Challenges in a Changing Information Ecosystem
"What we are experiencing now is the result of a totally changed information ecosystem"
Corina Cristea, 07.03.2025, 13:00
What we are experiencing now is the result of a totally changed information ecosystem – this is the assessment made by Prof. Alina Bârgăoanu, PhD, European expert in combating disinformation and member of the Advisory Board of the European Observatory for Digital Media. She provided an analysis on Radio Romania about informational and cognitive warfare, the dictatorship of emotions, and the manipulation of algorithms on social networks in order to falsify reality. I believe that any era is defined by the dominant means of communication, says the expert in combating disinformation, and the pace of changes in terms of communication is so great today that we feel overwhelmed, confused, anxious, because we are not prepared, we do not have a similar historical period that would have trained us for such a great pace of changes: “If we think about Romania, we are not very far, for example, from 1989, when we had only one TV program. There was a TV in the house and there were two hours when we watched TV, and that was just about all our exposure to mass media. After this period of informational austerity, there was that boom after 1989, with the explosion of the written press, after which radio stations started, then commercial television stations. It was already an informational space that was as much of a provider as possible. We didn’t settle down very much with 24/7 televisions and bombastic headlines written down, that blogs appeared, after which the online version of newspapers appeared, after which social media started to appear a little, which already greatly crowded the informational space. We hadn’t assimilate yet the experience of what Facebook was, that all kinds of platforms based on sound, on image appeared. Again, we didn’t get to get used this change that artificial intelligence appeared, Chat GPT appeared, these enormous possibilities for creating content appeared. So, if we take Romania alone, in 35 years we have gone from a two-hour television program to an informational oversaturation, a continuous bombardment of the most varied content possible.”
The whole of society is caught in this whirlpool, and the effect of new technologies and changes is felt at the level of all generations. For a long time now, we have not been talking about simple actions of distorting the truth, the facts, explains Alina Bârgăoanu, but we are talking about information warfare, political-informational warfare, or even cognitive warfare.
“At this moment, the information ecosystem has been transformed into a real weapon. Many times, digital platforms can be transformed into platforms from which to carry out actions to alter reality, to alter cognition, to install the dictatorship of emotions. The power of new communication tools to alter reality is indeed considerable. And because of this, the defense in terms of these weapons must be commensurate, that is, if we embrace this metaphor of information warfare, cognitive warfare, it means that you cannot leave people to defend themselves on their own.”
On the other hand, let’s not forget that social media have represented a real tool for emancipation, for overthrowing tyrannies, dictatorial governments, Alina Bârgăoanu points out. Meaning, right now there is a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of frustration with social networks, but, she explains, ‘I think it would be a shame to associate them only with this dark side and to forget that, at least in the early days, they contributed to a real democratization of the public space’:
“They took over traditional media by storm, but sometimes rightly so, because traditional media were starting to represent closed spaces, and then they created this way of allowing new voices to appear in the public space. But now, really, you can see the dark side a lot, because they have also become very, very technological, and allow this distortion of the way we perceive the distribution of content. There are even companies that specialize in what is called ‘rent a digital cloud’, meaning they rent a digital crowd. If you want to have 1000 likes on your post, it means you pay x amount for the next likes. And these measurements, of what is called engagement, are processed by the human mind as an indication of popularity, and then as an indication of truth.”
This is because the popularity of information is interpreted by our brain as an indication of validation. Virality is one of the main weapons, and social media platforms create different speeds of content advancement, says Alina Bârgăoanu. And she explains: such cognitive attack campaigns can also be carried out with truths, a content that is viral does not mean that it is false, it can be something as factual as possible, but the distortion occurs from the fact that it benefits from an increased number of likes by manipulating algorithms, and that popularity is interpreted as an indication of truth. I think that the strength of artificial intelligence at this moment is related to the ability to distort the distribution of content, concludes Alina Bârgăoanu.
