What we can achieve with a right to be informed

We have argued that we need a new right: to be informed. Two reasonable questions immediately arise. How can we suck a right out of thin air? What use is it?

New rights

Human rights develop through historical processes. Freedom of expression has a particularly long history. Its modern roots lie in the Greek agora, where free men — not slaves or women — could speak their mind. In England the writings of Locke and Milton in the 17th century contributed ultimately to the adoption of the First Amendment in the US Constitution in 1791 which protects freedom of speech, religion and the press.

Only millennia after Ancient Greece collapsed did it become widely accepted that slavery should be abolished and women should have the same rights as men. Rights change and develop and new ones come into existence, making life better for more people.

The South African Constitution of 1996 provided rights to housing, food, water, health care and social security. Decades earlier, it was unthinkable to include socioeconomic rights in a democratic constitution. Apartheid stripped people of access to housing and health; it made sense to include them in the Constitution.

A right to be informed is not truly new. It is well recognised in medical ethics that patients have the right to be informed about decisions that affect their health. The South African Constitution gives everyone the right “not to be subjected to medical or scientific experiments without their informed consent” (12 (2) (c), our emphasis).

The Constitution also provides the right to access information:

“Everyone has the right of access to — (a) any information held by the state; and (b) any information that is held by another person and that is required for the exercise or protection of any rights.” (32)

This right has frequently been exercised by activist organisations and news publications.

India too has legislation giving people the right to access government information. So does the United States.

In recent years, laws have been introduced in some countries that recognise people’s right to be informed about how their personal information is used (see for example this in the UK).

What is being argued for in this series is an extension of these conceptions of the right to be informed, particularly in respect of our news.

But there is also a key difference. To the extent a right to be informed currently exists — for example, for people to access their medical data — it is to obtain access to information that may otherwise have been denied. In this series we are concerned about the problem of people being confronted with too much information, much of it false, via opaque computer algorithms that confuse and mislead them.

Put differently: as the right to be informed currently exists, it is to solve the problem of not having enough information. Here we are concerned about the converse problem: telling truth from lies when there is too much information.

It is a timely right because of the way new technologies have changed the way information is distributed. It is not only needed because of the amount of misinformation we are all subjected to, but because more people are actively involved in public political discussions, a welcome development if such discussions are informed.

What are the practical consequences of a right to be informed?

First, it is a right that will have to be struggled for. Most governments won’t without intense pressure legislate a right to be informed. This means a campaign for the right to be informed can be the basis for political movements, ideally ones connected globally.

Whether a right is enshrined in law or not, nothing stops people from demanding a right to be informed from their media sources. There is moral power of a demand for the right to be informed. It can be used to pressure publications to rectify their systematic omissions and biases, not with the threat of law but with the persuasion and the ever present threat of switching to competitors. Even more importantly it can be used to demand more transparent filtering algorithms from the digital platforms.

There are also opportunities for people to work together to develop news curation applications and social media feeds whose purpose is to realise the right to be informed. Ideally these applications should be able to financially reward the publishers whose articles they use.

A right to be informed is also a useful ethical principle to guide editors and reporters. We should be continuously asking: are we realising our readers’ right to be informed?

There is a battle that requires at least the threat of legal action. This is in respect of the large platforms that filter news using computer programs that are optimised to keep the attention of their readers rather than inform them. Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok, Google Discover and others should be legally required to realise their users’ right to be informed, or, put slightly differently, not to systematically misinform users.

At first blush this might seem an infringement on the right to freedom of expression of these platforms. Surely they should be able to run their applications as they see fit? Isn’t what they choose to filter to their users their choice? We deal with this concern in article 8 of this series.

What does the enforcement of a right to be informed mean for platforms?

There are many possibilities. Here are a few suggestions, aimed at starting a debate; there may be better approaches:

• The default algorithm for filtering news on platforms should provide items in publication time order, based solely on the user’s explicit choice of publications. Bluesky’s “Following” tab appears to meet this criterion, at least at the time of writing.

• The way a news filtering algorithm works should be explicitly published.

• Platforms beyond a certain size should take measures to reduce misinformation, by removing or rendering obscure inaccurate posts. If this sounds too difficult, it is already being accomplished very well by some very popular websites using the “wisdom of the crowd” (see below).

A right to be informed is of application to platforms, publishers and readers. We have argued that platforms should be legally required to implement this right. There should be moral, rather than legal, pressure on publishers, editors and reporters to respect their readers’ right to be informed.

Finally we are all, to use a cliché, citizens of the world. And we are all readers of news. It is often said, with some justification, that with rights come responsibilities. As citizens, as readers, especially in functioning constitutional democracies where we are free to read what we choose, we should be taking steps to ensure that we are informed, by reading from multiple sources and not only using the large platforms to filter our news.