Why we need a right to be informed

This is the first of 11 articles we are publishing on the right to be informed. We are publishing the articles over two weeks starting 19 May 2025.

We are bombarded with more information than ever in history. Daily, hundreds of thousands of news articles and commentaries are published online, tens of thousands of which are AI-generated. Add to this the millions of Facebook and Instagram posts, TikTok and YouTube videos, and tweets and WhatsApp messages.

It has become nearly impossible to consistently differentiate between what is true or false, or to decide whether a source can be trusted.

We argue in this series that to be informed should be a human right. The right to be informed is crucial to the functioning of democratic societies.

This right is threatened mostly by the large digital platforms — Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, etc. — on which we are increasingly being notified of news. The computer programs selecting what we see on our devices are for the most part opaque. We have only vague notions of how our news is selected. The programs have also become so complex — multi-billion-parameter artificial neural networks trained on petabytes of data — that not even the engineers who develop them properly understand how they work.

These platforms are not optimised to provide us with accurate and useful information; they are instead tuned to keep us glued to our devices, so that we may see more adverts — the profit-generating content of the social media platforms.

This encourages content creators, including news publications, to produce clickbait nonsense. Low quality, low factuality news publications thrive in this environment. More reliable publications, which delay publication to fact-check and edit their articles, and write sober headlines and content, struggle to compete.

As a result, we are awash in misinformation. Around the world, this is causing crises for constitutional democracies.

US instances are well-known. For example false claims about voter fraud in the last two presidential elections, a fake video of Taylor Swift supporting Donald Trump, or the claim that a school shooting that left 26 people dead was staged.

During India’s 2024 elections, deepfake videos showed Bollywood stars campaigning for the opposition Congress party.

Elon Musk, the world's richest person, has become a reliable source of disinformation. “You would need an AI-scale polygraph to capture all of Musk’s disinformation. At a rate of one every few minutes, the velocity of his posts is outdone only by their shock value,” writes Edward Luce in the Financial Times.

One of the most egregious examples is how he pushed conspiracy theories about UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s role in tackling child sexual abuse. An editorial by The Guardian aptly states: “Disinformation becomes a potent political weapon, making voters believe falsehoods … Mr Musk values the power to shape belief systems to enable pliable governance. Politicians who refuse to align with his agenda can be discarded, as he bets his followers will support whichever candidate he endorses.”

In South Africa, social media gave rise to a conspiracy theory that billionaire crook Marcus Jooste is still alive and didn’t actually shoot himself outside his Hermanus home. Jacob Zuma’s daughter tweeted a fake video showing Donald Trump encouraging people to vote for her dad’s party.

But outright misinformation is only part of the problem. Even when blatant falsehoods are largely absent, political discussions on online platforms are usually characterised by protagonists trying to be wittier, acerbic and more hysterical than each other. Alternately, they become back-slapping echo chambers in which nuance and important facts are lost. Ideological differences are a divisive force, splitting people into camps that become ever more staunch and fanatical.

An age-old problem

Distorting truth for political purposes is not new to our age. Nearly 4,000 years ago, Hammurabi claimed to receive a set of laws from a god. A few hundred years later Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II distorted the truth to excuse an unsuccessful military campaign. The empires of Athens, Rome, Byzantium and the Ottomans as well as the Chinese dynasties were all supported by clever but often untruthful propaganda, bolstered by priests, religion and texts.

The Prague Cemetery, a novel by Umberto Eco, describes the widespread conspiracy theories of the late 19th century and early 20th century, culminating in the daft but deadly piece of antisemitic nonsense: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It is a mistake to think that widespread false propaganda is a new phenomenon, but the nature of misinformation has changed because of technological advances. The massive stream of information we are subjected to, coupled with the fact that we are incapable of reading more than a miniscule fraction of what’s published, makes it extremely hard to maintain a reasonably accurate view of the news events relevant to our lives. This is exacerbated by the attention-grabbing social media computer programs.

We make the case in this series of articles that we need a new right — to be informed, so that the quality of information we receive can be improved. This right to be informed is certainly not entirely new. It is well recognised in medical ethics that patients have the right to be informed about decisions affecting their health. In recent years, laws have been introduced in many countries that recognise people’s right to be informed about how their personal information is used (see for example this in the UK). Our view is that the right to be informed must become much wider, that it must be extended to information generally, especially news, and that it should be codified into law.

In 1644, John Milton delivered a seminal speech in the English Parliament, titled Areopagitica, arguing against pre-publication censorship. He wrote: “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

It is considered a foundational argument for freedom of expression. In today’s world to get to the truth we certainly need freedom of expression. But it is insufficient; we also need a mechanism to hold the providers of our news to account, and a right to be informed can help us do that.