Epistemic Security for Crisis Resilience

Robust and healthy information ecosystems are critical to a democratic society’s ability to navigate complex challenges and crises. From climate change and pandemics to economic collapse and election interference, effective and timely response depends on a societies’ ability to coordinate public action and response.

However in a modern digital era riddled with hyperrealistic fake content, rising distrust in government and traditional news media, epistemic security – a society’s collective ability to yield and deal in reliable and trustworthy information – is becoming ever more difficult to defend. Adverse influences on information supply chains can add fuel to ongoing crises, slow response to crises in action, and nurture seeds of public dissatisfaction and distrust.

This project, conducted in partnership with the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security (CETaS) at the Alan Turing Institute, gathered a leading group of experts on subjects related to epistemic security to analyse a set of hypothetical crisis scenarios in order to better understand epistemic drivers of crisis. We employed red-teaming and scenario mapping methodologies routinely employed in national security settings to predict scenarios and test interventions. We identified seven intervention areas that promise to be the most efficient targets for strengthening the UK’s information ecosystems and mitigating the likelihood and severity of a wide variety of epistemically exacerbated crises.