Information governance is becoming infrastructure: How the Global South allocates long-term capital in the era of disinformation

Introduction: The Information Problem Is Becoming a Development Problem

In January 2024, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published *Effective Responses to Disinformation: An Evidence-Based Policy Guide*, which systematically assessed ten mainstream policy interventions—from fact-checking, foreign sanctions, and algorithmic adjustments, to counter-narrative communications campaigns. The report’s headline conclusion is not an appealing one: no single intervention simultaneously satisfies the three conditions of being well-researched, demonstrably effective, and easily scalable. The effectiveness of most tools remains highly uncertain, and their success depends on a large number of contextual factors that researchers have only just begun to investigate.

This conclusion is usually discussed in the context of media policy in democracies. But for emerging markets and the Global South, it points to a more structural issue: when the pace of digital expansion outpaces the pace of institution-building, information governance is in fact laying the foundation for long-term growth capacity.

I. The Generational Leap in Digitalization Makes Two Things Happen at Once

The path of internet diffusion in emerging markets is fundamentally different from that of early industrialized countries: mobile-first, platform-first, a high share of young people, and rapid urbanization. As a result, the expansion of the digital public sphere and the building of regulatory capacity, judicial capacity, and media professionalism occur almost simultaneously, with no time window for “mature first, then govern.”

At the same time, the financial foundations of traditional media are more fragile. The report notes that the continued decline of local news organizations—especially newspapers—is strongly associated with declines in civic engagement, public knowledge, and trust, and this trust is precisely a hidden variable in the investment environment and the cost of policy implementation. For many countries of the South, local media are often one of the few accountability channels in subnational governance; their contraction is not only a cultural loss but also an erosion of institutional capacity.

II. Portfolio Thinking: Policy Is Like Asset Allocation, Not a Single-Choice Question

The report’s second core recommendation carries clear investment connotations: policymakers should act like investors, holding a diversified portfolio of responses and continuously rebalancing as they learn. Tactical-level actions (fact-checking, platform labeling) and structural-level investments (local news, media literacy) need to be deployed simultaneously, and each policy should come with concrete arrangements for ongoing reassessment.

This framework is not unfamiliar to emerging-market policymakers and multilateral development institutions. Limited fiscal and institutional resources mean precisely that the chips should not be bet on a single tool. The truly difficult part lies in budgetary politics: the payback period for structural investments is measured in decades, making it hard to match election cycles or the rhythm of annual fiscal negotiations.

III. The Undervalued Long-Term Asset: Local Journalism and Media Literacy

The report’s assessment shows that there is significant evidence that media literacy education helps people identify false stories and unreliable sources. But differences in teaching methods mean that the success of one program cannot automatically be generalized to another; the most effective models emphasize empowerment, enabling individuals to actively manage their own information consumption and actively seek high-quality information. The main challenge is not effectiveness but speed, scale, and precision of reach—covering large populations, including the most vulnerable groups, is costly and time-consuming.

For multilingual societies, this cost is further amplified: curricula, teaching materials, and assessment tools all need to be localized language by language, and the marginal cost is far higher than in monolingual markets. This is a frequently overlooked structural disadvantage of the Global South in information governance.

Local journalism is likewise undervalued. The report argues that supporting local news could halt or even reverse the decline in trust, but this causal chain has not yet been directly tested; and the production costs of high-quality journalism and the depth of the industry’s financial decline mean that long-term solutions will likely require government intervention or alternative business models, including indirect instruments such as direct subsidies disbursed through non-governmental intermediaries, tax breaks, and bargaining rights.

IV. The Dilution Effect of Platforms

The report explicitly cautions that platforms and technology should not be treated as the sole focus. Recommendation algorithms do encourage and amplify misleading content, but traditional television programming, statements by political elites, and narratives spread by trusted community members also shape people’s speech, beliefs, and behavior. More importantly, the growth in the number of digital platforms dilutes the actual effectiveness of any single company’s anti-misinformation efforts.

In emerging markets, this picture is more complex: information flows depend heavily on closed messaging apps and private communities, content is difficult to observe publicly, and the language coverage and accessibility of platform governance tools are uneven. In other words, governance approaches centered on public social platforms may be significantly less effective in Southern countries than policymakers expect.

V. The Other Side of Sovereignty Risk

The report puts forward a judgment that is often avoided: countering disinformation is not always apolitical. Actions such as removing fake accounts are largely politically neutral, but counter-propaganda actions that compete with false ideas through narrative and emotional appeals are difficult to distinguish from traditional political advocacy. Any institution that declares what is true and what is false, and backs that judgment with power, resources, or prestige, implicitly makes a claim to authority and therefore has political meaning and consequences; denying this reality may lead to overreach or trigger backlash, further deepening distrust.

For emerging markets, this connects directly to the issue of sovereignty risk. Platform regulation, content governance, and data localization have become an intersection of state capacity and political legitimacy, and an important variable for international capital in assessing policy uncertainty. For long-term investors, what truly needs to be tracked is not the wording of any single law, but the predictability of governance boundaries.

VI. Generative AI: Changing the Cost Curve, but Not Necessarily the Rules## VI. Generative AI: Changing the Cost Curve, but Not Necessarily the Rules

The report’s assessment of generative AI is complex rather than dramatic. AI may indeed make it cheaper and easier to produce realistic and personalized false content, but whether people believe a piece of information is often not determined primarily by how realistic the content is—repetition, narrative appeal, perceived authority, group identity, and the psychological state at the time of reception may be more critical. At the same time, AI can also be used against disinformation, for example by helping fact-checkers improve efficiency under human supervision.

For the Global South, the key variable is the distribution of language and data resources. Fact-checking tools, training data, and local fact databases for low-resource languages are relatively lacking, which may amplify existing asymmetries. The information divide in the AI era is likely to deepen along both lines at once: language and computing power.

VII. Asymmetries in Knowledge Production

The report calls research a “generational task”: filling knowledge gaps is not just about commissioning a few studies, but requires investment in basic research infrastructure—human capital, data availability, and technical capacity. The report also offers a sober benchmark: progress in the social sciences is slow and rarely provides definitive answers to the most difficult questions; a century of economic research has helped policymakers curb depressions and panics, but has not eliminated them, and debates over major questions continue.

For research institutions in the Global South, this is essentially a matter of agenda-setting. Who defines the questions, who controls the data, and who has the capacity to evaluate ultimately determine whose interests and knowledge traditions the policy mix serves. The Southern perspective in the field of information governance should not be merely an object of study, but should become a producer of research.

Conclusion: Accounting for Information Integrity in the Long-Term Growth Ledger

The long-term growth of emerging markets depends on demographics, urbanization, capital formation, and productivity, and equally on institutional trust and policy predictability. Information integrity is not a soft issue, but the public-good foundation of these variables.

The report’s implications can be condensed into three points: there is no silver bullet, so combinations are needed; structural-level investment has slow returns, so long-term commitment is needed; governance has political implications, so the boundaries of authority must be faced honestly. For the Global South, the viable path is more likely to be long-term investment that is combined, driven by local languages, anchored in local institutions, and equipped with continuous evaluation mechanisms—rather than the rapid deployment of any single tool. Writing information integrity into the infrastructure checklist may be closer to the true scale of the problem than treating it as media policy.