Addressing meta problems that support disinformation.

My comments to members of U.S. Congress and UK Parliament, 11 May 2025

I am Alan Jagolinzer, the Professor of Financial Accounting and Vice Dean of Programmes at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. I am the co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for Financial Reporting & Accountability and I am also the chair of the convening committee for the University of Cambridge Disinformation Summit events and projects.

I have spent the past two decades researching how to improve information in financial markets, how to ethically govern corporations, universities, and governments, and how to prevent fraud and abuse. I have seen rank corruption from some actors in our largest institutions and I know how to trace how this happens and map the devastating systemic toll it takes on humanity.

I am also a former U.S. Air Force pilot who has trained in combat environment threat assessment, Prisoner of War survival and interrogation, and military grade psychological operations.

Based on my experience, I sense that the current information pollution problem manifests from a number of higher order problems. Here is a partial list of problems that I believe create the ecosystem for where we are right now where bullshit, anger, and tribalism thrive and cause harm to many communities: 

Four meta problems that amplify the effects of disinformation

We have: 

• a transnational organized crime syndicate (or mafia state) problem, many of which have taken over nation states and are colluding to leverage manipulative influence campaigns and crypto financing to undermine democratic and accountability institutions globally. I sense they have an insatiable appetite for raw dominance power and that there are very few months remaining before they usurp our collective power and influence, given their heightened aggressiveness, without serious intervention,

• a monopolistic tech industry problem where a small set of massively wealthy institutions and executives addict millions, collect and monetize our data about what we think, what we buy, where we are, and how we feel, and then use that money and data to stoke deep emotional divides and even deeper addictions to our in-groups and our phone screens,

• a genuine grievance problem where members of society cannot find pathways to socially and financially elevate. There is no clear path anymore to “the American dream," or equivalent, and that makes millions of people susceptible to populist and extremist narratives that corrode trust in everyone in this room and all the institutions we rely on. It also makes these people susceptible to radicalization which is a force multiplier that leads to the next problem, which is

• a cowardice problem where people like you and me, who have sworn oaths to uphold existing laws, have become unwilling to intervene and prevent blatant criminal actions because we fear losing status, losing money, being harassed, or emotional and physical abuse to ourselves or our families.

It is, in my opinion, the perfect storm to support the darkest forces to overturn decades of infrastructure that was built for a reason. I have said publicly that I believe we are in the most acute information and accountability crisis of our lifetimes and if we don’t engage that crisis with the courage of those who fought on this continent in WW2, then I sense we risk the eventual ramp up to carnage that could easily surpass that. Imagine the 1940’s darkest actors having access to the surveillance, collection, manipulation, and dissemination technology that is available to today’s criminals.

So, what can we do?

The most important thing I sense is to:

• solve the cowardice problem. We need to collectively commit to support independent research, independent journalism, and uphold existing laws around harms related to speech (which in many cases are separable). We don’t necessarily need new laws. We simply need the courage to hold the most powerful people accountable to the existing laws. I will do it on my end—with or without your support—by leveraging existing outsourced accountability infrastructure like Bellingcat and ProPublica, providing evidence of crimes to the International Criminal Court and teaching the public how to crowdsource accountability using open-sourced data and investigative reporting,

• engage direct action on real grievance. We need genuine commitment to build infrastructure to support communities in need, rebuild alternative community bonds, address financial, health, and employment needs and facilitate opportunities for people to thrive. This might include education funding and skills retraining, which is the kind of stuff being aggressively defunded in the States right now,

• mandate and enforce transparency and accountability for monetized algorithms, which is already codified across different digital services and online acts,

• to that last point, in my opinion, we need to hold senior media executives accountable for harms from their monetized amplification of speech. This is not censorship of the original speech act. It’s engagement and intervention on commercially exploitive acts. In many cases, we can separate a speech act (e.g., grooming) from an associated harm act (e.g., unwanted physical assault or financial fraud). Actors have aggressively, and improperly, conflated and reframed acts of harm into a false “free speech” debate so it freezes us in our tracks. We cannot fall for it, particularly if it can be shown that commercial acts like algorithmic amplification induces harm acts like terrorism or fraud. Also, many who bring forward the conflated "free speech" arguments are the same people who are hypocritically and systematically shutting down independent scientific and journalistic speech. 

In summary, what we face is a very complex information, accountability, and tech-supported human crisis. It’s multifaceted, which is why our Summit pulled together scholars and policymakers from many disciplines including computer science, sociology, business, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, linguistics, communications, military studies, and education. The core roots of the problem—the reason why disinformation is so effective—are human problems that offer better opportunities for potential criminal actors to exploit and amplify existing social and economic anxieties and grievances that have eroded trust in all of you and our institutions. These same human problems have made too many of us turn into cowards and we will never solve the problems without courage to do so.

From a dialogue with members of U.S. Congress and UK Parliament at the University of Cambridge, 11 May 2025.