Acknowledgement of Country

I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, water and culture. The University of Sydney is located on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present.

The Challenge: Information Disorder in Democracy

Citizens face immersion in environments where coherent understanding becomes impossible

• Traditional fact-checking approach has fundamental limitations:
  • Requires establishing contested ground truths
  • Doesn’t scale across millions of posts
  • Misses how contradictory legitimate perspectives undermine sense-making

Key distinction: Healthy pluralism → Chaotic pluralism

• Citizens possess epistemic rights to sufficient information AND competence to navigate information systems
• When undermined, consequences extend beyond confusion to degradation of democratic deliberation

Our Contribution: Measuring Disorder Without Adjudicating Truth

Framework: Information environments as networks of semantic relationships

• Infons (Devlin, 1991; Floridi, 2011): discrete, meaningful units of information (individual posts)
• Relationships between infons: agreement, disagreement, or independence
• No reference to ground truth needed - assess mutual support/contradiction

Information Disorder Measure:

\[ D = \frac{|E^-|}{|E^+| + |E^-| + |E^0|} \]

Where \(E^+\) = agreement, \(E^-\) = disagreement, \(E^0\) = independence

Ranges from 0 (no disagreement) to 1 (complete disagreement)

Methodological Innovation: Supra-Infon

Supra-infon: Anchoring claim outside immediate information space

Data Collection

Source: Facebook via CrowdTangle API (🪦 RIP)

Time series of posting activity

Time series of posting activity