The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) . . . coordinates science and technology policy across the diverse entities that make up the Federal research and development enterprise. . . . The NSTC prepares research and development strategies that are coordinated across Federal agencies aimed at accomplishing multiple national goals. . . .
This document establishes a Federal roadmap in the area of information integrity research and development. Its purpose is to acknowledge gaps in today's scientific knowledge and equip research communities with a shared understanding of Federal research priorities for the future. These priorities enable researchers within and outside of the government to align research efforts, identify opportunities for productive coordination, and work with communities of all kinds to explore the area of information integrity in a manner that protects fundamental freedoms and human rights. . . .
Accurate and reliable information is central to the well-being of people and society. Manipulated information can have destabilizing and harmful consequences for national security, democratic processes, economic welfare and development, the environment and natural ecosystems, local and national crisis response efforts, human rights and protections, violence and extremism at home and abroad, healthcare systems, and people's individual health and welfare. . . .
As the result of a year-long study, this document lays out a Roadmap . . . to understand how the lack of high-integrity information contributes to harmful outcomes and what research can help address these challenges. This Roadmap establishes objectives for federally funded information integrity research (both extramural and intramural), provides a structure for coordinating research and development (R&D) in information integrity, and encourages multidisciplinary research that recognizes responsibilities in both the public and private sectors. . . .
[I]ts purpose is to advance the science and expand the number of evidence-based options that government employees and policymakers, entrepreneurs and companies, individuals and community organizations, educators, nonprofits, and foreign partners have to strengthen the role of information ecosystems in the open exchange of ideas where healthy debate and free expression thrive.
Information integrity R&D should focus on understanding how people discern between high-integrity (i.e., authentic, accurate, trustworthy, transparent about its vetting) and low-integrity information and information ecosystems, contend with uncertain or ambiguous information, mitigate and recover from the effects of information manipulation, and enjoy the benefits of open information ecosystems. . . . [R]esearch should focus on the following goals:
-- Integrity Assessment: Enhance approaches people use . . . to discern between high-integrity and low-integrity information, narratives, and characteristics of information ecosystems.
-- Harm Mitigation: Identify strategies that could be used to prevent or minimize avoidable harms caused by information manipulation and assess their effectiveness across populations, cultures, communities, and types of harm.
-- Resilience: Identify skills and strategies that make it easier for people to operate in the context of potentially questionable information, and enhance communication strategies and tools that enable communities to progress toward and maintain appropriate levels of information integrity within open information ecosystems . . . .
-- High-Quality Evidence: Collect rigorous empirical evidence to evaluate strategies and technologies intended to address information integrity challenges; clearly convey high-quality evidence to decision-makers to inform the development of relevant public policy; organization-level communication processes; and decisions about which technologies to adopt, enhance, or retire.
To realize these goals, this Roadmap establishes research priorities for fostering and advancing information integrity science and its application to real-world contexts. . . . [I]ndividual Federal agencies will focus on subsets of the research priorities, corresponding to their expertise. . . . Collectively, the research priorities seek to answer these questions:
1. How do human, social, technical, and systemic elements of information ecosystems affect the integrity of information creation, exchange, and consumption, and how can modeling, measurement, and analysis enhance understanding of the underlying mechanisms?
2. Which safeguards, skills, and strategies assist people who encounter manipulated, misleading, or uncertain information, what are the risks and benefits, and how does effectiveness vary across context, culture, information source, and population?
3. How might technologies make it easier for communities to foster and maintain high-integrity information ecosystems?
4. What approaches and manipulatedtools help people identify, mitigate, respond to, or information campaigns while protecting proac tively debunk First Amendment and human rights?
5. How can data acce ss, research infrastructure, and partnerships accelerate and improve the rigor of information integrity research?
6. How can the knowledge and insights produced by information integrity practice in a manner that helps society as a whole?
The following six research priorities seek to address these questions.
1: Analyze, Model, and Measure Information Ecosystems. Advancing the science of information integrity requires models and measurements with which to instantiate, evaluate, iterate, and improve theories of information ecosystems. Computer science, cognitive sciences, economics, epidemiology, linguistics, political science, psychology, social and behavioral science, and other relevant disciplines have developed methods, models, and theories that offer explanations of different aspects of information ecosystems. A challenge for advancing the science of information integrity is to connect relevant methods, models, and theories to capture interdependencies in the system and explain new conditions as they arise, including mechanisms related to information supply chains, incentive structures, human elements, and technical components. Interdisciplinary theory is needed to advance scientific understanding and formulate research questions that will lead to effective and efficient ways to mitigate harms, bolster information integrity, and strengthen resilience against information manipulation. . . .
2: Investigate Safeguards that Assist People. Manipulated information is easy to produce, is free to distribute on a wide scale, and cannot be easily stopped at its source. Given these realities, research on safeguards that assist people, communities, and organizations—including those who encounter manipulated information and those responding to manipulated-information campaigns—is vital. Research is needed to identify safeguards, skills, and strategies that reduce people's vulnerability to manipulated information and empower people to become astute consumers of information. Importantly, safeguarding approaches must also respect the autonomy of participants in the information ecosystems, protect free expression, and support people in making informed and independent assessments of information. Research is needed on opportunities to familiarize individuals and communities with digital, media, and information literacy outside of schools and other formal learning environments and on how to adapt these support mechanisms to individual and community needs.
3: Envision Technical Approaches to Enhance High-Integrity Information Exchange. Design decisions within information ecosystems create both intended and unintended effects that influence the creation, prevalence, and persistence of manipulated information. . . . Key questions include how technology might assist communities in establishing and maintaining high-integrity communication within open information ecosystems, how provenance-tracking technologies might assist in the design of trustworthy information channels, and Roadmap for Researchers on how user customization might enable people to influence information ecosystems in ways that appeal to users with a genuine interest in dialog in pursuit of high-integrity understanding. Additional research on the causal relationships between ecosystem design and information integrity properties is also needed, including fundamental research on outcome metrics, algorithm design, and the mechanistic relationships between design choices, societal benefits, and harms related to manipulated information.
4: Understand Effective Strategies to Address Manipulated-Information Campaigns. Campaigns to spread manipulated information deserve special attention . . . . [T]here is a growing need for mechanisms to address information campaigns that result in harm, such as negative health outcomes, financial theft, radicalization, undermining of international alliances, and degradation of democratic processes. Human-machine teaming approaches are needed to enable early warning, proactive outreach, and mitigation of widespread harm, both to improve communication with communities at risk for being targeted and to rapidly adapt to adversary tactics. Effective approaches must address the asymmetry between the low cost of spreading manipulated information and the high cost of anticipating, mitigating, and remediating effects of such manipulated information and campaigns. Research is needed to understand the incentives for information manipulation and how to impose costs on manipulated-information campaigns to deter them from being initiated. Research will also require a multimodal perspective as campaigns move across numerous online platforms, television, print and electronic media, and offline channels. Finally, interdisciplinary approaches remain essential, including artificial intelligence, national security, economics, education science, behavioral and social sciences, and expertise domains associated with populations targeted by manipulated information.
5: Foster Data Access and Partnerships. Significant advances in information integrity research will require comprehensive, longitudinal data on the production, spread (e.g., digital routing), and consumption of low- and high-integrity information across multiple modes, platforms, and channels. Akin to impacts in domains such as public health or finance, research would benefit from consortia that allow many interested parties—platform companies, researchers, regulators, and end users—to aggregate data, tools, methods, and insights in a coordinated, responsible, privacy protective, and transparent way. Such research consortia would need to grapple with issues pertinent to the information integrity ecosystems, such as . . . .
6: Connect Research to Policy and Practice. Ultimately, partnerships should expand beyond data transparency and measurement toward improved outcomes, such as greater public awareness of how to mitigate information manipulation. Multiple research approaches are needed with fundamental researchers providing sound measurement techniques and generalizable knowledge, use-inspired researchers de-risking novel prototypes, translational researchers increasing the utility of those prototypes for policymakers and practitioners, and outcomes researchers measuring longitudinal effects in real-world contexts.
This Roadmap closes with an action plan that identifies public and private organizations community and its partners potential roles in information integrity R&D for and describes concrete actions for the information integrity R&D to consider.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Roadmap-Information-Integrity-RD-2022.pdf [73 pages]
