In her keynote talk at Internet Librarian Connect 2025, Clair Wardle, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Cornell University, acknowledged that even as our world becomes increasingly scary, she remains hopeful. She reminisced about The New York Times paying someone $500 to create a deepfake of her in 2019. Today almost everybody can do this—easily, quickly and for free. Yes, that’s scary.
Wardle, co-founder of the non-profit First Draft and of Brown University’s Information Futures Lab as well as developer of a BBC training programme on verification and misinformation, characterized the contemporary information ecosystem as "splintered". Information consumption behaviour has changed, with people using many different platforms to access information. One result of the splintering is hyper-partisan news outlets and platforms, resulting in no one having identical information experiences.
"The information environment is increasingly polluted," she said. AI slop has moved into the mainstream and we now encounter "pink slime" sites that masquerade as local news outlets but are actually built on Substack and have nothing to do with the geographic area they purport to cover. The decline in trust and elimination of fact checkers from major sites such as Facebook, X and Google affects people’s ability to grasp what is real and what is not. Even real videos are now claimed to be deepfakes. Also concerning to her is the attitude of her students who are aware of the amount of misinformation now in circulation but seem indifferent to it.
Power of Participatory Communication
The older model of top-down news has been replaced by a networked narrative, exemplified by a lack of respect for the top-down, elitist approach. An expert makes an assertion based on facts but pushback comes swiftly from a host of social media posts, generally not fact-based. This deficit model, which assumes that more facts solve problems, has been replaced by a participatory model that is dynamic and inclusive with two-way information flows. Participatory communication is story-based, heavily visual and emotional, and relies on lived experience to denote truth.
Wardle advised against responding to misinformation by being snarky. Instead, recognize that, when confronting a "memetic" culture with its insider jokes, nods and winks, and people "doing their own research", what works best is empathy and creating participatory spaces beyond mere factchecking.
What Engaging Communities Looks Like
To engage with your community, gamification is powerful. She pointed to Zohran Mamdani’s August 2025 scavenger hunt across New York City as an example. As part of his run for mayor of the city, his campaign organized a very successful scavenger hunt, with clues related to the city’s history and its mayors, that promoted community engagement.
The Listening Post Collective is another example of bringing knowledgeable influencers together to empower communities through reliable and impactful information.
Wardle concluded with the iceberg analogy. Whilst harmful information is visible on the surface, underneath are quality information seekers. Passive participants may only lurk, but the opportunity for libraries lies in providing content, context and clarity. As a profession, librarians need to listen, to make people feel heard, and to then provide meaningful responses. We are well positioned to help people, to engage our communities.
When it comes to considering the role of misinformation and disinformation in today’s society and the pervasive lack of trust in information, we do need some scepticism. However, the danger lies in trusting nothing. Losing trust in everything we read, see and hear is harmful not only to libraries as arbiters of reality but also to society at large. This affects all of us. Not everything is AI generated, not all videos are fake, and it’s up to us to fight against the scary scenarios that nothing is real and bring back hope to our communities.