There is a risk that the Internet becomes an “echo chamber”, where profiling of citizens, "fake news" and citizens’ own preferences and social groups distort the information citizens can see to biased opinions or sympathetic views that reinforce entrenched views.
Multidisciplinary research is needed in order to answer questions relating to the promotion of information diversity and truth in the Internet. Many of these questions relate to the causes of limited or biased information and how the information can be made less biased or more complete. Examples of causes include unbalanced search results from Internet search providers that tune the results to users’ previous searches or preferences; restrictions on Internet search results through interventions by authoritarian governments; the current high-profile of “fake news” (is the news really fake or is someone merely accusing it of being fake?); and social groups that pursue a particular agenda by reinforcing certain arguments, ignoring other opinions.
These questions raise other questions of jurisdiction, state control and liberty, and a question overarching them all is: what levels of intervention are acceptable before liberty is compromised?
