University researcher Aleksi Knuutila has joined HSSH’s university researcher Matti Pohjonen’s project Information and Media Literacy Programme for Judges and Policymakers (InfoLead). The project is done in collaboration with Oxford University and the University of Florence.
Over the last decade, there has been an acceleration of Media and Information Literacy programmes, many of which have targeted young people and vulnerable communities. However, judges and policymakers are a crucial constituency that has been overlooked nevertheless having a significant impact on making rules about social media and addressing threats and opportunities platforms offer.
“The project is unique in its focus on providing judges and policymakers with the necessary knowledge and media literacy to better understand debates around contemporary information disorder and challenges raised by generative AI. This is the group of people who are ultimately in the position to make decisions that actually matter on these topics,” Matti Pohjonen says.
“We are also lucky to collaborate with such a great team of experts from University of Oxford and University of Florence and complement their legal and policy perspectives with the methodological expertise available at HSSH and among our broader network of partners at the University of Helsinki."
Research from the project team has demonstrated that there are 1) misunderstandings about the impacts of digital tools, including whether they will have the desired effect (e.g. does fact-check to address misinformation impede the spread of offline harms?); 2) a lack of awareness and understanding of alternative tools for addressing the genuine challenges of content moderation failures or manipulation of social media; 3) misunderstanding about the processes and guidelines of how to engage more effectively with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and social media platforms to address issues information disorder; and 4) a lack of capacity, technical expertise, and experience with social media and AI works, on the part of policymakers and judges to respond to issues such as disinformation.
“As part of this project, we will explore using games as tools for improving literacy and conducting research. This will open up new perspectives on misinformation and media manipulation,” Aleksi Knuutila says.
The project’s goal is to equip end users, namely judges and policymakers, with the necessary information literacy to ensure that when they develop or implement policies, or make and interpret laws, relating to information disorder, they do so with high levels of information literacy and are able to craft responses that are suitable, necessary, and reasonable.