Securing Information Integrity Requires Global Action

In Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty famously states: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”.

That’s true for power today – but there’s also a new factor: Actors who deliberately foster ambiguity by “flooding the zone” to overwhelm and distract people’s semantic attention.

We live in contemporary domestic and foreign fronts, where people and systems powered with unprecedented data surveillance are working eagerly to make information malleable. Verification of information is devalued; emotive resonance becomes primary.

It makes George Orwell’s 1984 look tame.

Yet in the end, everyone loses. Because when some information is falsely branded as untrustworthy, and when lies are given credence, the contamination inevitably spreads. Then no one can relate to our shared reality – because, as Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa points out, we lack the basis of common facts.

This is the urgent context of the upcoming Copenhagen Conference on Information Integrity. Organised by IMS (International Media Support) in collaboration with the Digital Democracy Initiative and the Danish foreign ministry, the programme covers, among other things, Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) – such as in Eastern Europe and in the Sahel; Gendered disinformation and climate-change disinformation – relevant to many countries; and recent elections and crisis situations.

The discussions will especially be solutions-focused – strategising how professional journalism can be strengthened, how alternative communications platforms can be built and how media and information literacy efforts can make impact.

The event builds in part on IMS’ support for the “Media 20” (M20) process – an independent track that parallels the G20 network of the world’s leading economies and also involves professional journalists from other countries.

In September, the M20 Johannesburg Declaration recognised that “coordinated disinformation campaigns are amplified across multiple languages and diaspora networks, often state-sponsored, requiring targeted cross-border and multilingual responses”. The G20 digital economy ministers themselves noted continued and growing threats to information integrity and online safety, including those from generative AI.

The M20’s momentum echoes IMS’ strategic record of supporting the building of coalitions for better information. It’s a strong international alliance that can take forward the recommendations that will emerge from the Copenhagen Conference on Information Integrity.  

This is significant since the US is the host country of the 2026 G20, which portends even more contestation around “disinformation”.  As the South African digital affairs minister Solly Matlatsi told the M20 in September: “Information integrity is not a local issue. It is global and it demands global cooperation”.