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Scholars and policymakers increasingly use ecological metaphors such as “information environment” and “information ecosystem” to describe contemporary informational spaces. Ecology offers more than loanwords. Its concepts and frameworks can help researchers understand relationships among people, technology, content, and society. We leverage natural science definitions and Pickett and Cadenasso’s six parameters of physical ecosystems to develop concrete models for studying complex informational systems.

Open-source investigators and OSINV journalists have spent the last decade turning publicly available data into evidence of war crimes, environmental harms, and human rights abuses. More recently, they have trained the same lens on a different target: the algorithms, bot networks, and generative AI systems that industrialise deception and information disorder.