The Need for ‘Infodemiology’ as a discipline to tackle the challenges of misinformation, polarisation, and democratic fragility

Democracies around the world are facing unprecedented and interconnected challenges, including polarisation, misinformation, and democratic backsliding. These challenges are in part informational in nature, prompting researchers from disparate fields of inquiry to study how the consumption and sharing of information impacts relevant attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours. However, information flows through complex and dynamic ecosystems that play out as an interaction between media outlets, social media channels, and socio-political contexts – all filtered by individual psychology. We argue that it is time to move away from the siloed study of informational challenges, and to establish ‘infodemiology’ as a distinct interdisciplinary field, dedicated to understanding how information flows and beliefs may form within these intricate systems. We argue that studying information ecosystems dynamically rather than in isolation yields critical insights that exceed the sum of their individual components. We argue that a minimal infodemiological model must at least four component categories (citizens, broadcast media, social networks, and a regulatory system). By considering the interplay between individual-level (e.g., trust in institutions, susceptibility to manipulation) and system-level (e.g., recommender algorithms, network structures) components of information environments, we argue that the establishment of infodemiology as a distinct field would encourage theoretical and methodological innovations, spark discussions on how to calibrate and validate infodemiological models, and invite practical benefits such as policy interventions.