At a personal level, information Integrity means having the information you need to make good decisions for yourself, for your family, and for society. It means information that meets your reasonable expectations, both for the confidentiality of private information, and for the reliability of public information. In practice, information integrity is abstract, like truth, hard to approach. I find it helpful to start with something more tangible, food integrity.
If you are reading this book, odds are that you have never faced life-threatening hunger. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that 44M Americans, about 12% of us, are subject to some form of food insecurity,[1] but most of us will never know that challenge. It’s more likely that you’ve had food poisoning, and if you have, you probably learned a few things about what not to eat, like avoiding chicken sandwiches in third-world airports. This book, like the food you ingest, has a non-zero chance of becoming a part of you. Sometimes the outcome is predictable. Fiber tends to pass through. Sugars are ingested and metabolized, unless your body decides to convert them into fats. Then they may be with you for a long time. Micronutrient retention depends on their solubility in oil or water. Information retention is harder to predict. Considerable care goes into our food, before we eat it, to exclude pesticides, impurities, and heavy metals like mercury and lead. Unless you are a former Russian spy, you probably never worry about ingesting polonium. Every time you make a decision about where to dine, or shop for groceries, or what to feed your kids, you are making a decision about food integrity.
Most of us will never consider food integrity beyond these basic personal decisions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. It means we are lucky. You probably haven’t been worrying about information integrity either. When it comes to developing and maintaining your system of beliefs, the ideas you consume are as important as the food you put into your body.
The Internet is nothing like a grocery store. Your aesthetic sensibility is a useful guide in a vegetable market, but in our modern age of post-industrialized information production many find themselves ill-equipped to recognize trustworthy content with only the skills they learned from their family and friends. Technology revolutions matter for information, just as refrigeration revolutionized food. New skills and practices are required to maintain a wholesome experience as an information consumer. And as with food, if society tolerates situations where the public is predictably unsafe, your best efforts to exercise reasonable care will be inadequate to maintain safety for you and your kin.
Mercato Centrale, Firenze, by Juan Antonio Segal on Flickr.
Quantity, Quality and Variety
Information integrity means giving the public unfettered access to available information, enabling rational, informed decisions on questions that materially impact society, family or personal life. It does not guarantee good decisions, any more than access to healthy food guarantees people will eat it, but if individuals make bad decisions because they are systematically denied access to relevant information, that is not information integrity. Food integrity benefits from millions of years of evolutionary development, and that might make it more intuitive than the integrity of written information, which has only been with us for a few thousand years, a fleeting instant on the scale of evolutionary time.
The basics of food integrity are pretty simple. Food integrity requires a supply of sufficient quantity, quality, and variety to please the palate and maintain a healthy organism.
The open markets near the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence, Italy have intrigued tourists for centuries. Those who explore beyond the street vendors and their textiles and leather goods may find themselves in a vast pavilion, with row after row of stalls offering every kind of meat, produce and consumable imaginable. Medina in Marrakesh, Chelsea Market in New York City, Les Halles in Paris, the Tsukiji Market in Tokyo; these historical institutions demonstrate how free market forces shape the quantity and quality of foodstuffs available to a demanding public, and the dizzying variety of things available to put in your mouth and incorporate into your organism. We call such markets efficient when they are sufficiently open, scaled and competitive for free market forces to usefully guide the allocation of economic resources, promoting competition and innovation for the public good. They also show how regulation supports food safety. The Corner & Sanitary Market Building in Pike Place, Seattle was named to reflect the prohibition of live animals such as horses. Food is extensively regulated in countries like America, and most Americans consider that a good thing. We like that our restaurants are inspected, and being able to shop at the corner grocer without worrying about botulism or trichinosis. While food is regulated, the dominant theme for information in America is deregulatory, elaborating our rights to free expression and self-determination. This dates back to America’s founding fathers, who were radical deregulators. They shed their blood for the right to produce, consume, and believe practically anything they wanted. This deregulatory mindset does not make information integrity a lesser challenge.
Like the open markets of Florence, we have institutions for information too, bookstores like Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, or the Fnac in Paris, and libraries like the Boston Public Library and the New York Public Library. The longevity of information means the largest institutions can offer millions of volumes. Certain libraries, like the Library of Congress or the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin have a designated archival purpose, durable storage for indefinite preservation of information protected by copyright, in the public interest. Copyright grants an author the right to exercise a monopoly on their intellectual property. In exchange, the author may grant public access to their work through such institutions as designated repository libraries. Such libraries were created throughout the 18th and 19th century as copyright laws were passed to establish intellectual property rights for authors and publishers. While copyright limits free expression, it also controls practices such as plagiarism. These controls are important. They were critical to creating a robust open market for published information.
Accessibility is critical for food and information integrity. For food, this means having access to sufficient quantities of food so that you don’t starve. Access is key; the 19th century Potato Famines in Ireland and Scotland were caused not by a shortage of food, but rather by the inability of peasants to pay for it.[2] Too much food can be a problem if you overeat, or if skewed distribution denies others of food or resources they require. Information access is both the same and different. While it’s a problem if you are systematically denied access to relevant information, it’s normal to have access to vast amounts of information you don’t need, such as library books you’ve never read, and little harm comes of it. Voluminous information needs to be maintained in some order though. It’s a problem if an excess of irrelevant information prevents you from finding the information you need. We take for granted the order of a modern library and the power of Internet search, but these inventions are relatively new. The challenge of irrelevant information can also be used adversarially. Italian litigators are renowned for burying investigators in tremendous volumes of irrelevant information.[3] This approach can be used against the public too. Steve Bannon called it “flooding the zone.”[4] The challenge is familiar to librarians. In their 2000 report Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, the American Library Association anticipated the future of the Internet when it advised:
The sheer abundance of information will not in itself create a more informed citizenry without a complementary cluster of capabilities necessary to use the information effectively.[5]
The sheer abundance of food is not adequate for food integrity. Food must also be of due quality. Food that is spoiled, contaminated, or poor in nutrients makes it difficult to keep your body strong. Bad food can make you sick. If it makes you sick quickly it may help you and others learn to avoid bad food. Information is different, because there is a healthy way to consume a certain amount of bad information, provided you don’t make it a staple, and that you are capable of recognizing it as bad. If your mind mismanages bad information, or you persist exclusively on a staple of bad information, it can make you confused, not sick. It might make you think that you are the only sane one, and everyone else is deranged. That would be an example of fundamental attribution error,[6] our tendency to make optimistic assumptions about our own abilities and motives, and pessimistic assumptions about everybody else.
Some people consume low quality food and information for pleasure, although they typically do not knowingly consume low quality food as a means of personal betterment, despite the Tuscan proverb “That which doesn’t kill you makes you fatter.”[7] Humans are not necessarily harmed by consuming bad information, provided they recognize it’s bad, and consider good information in the balance. Some people may deliberately consume bad information for purposes of scholarship, empathy, or to better understand the challenges faced by society. Hoarding bad food is uncommon, but research libraries keep all information, good or bad, in the public interest. The academic field of History is an exercise in considering the entirety of available information, good and bad, to recognize historical truths.
In her recent book A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communications, British philosopher Onora O’Neill cites three requirements for successful communication: Information must be accessible, intelligible, and assessable.[8] Requiring information to be intelligible is kind-of like saying that “food must be food.” A young bull can grow to great size on a strict diet of grasses, but grass makes poor food for humans, due in part to our inability to ruminate. Similarly, a news source in Ukrainian does little good for a person who does not understand the Ukrainian language. Such news is not intelligible. Intelligibility depends on more than just language. Prerequisites in college course catalogs reflect conceptual intelligibility requirements.
Certain differences between food and information derive from information’s virtual nature. Food can obviously be eaten only once, whereas the best information is commonly consumed repeatedly and by multiple persons. We value freshness in food, but fresh information is suspect. New scholarly writing is peer reviewed, and new fiction is scrutinized by editors and then by critics and reviewers. We typically avoid food that is very old, whereas very old information is commonly revered. We treasure information that is very old and has been consumed by many people.
Variety is a third basic requirement for food integrity. Nutritionists recognize numerous ailments caused by deficiencies of particular nutrients. Rickets, beriberi and scurvy are all conditions that result from a lack of essential nutrients. In his book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan explores the value of consuming a variety of high quality foods, to give your body access to the full spectrum of nutrients it requires.[9] At the same time it is normal for an individual’s food and information diet to be influenced by cultural and professional context. News content is organized by locale and language. Modern scholars tend to develop expertise in a particular subject, with the celebrated polymaths of the 18th century less and less common. WIthin a particular domain of knowledge, integrity may suffer when exposure is restricted to an information monoculture or systemic bias, as such pre-determined information denies an individual of self-determination.
Information creation and curation is the essence of competent political leadership. Abraham Lincoln used his oratory skills to guide America through the Civil War, and Franklin Delanor Roosevelt used the disruptive media technology of his time, radio, to engage his public in support of the reforms that guided America out of the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. Such leadership supports information integrity when it is honest and promotes public access to relevant information. However, political information strategy can also partition society into factions, a favored technique of despots. Mussolini built a dominant position in Italian newspapers that supported his political ambitions. Hitler made aggressive use of radio. A Nazi government sponsored program to manufacture inexpensive Volksempfänger radio sets helped his weekly broadcasts reach a broader audience. The Nazis used entertainment programming to draw a bigger audience for Hitler’s speeches.[10]
Understanding information integrity requires recognizing systematic bias and dishonesty, especially in political communications. Autocratic campaigns can exploit situations where reasonable people disagree, and when citizens fail to recognize leaders with dishonest or anti-democratic intent. Fascism and Eugenics found robust support among American leaders prior to the nation’s commitment to enter World War II. These information misadventures were the backdrop for American regulation of broadcast media. The Communications Act of 1934, the establishment of the Federal Communications Commision, the FCC Public Files standards, and the Fairness Doctrine helped guide American journalism for the second half or the 20th century, and were imagined under the menace of nationalist Facism, Nazism, and the world Communist movement invigorated by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
Accessibility requires that public information remains public, not disappear. Information integrity further requires that confidential information remain confidential, as per the will of the rightful owner of the information. Both for food and for information, sharing should not happen by accident. Online platforms challenge this norm by encouraging casual information sharing, with friends, the platform, and the broad public. The integrity of confidential information requires that expectations for shared information to be clear, explicit and respected.
What to eat
Assume you have perfected access to the full quantity, quality, and variety of food available to humankind. You’re still hungry. You need to decide what to eat. Eaters make decisions based on a spectrum of personal goals. The quality of their decisions depends in part on having accurate information about food, what’s in it, where it’s from, how it will impact their organism. It also depends on having accurate information about what their body needs, a melange of appetite and our evolving understanding of nutrition.
In an analogous fashion, we are continually making decisions about what information to consume, and what to think of it. The Internet represents the potential and the illusion of having access to all the world’s information, but a competent librarian might explain that is not so new. Here are some things that are new:
Algorithmic search and recommendations. Like a card catalog on steroids, full-text indexing and behavior-based recommendation systems are incredibly powerful tools for managing a large corpus of information. They also create the possibility of nefarious and adversarial manipulation of algorithms.
Zero-cost publishing. Before the Internet, publishing resources were scarce, and editors played a critical role in allocating publishing resources based in part on a local notion of quality. With zero-cost publishing online, the editorial role shifts to curation, allocating user attention. This puts editors in competition with algorithmic search and recommendations. Zero-cost publishing combined with algorithmic discovery also opens the field to a huge contingency of diverse and niche creators that formerly didn’t have a voice. Unfortunately, mischief abounds in this unfiltered deluge of new content sources, with few checks on dishonest publishers.
Anonymous publishing. Conceived with an ideal of free expression as a quasi-absolute right, and the noble goal of supporting diverse and under-represented voices, online systems are typically very permissive regarding anonymous and pseudonymous publishing. This is a great benefit for honest, relevant creators who could face physical safety risks if they published with their legal identity. It also benefits criminals, who could be held to account if they operated with their legal identity. Weak identity guarantees the public will have no useful information to differentiate a wolf in sheep’s clothing from a user taking their first baby steps online.
Ephemeral publishing. Legacy publishing is relatively durable, with systems like reference libraries supporting a record of public acts that commonly outlives its creator. With online publishing, the duty for archival retention has shifted from designated repositories to publishers. Some online publishers exploit this by modifying or deleting public activity which they later regret. This is useful for amateur publishers, to unpublish things that were ill-considered, and for dishonest publishers, to hide evidence of dishonest acts.
When we rely on Internet-based media for information. outcomes reflect the impact of Internet technology on information integrity.
O’Neill’s third requirement for successful communication, assessability, is about making rational decisions about what you consume and what you think about it. In modern society this is relatively easy for food. We generally know food when we see it, and the labeling and disclosure requirements of the relevant regulatory and normative regimes give us factual information, sometimes useful, to make decisions about the food we consume. In the realm of information, online media has made assessment harder. With legacy media, the norms for documenting authors, editors and publishers provide the basic factual context for consumers. Archiving of published works completes a corpus of facts that enable the public to develop a notion of the reputation of an information source, and make publishers accountable for their public acts. Publisher identity and history are essential context facts, and online media disrupts both, through its support of anonymous and ephemeral publishing. Naive, generous provisioning of anonymity and content removal makes accountability unreliable, enabling situations where abuse has no meaningful consequences. This tends to create a “tax on the honest,”[11] and makes rule-of-law irrelevant, exposing the global online public to the worst traits of authoritarian governments.
The tendency of online media platforms to make published content ephemeral is reinforced by concerns for user privacy and for Article 17, paragraph 1 of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), “Right to erasure”, commonly known as “the right to be forgotten”.[12] Making content ephemeral is appropriate for private communications, but it is problematic for public communications, due to its relevance to public safety. Policies that allow removal of public content without appropriate review neglect regulatory guidance on preservation of information in the public interest, as articulated by Article 17, paragraph 3 of the GDPR, which describes the conditions under which content should be preserved due to a prevailing public interest.
The weakness of online publisher identity and publisher history enable dishonest publishers to manipulate identity and history, disrupt the synthesis of reputation, and avoid accountability for prior acts. Reputation plays a fundamental role in decisions about what to eat and what to read. You consider the reputation of a restaurant in choosing a destination. Then, as you inspect the menu, you consider your prior experience with various dishes. The process of deciding what to read or watch is similar, applying your experience with authors, publishers and themes you like or dislike. When weak identity and history online disrupt reputation, consumers are disadvantaged in their ability to assess their options. In the absence of factual context on authors and publishers, information consumers tend to revert to emotional decisions, based on personal appearance and other superficialities, the ideal conditions for a charismatic despot to build a following.
Returning to assessability, after deciding what to read, you must then decide what to think about it. Our food analogy starts to fail us here, as your body’s reaction to food is largely involuntary and subconscious. For information, you decide whether you find the information and its source to be trustworthy. Onora O’Neill is again a source of helpful guidance. In her 2013 TED talk “What we don’t understand about trust,” O’Neill identifies three basic criteria that a trustworthy information source should satisfy, that they must be honest, competent, and reliable.[13] Without exploring why these criteria are important, note that none of these properties can be assessed for an author or publisher without reliable identity and history. If an author can present themselves with deceptive identity, they can avoid being associated with prior work that demonstrates their dishonesty or incompetence. Similarly, if a publisher can manipulate history, they can eliminate or modify earlier public work that is evidence of their dishonesty or incompetence, again rendering reputation unreliable and accountability impossible. When authors and publishers commit to verifiable identity and history, they make themselves vulnerable, easier to reproach for irreputable public behavior. This is a heavy burden, but it is a reasonable standard for professionals. It is the standard we’ve grown up with, experienced throughout our lifetimes in public libraries, bookstores and newsstands around the world. As O’Neill points out, that willingness to be vulnerable and accountable is one of the best indicators of trustworthiness.
The food comparison becomes more strained with information phenomena like fraud and disinformation, phenomena that deliberately test our ability to assess information. Modern technology has enabled novel information techniques, like malware and troll farms, but there is nothing novel about fraud and disinformation. The rarity of problems like baby formula tainted with melamine[14] and honey diluted with corn syrup[15] is a credit to the systems that support food integrity on our behalf. The overt corrupt intent of malware is better compared to episodes in history and fiction where individuals were deliberately drugged or poisoned through their food, although these tend to focus on a single victim, whereas malware threats commonly operate at the scale of thousands or even millions of victims. Modern examples of food integrity failures that combine comparable scale with overt criminality are rare, although there are food conspiracy theories applied at that scale, like the theory that fluorination of water and toothpaste is part of a plot for world domination.[16] We will return to the notion of accessibility when we discuss context in the next chapter.
Back in Florence, some of what you’ll find at the public market at San Lorenzo may look unwholesome to an American eye. Like the Internet, there may even be offerings deliberately designed to deceive you, or to harm you economically, hence the adage “Caveat emptor” — let the buyer beware. Even so, it’s unlikely that anyone at San Lorenzo wants to sell you something with the intent of causing you physical harm. That would likely be criminal, and if a person wanted to physically attack random individuals there are far easier ways to do that than setting up shop in a public market. I wish I could say the same about the safety of the Internet, but sadly I can’t. If the San Lorenzo market were like the Internet, all of your favorite brands and celebrity chefs would be there, and they would be generously distributing samples for free, with a large contingency of unsupervised, thinly disguised children mixed into the public. Many of the most curious sweets and savories would be packed into rank after rank of unstaffed displays. The merchant’s identity would be declared, but with most of the declarations false and nearly all unverified, the labels are not much help. The goods would be presented with complete indifference to your diabetes risk or cardiac health. If ingredients were disclosed you wouldn’t trust them, as disclosure mostly serves the emphatic claims of dishonest vendors, who reappear day after day with a newly manufactured identity and no meaningful consequences for their dishonesty. Among the tempting wares you know there are items deliberately designed to hurt you, from people who will never be punished for their criminality.
So far this discussion has been built from the personal perspective on information integrity. That perspective is incomplete, because the most diligent information consumer will be frustrated if the public information context is deficient. Next we’ll step back from this personal perspective to develop a systems perspective on public and private information.
Endnotes
A note on endnotes: Proper use of citations is an important part of information integrity. These endnotes are based on Modern Language Association format. In consideration of the questionable durability of Internet resources, I also provide links to archive.org for online resources.
[1] “Hunger in America | Feeding America.” https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america archive.org
and
Rabbitt, Matthew P., Hales, Laura J., Burke, Michael P., Coleman-Jensen, Alisha. Statistical Supplement to Household Food Security in the United States in 2022. Economic Research Service, Administrative Publication Number 119, October 2023, United States Department of Agriculture. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/107710/ap-119.pdf?v=5694.6 archive.org
[2] Ross, Eric B. The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development. London, Bloomsbury Academic, 1998. Pg 47.
[3] Jones, Tobias. The Dark Heart of Italy, London, Faber and Faber, 2007, pp. 15, 56, 69. archive.org
[4] Stelter, Brian. “This infamous Steve Bannon quote is key to understanding America’s crazy politics.” Reliable Sources (newsletter), Cable News Network, November 16 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html archive.org
[5] “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.” Chicago, Association of College & Research Libraries, 2000. http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/standards.pdf archive.org
[6] Jarvis, Jeff. The Gutenberg Parenthesis, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, p 197.
[7]Giusti, Giuseppe. Raccolta di Proverbi Toscani. Firenze, Felice le Monnier, 1853, p 312. Archived by The Hathi Trust. In Italian: “Quello che non ammazza, ingrassa.” Friedrich Nietzsche is often cited for the variant “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.” “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” He may have picked this up while living in Venice in the years before publishing Götzen-Dämmerung in 1889.
[8] O’Neill, Onora. A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communications. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
[9] Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. New York, Penguin Publishing Group, 2008.
[10] Marsh, Allison. “Inside the Third Reich’s Radio.” IEEE Spectrum, April 2021. https://spectrum.ieee.org/inside-the-third-reichs-radio archive.org
[11]“A Tax on the Honest.” The Economist, October 16, 2003. https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2003/10/16/a-tax-on-the-honest archive.org
[12] “Right to Erasure.” Article 17 of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/ archive.org
[13] O'Neill, Onora. “What we don't understand about trust.” TED Talk, September 13, 2023.
[14] Gossner, Céline Marie-Elise et al. “The melamine incident: implications for international food and feed safety.” Environmental health perspectives vol. 117,12 (2009): 1803-8. doi:10.1289/ehp.0900949
[15]Olmsted, Larry. “Exclusive Book Excerpt: Honey Is World's Third Most Faked Food.” Forbes, 15 July 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2016/07/15/exclusive-book-excerpt-honey-is-worlds-third-most-faked-food/ archive.org
[16]Subbaraman, Nidhi. “Conspiracy Theorists Have Chilled Real Fluoride Research.” BuzzFeed News, Sept 15, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhisubbaraman/fluoride-water-iq-kids-debate archive.org