I'm My guest today says that we pay too much attention to disinformation.

Before we can effectively combat disinformation directly, she believes, we need a better understanding of the overall information

environment. This, in her view, will require a whole new field of study, what she calls

information ecology. Alicia Wanlis is the director of the partnership for countering influence

operations at the Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace. She's building the field of information ecology from the ground up.

She's been writing articles. She's working on a book, and she's creating an organization called

the Institute for Research on the Information Environment.

Here's some good news. According to Alicia, we can already learn a lot about information environments,

including our own, by looking to history. Across the millennia, she tells us, there are patterns.

Here's one. A new technology comes along. It causes the volume and velocity of information to rise. This, in turn, leads to

information competition, or an information war, if you will, between groups seeking ideological supremacy

within the information ecosystem. Does that sound familiar? Maybe like what we're experiencing

today? Let's ask Alicia about it. This is the tech policy podcast. I'm Corbyn Barthold. Alicia, welcome.

Thank you for having me, Corbyn. I'm glad to be here. It's so good to have you on. Let's start with

that claim that we pay too much attention to disinformation. I actually ran into your work

in Lawfare, a great essay you wrote there that I will make sure to put in the show notes. And in

that article, you even go so far as to say that you don't believe in disinformation. So please

unpack that provocative thought for us.

Happy to.

I don't believe in disinformation in the sense that it is the sole problem that we should be focusing on in the information environment.

It's one of many and it is perhaps satisfying to do case studies on and look at as a phenomenon, but beyond that,

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