SIPA Panel Discusses the Threat of AI to Journalism and Democracy

 Anya Schiffrin, senior lecturer and director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia SIPA, convened a panel of international experts on October 24 to discuss policy solutions for saving journalism from large tech companies increasingly dominating the global information landscape. 

“It became clear during the pandemic that we had to find a solution” to ensure quality journalism survives this information revolution, Schiffrin said. Thursday’s discussion was part of a continuing dialogue at Columbia focused on exactly that.

The Saving Journalism conference began after the pandemic when Schiffrin worked with her students to write reports mapping how countries around the world had supported journalism when many outlets went out of business as their advertising revenue fell and economies contracted. This year Schiffrin and Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute and University Professor at Columbia University, received a $17,000 matching grant from the Bollinger Convenings at the Forum, set up in honor of former Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger, motivating them to begin with an event open to the public. Both SIPA and Columbia Business School supported Schiffrin and Stiglitz’s application for the funds.

The panel discussion was sponsored by the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at SIPA and Columbia World Projects (CWP), as well as McGill’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy. Opening remarks were delivered by Wafaa El-Sadr, Executive Vice President of Columbia Global. 

Panelists included Katrín Jakobsdóttir, former Prime Minister of Iceland; Melissa Fleming, under-secretary-general for global communications at the United Nations; Lee C. Bollinger, president emeritus and a first amendment scholar; Stiglitz; and Churchill Otieno, president of The Africa Editors Forum.

Jakobsdóttir noted that the proliferation of social media and the advent of AI have transformed elections in her country and around the world. “In my presidential election,” this past June, she said, “I felt like a rabbit hole was opened in front of me,” when conspiracy theories accusing her of maintaining allegiances to foreign entities over Iceland circulated on social media.

The spread of online misinformation and disinformation is a global phenomenon aided by the “increasing centrality of social media” in each successive election, Otieno said. In Kenya, for instance, “if a message is well designed, the chances the average voter believes it rises exponentially regardless of the source.” 

The consequences of misinformation and disinformation can be especially acute when it exploits uncertainty surrounding elections. “By the time the electoral commissions in these countries arrive with their results, winners have often been prematurely announced online,” Otieno observed, noting “if that winner doesn’t align with the verified result, violence often erupts.”

It is not just elections that are being affected but also the operations of international organizations. “At the UN, we’ve discovered that every single area of our work has been affected by disinformation,” Fleming said, which is being amplified by the algorithms underwriting platforms owned by companies like Meta, X, and TikTok. This reality has led the UN to dedicate their resources to combating social media’s negative externalities. “We have worked on policy documents that we believe offer a blueprint for a healthy information ecosystem and digital environment,” Fleming said.

While the UN may be working on policy blueprints, existing regulations in the US have made it difficult to fight the negative externalities of social media platforms. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the carve-out for online service providers which protects these platforms from liability, has “created a culture of no accountability,” according to Stiglitz. This precedent may present barriers to allowing the US government to regulate tech companies based within its own borders – or as Stiglitz said, “the US innovates, China imitates, and the EU regulates.”

The EU is regulating the large platforms through legislation like the Digital Services Act (DSA), which aims to hold platform owners accountable for spreading misinformation and disinformation. “The DSA is making Europe and its people safer. They’re also making it harder for the platforms not to adjust their products for the whole world,” Fleming said.

When it comes to censoring content online, the first amendment also makes regulation more complicated in the US, according to Bollinger. “For the past 100 years, there has been a huge effort in the US to establish very strong protections for speech,” he said. Though news publishers and broadcasters have been subject to content standards, it is up to lawmakers to decide whether the indemnification privileges provided by Section 230 should continue to apply to tech platforms.

Regarding content generated by AI, on the other hand, Bollinger noted that “there would be consensus across the first amendment community that AI-generated speech is not protected; there would need to be some degree of human in the loop” for it to be. The question for him is whether “we put regulations on the social media companies to pressure them into keeping a lid on” AI-generated misinformation and disinformation.

The panelists observed that digital platforms have not only aided the spread of misinformation and disinformation, they have eroded the viability of the business model underwriting legacy journalism. “Google, Meta, and OpenAI are scraping information from legacy media; they’re stealing it without paying for it,” Stiglitz said, to populate datasets with quality content to train their large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini.

The panelists agreed that a well-funded, independent, and free press is critical to the health of democracies around the world. “Democracies require a certain level of quality information to grow,” Otieno said, and it is critical news publishers are funded to produce quality information. 

CWP will be hosting more conversations on democratizing and safeguarding today’s digital environment, including a panel discussion on reshaping social media for the public good with Camille François, associate professor of practice at SIPA and Institute of Global Politics (IGP) affiliated faculty member, on November 25.