In 1997, I was sent to Bougainville, not as a combat soldier but as part of a military information support team. The island had just come through a brutal civil war, and a fragile truce was holding by a thread. In that setting, the most dangerous weapon wasn’t always a gun. It was a rumour. Information moved slowly and lived in face-to-face conversations, in village meetings, in whispers passed along jungle paths. If someone started a story about what one group intended to do to another, it could harden suspicion overnight and tear apart the trust needed to keep the peace. What people believed was happening could become just as important as what was actually happening, and often more so. Our job was not to drop leaflets from the sky or blast messages through loudspeakers. We had to earn the right to be heard. We started a small printed newspaper, and we delivered it ourselves, walking into communities, sitting down with people, returning week after week. The paper contained reliable information about the peace process, but its real power came from something harder to measure: the relationships we built and the credibility of the Truce Monitoring Group. People paid attention because they knew who we were, because we showed up consistently, and because our actions matched our words. Nearly thirty years later, sitting here in Australia, I keep coming back to that experience. The technology around us has changed beyond recognition, but the challenge feels strangely familiar. We have democratised the creation and distribution of information in astonishing ways. Anyone with a phone can reach millions. Yet we have not developed equally effective ways to establish whether information is reliable, who stands behind it, and why we should trust it. The tools are different, but the human problem is the same: uncertainty can eat away at trust, and trust is the foundation of any community, online or off.
Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian communications theorist, saw pieces of this coming in the 1960s when he talked about the global village. He argued that electronic communications would shrink the world and recreate something like the closeness and immediacy of oral societies, where everyone knew everyone and stories moved through the whole tribe at once. Today’s digital environment has amplified that vision into something McLuhan could hardly have imagined. We have global reach, but we also have algorithmic amplification, targeted advertising, synthetic media, and artificial intelligence. Information no longer flows through a village square; it flows through networks shaped by familiarity, identity, and shared belief. Sometimes a claim gets repeated hundreds of times before anyone checks it, and repetition itself begins to feel like evidence. By the time a correction arrives, it may come from someone outside the network, an institution or person already distrusted, so the correction bounces off and leaves the false belief stronger than before. Bougainville and Australia seem like two different worlds. Bougainville was emerging from armed conflict and suffered from information scarcity. Australia is a stable democracy drowning in information abundance. But the deeper dynamic is similar. When people cannot figure out which claims to believe, trust erodes. In Bougainville, the danger was that a rumour would reignite a war. In Australia, the danger is less catastrophic but still corrosive: a public that can no longer agree on basic facts loses its ability to solve problems together. Uncertainty doesn’t just confuse us; it isolates us. When nobody can agree on what is real, we stop trusting the institutions we might otherwise work through, and collective action becomes far harder.
None of this means digital communication has been a mistake. It has brought enormous benefits. Citizens can challenge authority, expose wrongdoing, organise movements, and participate in public debate in ways that were impossible before. Healthy scepticism is not the enemy of democracy; it is a sign that democracy is alive. The danger comes when people cannot tell the difference between credible evidence and manipulation, especially when group identity decides which sources are acceptable. Psychologically, we are wired to trust the people we think are on our side. If a claim fits our story, we let it in easily. If it threatens our group’s status, we resist it, no matter how strong the evidence. This is not a matter of ignorance or stupidity. It is social identity doing exactly what it was meant to do. And now artificial intelligence is pouring fuel on the fire. AI can produce convincing text, images, and video at extraordinary speed and scale, making it easier than ever to create a claim that looks like proof. Verification, by contrast, requires time, evidence, and judgment. It is slow and uncomfortable. The result is a growing imbalance between the production of persuasive claims and the establishment of their reliability. To be fair, AI can also help us verify things and can expand access to knowledge. But the balance is wrong, and it is getting worse. We have built machines that can lie more fluently than we can detect the lies. That is not an argument for giving up on openness. It is an argument for building better ways to handle this new environment, just as we had to build better ways to handle rumour in Bougainville.
For much of the twentieth century, newspapers, broadcasters, universities, and governments played a central role in deciding what information reached the public. Their authority was never absolute, and it was not always deserved. They made mistakes, they held biases, and sometimes they abused their power. But they were identifiable institutions. People could scrutinize their claims, challenge their errors, and hold them responsible when they failed. That accountability gave their information a certain weight. Digital communications have weakened these institutions without automatically replacing them with equally accountable alternatives. A social media platform can influence millions of people while remaining utterly opaque about how it decides what to show them. It can generate enormous engagement without building the kind of relationships that make a community trust a source. It has no obligation to be transparent about its algorithms, to correct falsehoods consistently, or to explain whose interests its design serves. This is where Bougainville offers a lesson that should not be lost. The newspaper we printed only worked because communities had a relationship with the people and organisation behind it. Credibility came from consistent engagement and demonstrated conduct. It came from showing up, listening, and being honest when things went wrong. Today’s digital platforms have scale without those qualities. They can pretend to be neutral conduits, but they are not neutral. They create environments that shape what we see, what we believe, and what we argue about. In an open society, influence of that magnitude must come with accountability. We cannot go back to the old gatekeepers, and we should not want to. But we need to find new ways to make power answerable to the people it affects.
So what do we do? The first step is to recognise that trust has to be earned, not claimed. This applies to every institution, including governments. A public service should explain its decisions clearly, acknowledge uncertainty honestly, and demonstrate how public engagement influences outcomes. That means being more transparent about the evidence behind decisions and more willing to say “we don’t know yet” when that is the truth. It also means treating citizens as participants rather than audiences. The same standard should apply to media organisations, universities, and experts. They must make their evidence and reasoning accessible to scrutiny. Authority should flow from demonstrated credibility, not from institutional status alone. A degree on its own is no longer enough; people want to see how a conclusion was reached. They want to be able to check it themselves. Democratic debate needs fewer performances of certainty and more honest explorations of uncertainty. At the same time, digital platforms need to be held accountable for the environments they create. They should be transparent about recommendation systems, automated amplification, and synthetic content. Citizens have a right to know why a particular piece of information reached them and whose interests its circulation serves. Independent oversight is essential, but it must be designed with care. Protecting freedom of expression is and must remain a core value. The goal is not to control speech. It is to make sure that people can know what they are looking at, that they can see when content is generated by an algorithm or a bot, and that the platforms can be challenged when they act irresponsibly. That kind of transparency does not silence anyone; it empowers everyone.
Finally, we have to invest in the capacity of citizens themselves. Information integrity is not just a technical problem. It is a democratic capability. Education matters, not only in teaching media literacy but in nurturing the habit of questioning, listening, and revising one’s views. Independent journalism matters, especially local journalism that reports on communities and gives people a shared foundation of fact. Local civic organisations matter, because they create spaces where people can talk across difference and practice the messy art of public reasoning. Opportunities for constructive public debate matter, not the kind of shouting that has become common online, but real exchanges where disagreement is respectful and evidence is welcome. The OECD’s recent report, “Facts not Fakes,” makes a similar point. Information integrity requires institutional accountability, media independence, and societal resilience. Australia should translate those principles into concrete reforms that can be evaluated over time: more transparent public decisions, independently scrutinised digital platforms, and stronger opportunities for informed civic participation. But the ultimate objective is not to restore unquestioning faith in government or eliminate disagreement. A resilient democracy depends on citizens being able to challenge authority, test evidence, and disagree without losing the capacity to make collective choices. In Bougainville, the printed newspaper was useful, but the trust behind it was indispensable. Our technologies have changed beyond recognition, but the human need for credible relationships has not. Democratising communication was a profound achievement. Ensuring that democracy can sustain trust, accountability, and informed collective judgement is the unfinished work of the information revolution, and it belongs to all of us.