AI slop and the battle for truth — why platform dominance threatens quality information

We’re in a terrifying moment, one in which it seems that everything we’ve worked to build over decades is being dismantled. And not for any good reason, not because thoughtful people who shared the values of an educated/equal society – built on truth and science and scientific inquiry – decided it was time to carefully consider how to make the world more fair and more just and provide services more efficiently.

Everything we have worked for and believe in is being torn apart by autocrats because they can. They came to power because they had support from oligarchs and corporations with money enough to influence political processes. They had the support of frustrated voters who were, variously, angry about income inequality, “wokeism” and migration. And in the US – as well as in other countries – these new leaders use every method they have to grab and hold power, defying courts and institutions, civil service and civil society.

As usual, the news media is on the front lines.

Journalists believe they are the guardians of truth and their work holds power to account. They work in local communities, covering local news, institutions and politicians, and they work across borders, exposing massive global problems. They provide new information which can change hearts and minds and be acted on by responsible governments that want to act. 

Quality information is even more important now in an age of AI slop where the information ecosystem is awash in misleading images and strange blah words that sound like they mean something but don’t really. 

Public discourse has been debased in the US. Our leaders lie without  compunction. They seem to lie on every topic, whether it’s about migration or vaccines or the climate. They attack and defame their opponents. They’re doing what they did in the McCarthy era when they attacked the Voice of America and librarians burned and pulped books in US libraries overseas.  

What comes after this attack on science and academia? Confusion. Nathan Heller’s New Yorker piece last November summed up the US today: it’s no longer the microtargeted online disinformation that’s the problem but the general miasma of confusion. He argued that “it’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention”. 

Worse is the scary public violence. The assassination in Minnesota. Using cars to crash into protesters. Not once but repeatedly.

The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde wrote about life before the creation of the “public” that had access to quality information. He said that in the Middle Ages “there were fairs, pilgrimages, tumultuous multitudes dominated by pious or belligerent emotions, angers or panics”. 

That sounds like today, doesn’t it? 

We know how quality news media wound up in such a precarious situation: the collapse of the business model as IP and content were stolen by social media and now the large language models. There were changes in audience consumption patterns, loss of advertising revenue, capture by the state in many parts of the world, the spread of news deserts. The Covid-19 crisis which hit advertising. 

Quality information is a public good and yet few want to pay the full costs of production and dissemination. It’s the same with art/culture/health and many other essentials to society. But there is a cost to not producing public goods and we are paying the price already. 

In 2025, the Trump/Musk group decided to cut funding for journalism around the world. VOA, start-ups in Africa, exile media from Russia and Ukraine. The intermediary organisations. The losses are staggering and are rippling throughout the ecosystem. 

Some, like professors Gina Neff and Taylor Owen, argue that new regulatory frameworks are needed and that the old ways of governing and measures like the Digital Services Act will not be enforceable in this new world.

Others (Ruedy, Glaisyer and Reichenbach) argue that we need to prepare for “systems collapse” and if this is what is coming our way then the worst option is to try to preserve the current system. That would leave us unprepared for what happens if there is a collapse and out of the picture when the new system is being built.

No need to blame journalists for not innovating

There has been a tremendous amount of creative thinking already. I disagree with the view that journalists didn’t innovate, that they spent too much time blaming the platforms for the shortcomings of the media. To the contrary: journalists and donors have spent a lot of time over the past decades promoting engagement with audiences, supporting local news, trying to communicate and build trust with communities. 

In terms of viability, media outlets have innovated in endless ways, shifted to subscriptions and community-building models and tried all sorts of things to earn income to replace what was lost to the tech advertising monopoly. Governments in some countries have done a lot to support public interest news and have brought in many policies aimed at helping secure the information ecosystem.

There also has been tremendous engagement with the platforms. Attempts have been made to create voluntary codes of conduct for the platforms, to require data transparency, to work together to develop new forms of technology and income streams.

When it became clear that those attempts were not sufficient, governments tried to step in and help publishers. 

The good news is we have the tools. Governments tried, first with voluntary measures but they also know how to do tax policy and they know how to regulate monopolies. 

But when governments tried to use their powers to tax and legislate they were met with platform resistance.

Thus the platforms have been shown themselves to be bad actors in many cases:

1. They have polluted the information ecosystem by making money from spreading mis/disinformation and hate speech;
2. They steal intellectual property and by stealing it they weaken the ability of those who want to provide good information to be able to provide good information;
3. They’ve become monopoly capitalists and stifled innovation;
4. They’ve engaged in tax avoidance despite reaping enormous profits from their monopoly power;
5. The oligarchs heading these firms have used their wealth to interfere with the political process and written the rules in the US to benefit their monopolies; and
6. They have done the same thing in countries around the world. They didn’t respect IP or attempts to get them to pay for IP or copyright. Their playbook was and is the classic US corporate playbook of lobbying, PR, spreading misinformation about the laws, commissioning “research” and threatening exit.

Platform resistance has pushed the discussion further 

Faced with these tactics all over the world, some regulators came to realise that the heart of the problem is platform dominance and power asymmetries between platforms and publishers. That is why in Australia the competition authorities, rather than the copyright office, tried to get platform remuneration for publishers, arguing that fair negotiations were impossible because of platform power.

The Australian case is significant because it led to payments by Google and Meta to publishers and these, along with a raft of measures enacted by the government, helped preserve local news. 

However, when Canada adopted a similar law, Meta responded by dropping news, causing a decline in website traffic to news outlets, particularly smaller ones. 

Google lobbied against similar laws in Brazil and South Africa, and in California and parts of Europe dropped news as a “test”. When the Australian contracts came up for renewal, Meta refused to extend and now Google has said the same thing. 

This platform intransigence led regulators to consider a host of new measures. Australia announced in late 2024 that platforms unwilling to negotiate with publishers through the bargaining code framework could pay a digital levy that would be higher than what bargaining code payments would be. 

South Africa is considering digital levies as well. Other countries are considering fiscal tools like digital services taxes, with funding earmarked for journalism. 

Because platforms have threatened to exit and have downranked news in their algorithms, some regulators are considering policies to ensure that access to quality information is not subject to the decisions of the platforms. These include options such as “must carry” or visibility policies. 

The shift in thinking is dramatic and it’s not clear how such measures would be implemented. First Amendment considerations in the US preclude “compelled speech” and free expression scholars and advocates worry about the potential for misuse.

Had the platforms been more willing to make concessions, policymakers and others would not be considering these new measures. The only way to get concessions from the platforms is to proceed with legislative proposals.  

The next policy frontier will have to be some sort of AI tax, possibly with some funding given to support journalism. 

Paths to compensation – licensing fees and/or a negotiations framework

There are four policy options for the use of IP for AI.

A free-for-all where AI firms can scrape whatever they find online and creators and publishers have no protection. This is essentially what happened during the training period of the AI models. 

A second path would be one in which there is a strict policy of no use of intellectual property of news media. This seems to us to be unrealistic. 

This leaves the most likely options, all of which involve paying for the use of IP. 

• One would be through a fixed scale of fees that are predetermined. Payments to pharma companies during periods of compulsory licensing of medications are one example. Payments to musicians for each music download is another example of a royalty or fixed fee for use; and
• Another option is where the fees to be paid are determined in the context of a negotiations framework. A framework is essential because the larger competitive environment has a direct bearing on the ability of publishers to negotiate. As mentioned, it was the Australian competition commission that noted that a situation where powerful tech companies are on one side of the bargaining table and relatively powerless creators and publishers are on the other, will not lead to fair outcomes.

The path forward

The US government has made it clear that it opposes both tech regulation and taxation all over the world. 

There is a proposal in Trump’s budget bill to pre-empt state regulation on AI for 10 years. There is also a proposal for “revenge taxes” which would punish companies in countries that try to enforce the OECD tax agreement on global minimum corporate taxes (15%, which is already pretty low) or impose digital services taxes on US technology companies.  

This “revenge tax” is such a bad idea that the New York Times reported recently that the US business community has hired lobbyists to try to kill it. 

Make no mistake about what is happening in the US:

Trump and his friends oppose mis/disinformation research and regulation because they don’t want to be stopped from lying online.  

Trump/Vance and their Silicon Valley allies oppose paying for IP because it would eat into their profits. 

So what is left?

There’s been much discussion as to whether the EU and the rest of the world will “cave” or whether they will stick with their plans to tax or regulate Big Tech. India has apparently agreed to roll back its 6% tax on digital advertising.  

There’s also discussion about whether having the US out of global discussions is better because it means the rest of the world can get on with making plans. Normally the US demands concessions to international frameworks and then after dragging out the discussions, refuses to sign on because Congress won’t pass it anyway. 

The EU and the rest of the world and the international community don’t have a choice.

Either the US is isolationist and out of the picture for the long term, in which case the rest of the world has to move ahead in all sorts of areas without us. Or the US comes back to sanity, in which case it’s good to have spent a few years developing smart policies and the US can catch up later. DM

Anya Schiffrin is a senior lecturer in discipline at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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