Information Resilience: Beyond Connectivity

I have been working lately on Internet resilience, essentially, how to keep connectivity running when things go wrong. It is about how submarine cables, routing diversity, local interconnection, and the entire Internet supply chain sustains continuity of service and the preventative work that needs to occur so that we are ready for unpredictable events. Recently, at the Internet Governance Forum, I moderated a workshop organised by the Marconi Society, and it was an important reminder that the Internet’s availability depends not only on engineering, but also on policy and people.

More recently, at Something Digital in Brisbane, I had a conversation that shifted my perspective. I met Van Badham, author and researcher of conspiracy movements, who has shown how communities cohere around falsehoods and how institutional trust can collapse. This conversation made me reflect on a broader dimension of resilience. It is not enough to keep the network available; we must also ensure the integrity and preservation of the information that flows through it.

That reflection brought me back to Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.” Internet resilience keeps the medium going, but resilience today should also encompass the message itself: its provenance, authenticity, and resistance to distortion over time. Seen this way, information resilience becomes the twin of Internet resilience: one keeps the medium available; the other keeps information verifiable and trustworthy.

Think of two kinds of outages. One happens when a submarine cable breaks and a country goes offline. The other happens when information degrades, becomes unreadable, or loses provenance, which highlights how physical decay, technology obsolescence, and intentional tampering can erase or corrupt the record itself. We already have robust tools to address the first outage. For the second, we are only beginning to define what resilience might look like.

Protecting both, the medium and the message

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report shows audiences shifting toward social and video platforms, while trust in traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites declines. People are becoming skeptical, and they are disengaging as well.

Research confirms the risks. A landmark study of Twitter (now X) demonstrated that falsehoods spread faster and further than reliable information. When distortions circulate more quickly on social media, the window for correction is painfully small.

Van Badham’s work illustrates what this looks like on the ground by showing how communities fracture under the weight of conspiracy. Information disorder re-organises social bonds in such way that communities become anchored not in shared facts but in shared fictions.

Borrowing from NIST’s definition of information integrity (guarding against improper modification and ensuring authenticity) I think of this as information resilience. Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan’s framework adds further clarity: misinformation (false, shared unwittingly), disinformation (false, shared with intent), and malinformation (true but weaponized). When the reliability of information fails, every system built on it, from governance to science to public trust, starts to weaken in turn.

Just as Internet resilience relies on multiple layers (redundant cables, diverse IXPs, secure routing)  information resilience requires its own layered approach:

• Prevent – literacy that adds discernment against manipulation.
• Authenticate – provenance to establish source and integrity.
• Detect – fact-checking, trust and safety, crisis communication.
• Repair – visible corrections and rebuilding of trust.

Plurality, diversity, and redundancy keep networks going. The same principles apply to information. As highlighted in Communicating with the Future (Coughlin, Kelsey, Cerf, IEEE Computer, 2025), the odds of long-term survival increase when information is copied widely across different media and locations, and when those copies carry with them provenance markers and integrity checks. The challenge is therefore not only about keeping the network up, but also ensuring that what flows through it remains intact, verifiable and preserved over time.

Solutions for Information Resilience

Solutions to information resilience can be grouped into three broad dimensions.

1. Plurality: 

   Just as no single cable or operator can secure a country’s connectivity, no single source can safeguard an information environment. A resilient information environment needs plural voices, independent journalism, and a diversity of platforms. Redundancy in cables prevents outages; redundancy in sources prevents capture. As Communicating With the Future reminds us, the odds of survival improve when data are stored in many places, across many media, and with different custodians. Plurality in people and plurality in storage are both essential defenses.
2. Integrity and Provenance
:
   Technology provides tools to strengthen authenticity. The C2PA specification, better known as Content Credentials, uses cryptography to log the origin and edits of images, video, and audio. In practice, it makes tampering visible, offering something similar to “routing hygiene” (i.e. RPKI, prefix filtering, or route validation) but for content. Adoption is growing but challenges remain. Provenance only works if ecosystems interoperate, and if citizens understand what the specs mean. Without public understanding, cryptographic labels become unreadable signals.
3. Governance Experiments
:
   Technology alone is insufficient. Governance is beginning to evolve in parallel. The UN Secretary-General’s Policy Brief on Information Integrity set out principles for a voluntary Code of Conduct, aiming to balance interventions with human rights. Europe has gone further: the Digital Services Act obliges very large platforms to assess systemic risks, conduct audits, and mitigate harms. Since February 2025, the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation has been folded into this regime, providing the first real regulatory testbed.
4. Trust architectures:
   As I wrote before in "Governance of Trust", some ideas from network security can apply here. Zero trust  (which assume no source is automatically trustworthy) mirror the vigilance we need in the information environment. Federated technologies (where data and decision-making are distributed) offer models for resilience that avoid single points of failure. Together, these approaches suggest that information resilience, like Internet resilience, will require both distributed architecture and continuous verification.

Conclusion

Thinking back to my exchange with Van Badham, the connection between Internet resilience and information resilience comes into sharper focus. We already measure the former through redundancy, diversity, and security; the latter could be tracked with indicators such as trust in news, virality of harmful content, or adoption of provenance standards. One without the other leaves us exposed.

Generative Artificial Intelligence accelerates this challenge. Large language models can produce convincing but fabricated text at scale. Image generators and video synthesis tools create realistic deepfakes that blur the line between authentic and fabricated evidence. Voice cloning can counterfeit speech with unsettling accuracy. Global institutions such as the ITU are calling for stronger detection and authentication standards. However, resilience ultimately depends on literacy: people must be able to interpret content, question sources, and act responsibly on information. Without that civic capacity, even the best technical safeguards remain empty.

Lastly, preservation matters. Information has to remain accessible, authentic, and readable by future generations. Without durable standards and practices for archiving, we risk creating digital fragments that can no longer be accessed, trusted or understood. The challenge of “Communicating With the Future” reminds us that resilience is not only about withstanding disruption today, but also about ensuring that tomorrow’s societies can interpret and learn from the records we leave behind.

The path forward is not complicated, but it does require commitment:

↪Connect widely → Verify cryptographically → Communicate transparently → Correct visibly → Educate continuously → Preserve sustainably ↩

Holding connectivity, integrity, and preservation together (treating resilience as both a technical and a civic project) can move us from fragility to resilience.