By Meg Tapia
Publication Date: 2026-05-11 01:09:00
Most Australians already know that there is something wrong with our information environment. An Australian National University survey of 20,000 average Australians found disinformation consistently ranked among the top national security concerns. Participants rated it as more serious than the prospect of a foreign military attack.
That gut feeling — what participants described as being overwhelmed by the amount of information, an inability to distinguish truth from untruth, and a sense of algorithmic manipulation — now has economic evidence.
In a September 2025 report, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Maxim Ventura-Bolet of Columbia University use economic models to show why the information environment is deteriorating and explain why AI will make it worse unless governments intervene.
Their key conclusion is that without regulation, markets will systematically produce more disinformation and less truth, and AI will exacerbate the problem. Today’s…
