Institute for Research on the Information Environment
Democracies around the world are grappling with how to safeguard democratic values against online abuse, the proliferation of illiberal and xenophobic narratives, malign interference, and a host of other challenges related to a rapidly evolving information environment. Beyond countering threats, they also need to know what conditions within the information environment can foster democracies and encourage active citizen participation. Unfortunately, the evidence needed to guide smart policymaking and social action in this domain is sorely lacking. The Institute for Research on the Information Environment aims to fill this gap.
Research Isn’t Meeting Domestic or International Needs
There is little evidence about how the information environment works as a system. Research on the consequences of a polluted information environment, such as the effects of influence operations targeting democracies, is not keeping up with the scale and pace of challenges. Knowledge about the effects of disinformation on digital media is limited. Scholars have just started tracking companies’ policy changes and, beyond fact-checking, have barely scratched the surface of the efficacy of common countermeasures. What research exists is almost entirely from and about Europe and the United States.
Science for Democracy
Current research production models are slow and inefficient. Developing smart and strategic responses to safeguard the information environment requires higher capacity institutions that enable faster, more efficient collaboration across academia, government, civil society, and industry. Large-scale research institutions like CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, provide an ideal model for studying the information environment. These institutions bring researchers together to speed scientific discovery by leveraging shared infrastructure. Instead of each research center or university building its own smaller, cheaper instruments, physicists pool resources to build bigger machines that reach high velocities. CERN “exists to understand the mystery of nature for the benefit of humankind,” and there is a need to understand the mystery of the information environment for the benefit of democracies and their citizens. Connecting disciplines and providing shared engineering resources and capacity-building across the world’s democracies will scale up applied research to enable evidence-based policymaking. CERN’s international model also provides inspiration. CERN is run by a consortium of twenty-three member states, works with researchers worldwide, and has been a catalyst for innovation, encouraging collaboration between academic researchers and the private sector to develop infrastructure. Just like CERN works with numerous researchers, governments, technology companies, and philanthropies could contribute to a hub that combines the expertise of multiple research centers to tackle this critical work at scale, thus fostering a wider field.
The Origins of IRIE
For several years, researchers at Princeton University and the Carnegie Endowment have explored institutional models that could act as an inspiration for speeding up research on the information environment. This began in 2020 with a series of workshops and reports assessing the U.S. model of federally funded research and development centers and ultimately grew into an idea for a CERN for the information environment. These efforts brought the team into contact with other researchers who were writing for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and calling for a similar-sized research facility.
Starting in 2022, with the support of Microsoft, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the team at Princeton and Carnegie undertook a year-long development phase to explore how to develop what became known as IRIE. The project has already led to Princeton’s plans to build new infrastructure, and this continued effort to build community and ultimately IRIE.
This is but the beginning of the story…