David Gil de Gómez IV

Information and Democracy

"Democracy dies in Darkness"
Attributed to Judge Damon Keith

Democracy is based on the ability of the citizens of making informed decisions. This is no secret, and has been noted over and over in relevant literature, for example the “Democracy Playbook 2025” by the Brookings Institution, which names “counter disinformation” as one of their seven pillars of democracy. There are three factors that impact the ability of the general population to access information of good quality, all of them severely deteriorating throughout the last decade.

Access

"When the public's right to know is threatened, and when the rights of free speech and free press are at risk, all of the other liberties we hold dear are endangered."
U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd

For a Democratic society to work optimally there has to be broad and equal access to information. Access to relevant information is necessary in order to both assess the decisions made by the government and choose representatives that would vouch for the decisions that would align better with the priorities and values of the citizens.

In countries with a history of authoritarian regimes, it is not difficult to find regulations that control the access to information, usually enforced strongly for its own self-preservation and the suppression of the political opposition, when it exists. Limiting access to facts and figures limits as well the ability of the general population to question official narratives and keep their representatives accountable.

Access to data can be hindered also by socio-economic factors, which can be accentuated by the ways in which modern society obtains most of it. Costly devices, expensive access to internet or lack of investment in public facilities like libraries or civic centers can have an unexpected effect on the ability of certain social strata to obtain information and hence their possibilities to take part in informed decision making, affecting democratic quality. This makes the impoverished population specially vulnerable to manipulation, and excludes them from any meaningful contribution to the creation of policy.

When it comes to this topic, it is of crucial importance to consider accessibility. It is critical that every single citizen has the same possibilities to obtain and process the information, regardless of the chosen methods of storage and obtention. Depriving any single group of citizens of this right contradicts in a very clear manner one of the core principles of democracy, if not the most important.

Open Government is a model of governance that stresses this point as a means to increase the quality of democratic systems. Its name was originally coined by the lawyer Wallace Parks on a article with the title “The Open Government Principle: Applying the Right to Know Under the Constitution”, published after his death in 1957 on the journal “The George Washington Law Review”. On the article the idea of the “right to know” is laid down as a fundamental democratic right.

The development of that ground work led to legal frameworks like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the USA or the article 15 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, both granting said right for publicly produced documents and communications.

These ideas have crystallized into Open Data initiatives by different governments and entities, which aim to make publicly generated data accessible to everyone. This, of course, comes with challenges, which include the right to privacy and the possibility of unexpected data breaches.

On a different level, freedom of press is also paramount and receiving challenges at different levels. Of course, in certain places journalists face incarceration, kidnapping, torture and murder. New digital media is also challenging the appearance of dissonant journalistic voices, as click-fueled revenue heavily influences media content. We face a situation in which media revenue is driven directly by opaque algorithms that can be influenced by spurious interests. Public media, which should not be directly driven by profit, can be a counterbalance to this, with its own challenges.

The online discourse and argumentation is so degraded that it is standard for most journalists to face violence when presenting their work on internet channels. In the worst cases, said violence has transformed into real world harassment. At the same time, using the internet to promote their work on those channels is needed in order to obtain the needed revenue. Algorithm ruled, attention based online media has already caused a shift in the way headlines are written, as researched by Pietro Nickl and his team. Algorithms determine the accessibility of information, and pieces are now designed to attract attention instead of presenting information. These opaque algorithms are controlled by invisible forces, which could lead to a new type of manipulation which is difficult to detect and counteract.

We have seen leaders of developed countries expelling journalists out of press conferences due to differences in opinion. These silencing moves represent a direct challenge to citizens access to information and display the size of the problem.

Quality

"Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth"
Attributed to Joseph Goebbels

In the English language there are two words that can be used to describe the dissemination of low quality information, adding a subtlety that is nice to consider in this context.

The first word would be **misinformation**, which is the spread of false information by accident or inadvertently. This has always been part of journalistic activities. For example a bad source, a misunderstood comment or language barriers can be the cause behind it.

The second would be **disinformation**, which represents a similar concept, except that it adds the nuance of it being done on purpose, with a specific goal. Spreading wrong or misleading facts, repeatedly, makes them part of the public discourse, and it is a powerful way to manipulating the masses into taking certain decisions.

It is this type of activity that represents a great threat to democracy, and has been behind the most horrific crimes in human history. Disinformation has been cited as one of the main factors behind the Rwandan genocide, where the Hutu controlled state media was used to dehumanize the Tutsis, playing a crucial role in the systematic, ethnically motivated mass killings. On the internet era, we have examples like the crucial role that the spread of disinformation on Facebook, the social media platform, had in the 2017 Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, as stated on the Amnesty International report on the matter.

On top of the effects that it has on polarization, many of the coordinated campaigns aim to erode the public trust on the democratic institutions. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer shows a rise in government, media and supranational institution distrust. Low trust in the government causes a deep feedback loop, in which distrust makes governance more difficult, generating more distrust as decision making becomes cumbersome and detached from the citizenship. Then said governance difficulties may end up causing corruption, lower social cohesion and economic decline, which creates the perfect breeding grounds for authoritarian regimes.

The consolidation of media ownership also represents a challenge to the quality and variety of the information the public has access to, easing the spread of disinformation and magnifying its effects when it comes to shape the narratives and perceived truth, and making opposing or challenging ideas more difficult to express and discuss. Public media also has an incredibly important role in counteracting these problems, but it comes with its own challenges. Establishing mechanisms that allow for its effective control and guarantee its impartiality is paramount for it to be part of a healthy democracy of good quality.

Journalistic quality, on the other hand, is a very different topic to discuss about, as can be seen in Johanna Vehkoo’s piece: “What is Quality Journalism: and how can it be saved”. Some proposals to measure the quality of journalistic work can be found there, and the conclusion is that those end up always being incomplete or subjective, which makes it impossible to measure it conclusively. On the other hand, there seem to be some basic, desirable qualities of proper journalism, them being: faithfulness to the truth, preservation of the independence from the covered subjects and exertion of verification measures with great discipline.

All of them seem to be challenged in the current day and age. We constantly find contradictory statements in regular press, there are obvious ties between politicians or other journalistic subjects and media, and the mere existence of the so-called fact-checkers seems to indicate that verification is non-existent or at least insufficient in most channels. Verifiers introduce a new layer of trust, which is also subject to the possibility of manipulation. It becomes apparent then that information quality is at an all-time low.

On top of all these, as perhaps the biggest worry of them all is that now, due to the nature of the internet and especially social media, these hideous disinformation campaigns can be triggered remotely, from country to country, in which represents a new open highway for external unlawful influence in the internal affairs of different countries. According to Statista, as of May 2025, 59% of the people over 65 years old state that they see false or misleading information daily in the US, while 66% of the respondents of the EU Social Media Survey 2025 considered they had been exposed to disinformation in the prior week. These two data points grant considering this a big problem.

Comprehension

"We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge."
John Naisbitt, Megatrends (1982)

Information does not necessarily equate knowledge. For it to be transformed, it needs to be understood, processed and engaged with by as many citizens as possible. In short, broad access to information does not equate high quality democratic participation, unless people are not only informed, but also knowledgeable about the topics at hand.

Reading comprehension becomes crucial at this point. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) aims to establish a baseline for comparison of these basic skills among teenagers. On the last report at the time of this writing (2022), it shows a sharp decline in reading performance, going from 501 points in 2012 to 482 in 2022 on the average of the OECD. This test includes not only the ability to read the text, but also evaluate, understand and reflect on it, as well as the use of the information it contains.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in charge of the assessment, has published a list of recommendations, which include reducing the distractions caused by digital devices, keeping the schools open longer, support struggling students rather than making them repeat a grade, increase and encourage the involvement of the family in the education and ensure high quality staff and materials, among others. Most of these suggestions are of a political nature, so we face again a feedback loop, in which dubious leadership can purposefully erode the educative system of a country in order to stay in power or otherwise manipulate the citizenship.

This trend spread as well to mathematic performance, which went from 499 to 480 points during the same period for the same baseline group of countries. Considering that most data is presented in either a statistic or purely numeric form, anumerism and math phobia become a huge liability that can definitely impact people’s ability to make informed decisions. Needless to say, low income population gets also especially punished by this skill loss.

Non-profits like National Numeracy, based in the United Kingdom, support the upskilling of the general population. They have identified several areas of mathematical skill they consider basic for functioning inside of a modern society. The framework they devised includes algebra, unit conversions, ratios, percentages, shapes and measurements, estimation, rounding and the basis of statistics and probability, including the understanding of likelihoods. This is a very comprehensive set of basic skills necessary to navigate and understand the times we live in, hence allowing the general public to extract more accurate knowledge from the information they are presented with.

Even though the average public investment on education has been stable as a share of the GDP during the period 2015-2021 according to the OECD on its members, the distribution of said funds is many times reviewed as a matter of policy, making it an important point to overlook. Public education is many times subject to policy, and it is not unheard that antidemocratic regimes limit the access to it, or heavily manipulate it in order to serve their own purposes. It is crucial to keep it working to keep up the quality of democracy.

What can be done about it?

Fighting disinformation is a very multifaceted effort, in which governments, media and the general population should be involved. The risk for our democracies is real, and the fear of external influence on internal affairs can materialize at any time.

Developing critical thinking while being conscious of our confirmation bias is the most important effort that each individual can do. The easiest action path is to just respond to every piece of news emotionally, but that contributes usually to the spread of misleading information. Pause and think before sharing. Engaging in source and fact checking before sharing a piece is also important, especially with the proliferation of online-only illegitimate media that aims to obtain some look alike prestige by looking more traditional. Amplify accurate information.

Economically supporting independent journalism allows non-mainstream journalists to have a voice, which contributes positively to the general picture. Consuming such content purposefully, especially if done outside of social media platforms, lets us escape the algorithms, making us able to choose different media that can offer different points of view on different matters.

Finally, asking representatives to create regulations to counteract the exposed problems is, perhaps, one of the most important things that any citizen can do. Education, culture and public media are all subjects of policy.

References