The International Panel on the Information Environment is an international consortium of over 250 experts[1] from 55 countries dedicated to providing actionable scientific knowledge on threats to our information landscape. The IPIE has said it is modeled after and learning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.[2] The concept was officially proposed in a 2021 virtual meeting by Dr. Sheldon Himelfarb, then President and CEO of PeaceTech Lab,[3] and Professor Philip Howard, Professor at Oxford University and then Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, during the first Nobel Prize Summit organized by the US National Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation.[4]
Academics from IPIE in Switzerland collaborate on AI auditing methods. The photo includes academics from Mexico, Chile, India, as well as US academics, such as academic Alondra Nelson, creator of the US AI Bill of Rights, and academic Meredith Broussard, known for her critical books on AI's impacts.
Himmelfarb and Howard (2021) reported several motivations for launching IPIE including the following:
Misinformation is reducing the effectiveness of vaccines.
Foreign interference has impacted the 2016 and 2020 US elections.
Mobs in India, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Mexico have killed innocent people because of misinformation spread on Facebook.
False claims of electoral fraud have eroded public confidence in elections, causing damage that can’t simply be mitigated through fact-checking on social media platforms. This is a global crisis for democracy.
IPIE was legally registered in Switzerland in 2023.[5]
Sheldon Himelfarb is co-founder and chair of the IPIE.[6] The proposal for the IPIE grew in-part out of his work as Founder and CEO of PeaceTech Lab,[7] which itself had been spun out of his work as the Director of the Center of Innovation at the United States Institute of Peace.[8] One of Himelfarb's publications is the 2011 US Institute of Peace publication on, "Evaluating media interventions in conflict countries: Toward developing common principles and a community of practice".[9]
The CEO of IPIE is Dr. Philip N. Howard,[10] who is also the director of Oxford University's Programme on Democracy and Technology.[11] Some of his related research is summarized in his 2020 book, Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives.[12]
Jenny Woods is the Executive Director and COO of the IPIE.[13]
In May 2023 the IPIE was officially introduced during the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit.[14] The Panel's inaugural announcement said,
Algorithmic bias, manipulation and misinformation has become a global and existential threat that exacerbates existing social problems, degrades public life, cripples humanitarian initiatives and prevents progress on other serious threats.
At the launch, Sheldon Himelfarb said that misinformation is "so far-reaching that it is rapidly becoming an existential threat to the planet."[14]
A New York Times report on the Panel's launch described its initial plans to "issue regular reports, not fact-checking individual falsehoods but rather looking for deeper forces behind the spread of disinformation as a way to guide government policy."[15]
