and machines process information to make sense of the world—goes missing. Put simply, democracies don’t understand the information environment and yet are pressed to act now and do something about a variety of problems without knowing if that something is more damaging than the threat.

The current research model hinders this systemic understanding in seven ways:

1. The funding model is project-based.
   The funding model is project-based preventing longer-term measurement research and scaling up shared infrastructure, while also discouraging cooperation across research centers.
2. Researchers lack data access.
   The European Commission’s Digital Services Act (DSA) will enable more data access, but even with access, few researchers have complex technical systems to safely store and study that data. More needs to be done to expand data access outside of the EU.
3. There is a lack of researcher capacity.
   A lack of research capacity will make it challenging for researchers to navigate the DSA data access mechanism. A lack of awareness of existing datasets and resources hinders researchers’ current access.
4. Infrastructure and engineering resources are expensive.
   Infrastructure and engineering resources are expensive, and the current approach to building tools is piecemeal, with each research center developing its own. Researchers from the Majority World are disproportionately impacted by this lack of tools and resourcing.
5. There is no systemic understanding of the information environment.
   Researchers from many fields apply their own terms and methods to studying the information environment, the space where humans and, increasingly, machines process information to make sense of the world. This has led to a lack of consilience on the topic. There is little systematization of what research does exist to identify what is already known or if there is consistent evidence to support different types of interventions.
6. Research is not informing policymaking.
   The incentives and operating models of policymakers and researchers are very different. Researchers study what interests them, often with little understanding of how to make outputs policy relevant. Policy gaps are seldom articulated as research questions but as broader problems like “How do we stop foreign manipulation?” Policymakers are also pressed to respond and don’t have the time to assess multiple studies to find the best approach, nor do they know whom they should be engaging in the research community. The divide between the two stakeholders is vast.
7. All the science in the world matters not, if people don’t trust it.
   Simply investing in research on the information environment is not enough. Citizens must be engaged to build trust in research outputs.

Each of these pillars is a complex problem to solve on its own—and there are many great initiatives contributing to aspects of them, but often in isolation and in competition with each other. To reach the scale of IRIE, these initiatives must be connected to feed into a greater whole, and key gaps currently unaddressed must be filled. As many of these initiatives are centered in the Global North, connecting these initiatives can power and enable research in the Majority World, which disproportionately suffers from a lack of resource and access today. As a next step in the IRIE project, we invite initiatives working to address problems related to each pillar to connect, with the aim of creating guides to help link this community with partners and existing resources like data sets and tools.