Commercial Innovation Opportunities for Civic Tech to Reduce Misinformation: "Thinking outside the bunk"

Design opportunities ‘outside the bunk’

By examining the process of misinformation as a set of systemic relationships between communities and organisations that work to deliver reliable information, we can identify interesting design spaces for next-generation misinformation technologies. For example, by developing technologies that:

1. Support the information integrity cycle. Civic technologies can help organisations further or transfer their practices for assessing the risks of specific misinformed narratives, developing compelling narratives, learning from communities' information needs, and so on.

2. Support co-design and community-led information responses. The task of producing information that resonates with the diversity of communities most likely requires co-design with them. Civic technologies could support co-design processes by, for example, enabling multimodal community participation or helping co-designers prototype information solutions.

3. Facilitate social listening for and through misinformation. Information can be viewed as a type of social dialogue between organisations and communities. Civic technologies could facilitate what some interviewees called 'social listening,’ helping organisations understand the experiences, desires, and information needs of communities where misinformation spreads. Additionally, by practising social listening, organisations can identify gaps and limitations in current knowledge and recognise vulnerabilities or dependencies that may arise from it.

4. Support and collaborate with local trusted leaders and trusted intermediaries. As discussed, trust is fundamental to effective misinformation mitigation. Nonetheless, organisations cannot usually establish trust quickly or on the spot. Instead, building trust demands time, effort, transparency, and proof of mutual concern. That is why organisations focused on information integrity often rely on trusted intermediaries. Civic technologies might assist in pinpointing these trusted figures within communities and facilitate cooperation with them to provide access to high-quality information.

5. Support coalition-building around information integrity. Similarly, creating trustworthy messages often relies on forming partnerships with other information-active organisations and trusted sources. Civic technologies can assist in identifying potential allies, facilitate internal coordination and discussions about messaging, and make visible to communities the sources behind various claims they encounter.

6. Support perspective diversification instead of correction. Another consequence of recognising the diversity of information communities, information organisations, and trusted voices is the foregrounding of the importance of diversity of experiences and thought. From a community standpoint, this might also involve highlighting how other groups perceive an issue or how it impacts them personally.

7. Allow community-owned information integrity solutions. Communities already manage their own networks and channels of information. Civic Tech solutions could help bring information integrity to those channels, regardless of the platforms involved, which can vary widely. A network-based approach might also identify key community leaders who can serve as central nodes within the system, enabling collaboration. Alternatively, technological tools could assist communities in developing their own information artefacts tailored to their internal systems, ensuring the information is relevant and accessible.

8. Facilitate community-to-community information sharing. Current community tools like Community Notes aim to create neutral, helpful notes recognisable to users on opposing sides, but they can oversimplify systemic differences across social identities and places. A community-to-community approach would add context to information integrity, asking not just "is this claim accurate?" but also how other communities understand the issue, what their concerns are, and how the claim may affect my own. Such solutions could scale effective strategies and foster cross-community learning.

9. Communicate uncertainty and complexity. Trust with communities also relies on transparency and humility. Yet, the key challenge lies in creating narratives that are engaging, clear, and sharp enough to stand out against often misinformed claims that rely on bluntness, straw man arguments, and evoke fear and anger. Civic technologies might assist frontline workers in tackling this difficulty and in finding innovative ways to communicate complexity. For instance, this could involve delivering messages deeply grounded in real experiences.

10. Translate misinformation research for practice. The field of misinformation research is continually evolving and becoming more complex. Just as frontline workers must translate domain expertise to communicate about topics such as health, the environment, or food, information integrity professionals also need to stay current with evidence-based strategies and the latest debates on misinformation. Civic technologies could support these organisations in learning from recent research, applying findings in practice, or creating peer-learning networks to ensure their misinformation strategies are well-informed themselves.

Among the various design opportunities that thinking ‘beyond the bunk’ can offer, it is equally crucial to emphasise the core motivating values of this approach. This is especially important when tackling the challenges associated with mainstream technological solutions in the misinformation space. Insights from interviews with practitioners and experts highlighted essential ideas that serve as catalysts or guiding principles for any innovative response to misinformation, following the approach detailed in this document.

Democratic pluralism

The opportunity space assumes that democratic information integrity cannot be built by imposing a single authorised voice from above. It must support legitimate disagreement, perspective diversity and collective sense-making while still taking harms seriously. This is why several interviewees stressed pluralistic knowledge practices: presenting “one interpretation alongside others”, understanding “what the relevant divide is” for each specific context, and creating spaces where groups can “exchange and learn something and build something new together”.

Misinformation is a communication problem, and communication relies on establishing a common context. Understanding the information consumer is therefore as important as understanding the information producer (or source). Trust and authenticity are qualitative markers of acceptance. Respect is often neglected in these discussions: “agree to disagree”, empathy for alternative views, etc., even when the “facts” (however defined) are accepted by all sides […]. Integrity and tolerance are critical to the success of the social dynamic in socio-technical systems (Academic in human-computer interaction for information processing).

Digital inclusion

Any civic tech intervention must account for unequal access to devices, data, skills, confidence and digital spaces. As one interviewee asserted: “whatever is created must include a digital inclusion plan”, because tools may help many people while excluding those who do not have a smartphone, data, or the confidence to participate digitally.

Digital inclusion must also be put into context by looking at the specific experiences of systemic exclusion that communities have experienced:

An additional challenge with the corrective approach is that it ignores systemic harm. I know that you've got the sort of risks, including further exclusion or adversarial response. So, it's ignoring the lived reality of many people in Scotland who have experienced systemic harm, and therefore they cannot trust information originating in those systems of harm (Specialist in community engagement with information and digital technology).

Rendering visible the work of those on the ground

The figure foregrounds practitioners, community workers, nurses, doctors, charities, local leaders and frontline organisations as part of the information integrity infrastructure. These actors already interpret information needs, answer questions, translate institutional information and manage trust in everyday settings. Civic tech should make this labour visible, support it and connect it, rather than overwrite it with centralised solutions or, worse, seek to automate it altogether. On the contrary, solutions should help value and support frontline workers.

Community-centred design

A community-centred approach follows the principle that information responses should happen as close as possible to the communities affected. One interviewee linked this to subsidiarity, arguing that “communities are at the core of society” and that action should happen at “the most local level as possible”. Another stressed that each community may be targeted with different misinformation, making blanket responses inadequate. The design challenge is therefore to create shared infrastructures that can be adapted, altered and owned locally. In doing so, they should support capacity building in those communities:

It's a muscle, it's a skill, civic participation. Our civic muscle is something that can be strengthened, or it can atrophy. If we simply automate this stuff, it's like sending the robots to the gym for us. It's very impressive. They can lift a lot of weights. But that's not the point. (Specialist in misinformation technology and governance)

These values highlight what NextGen solutions in the misinformation space should aim for when addressing the challenges posed by widespread ‘bunk’ approaches. Of course, they can be approached from various angles, and any particular solution can only work toward these goals rather than achieve them perfectly.