Rethinking Information Access: Build With, Not For

Kari Jaaskelainen

15 Jan 2026 — 1 min read

Who controls what we see online shapes what we believe—and who holds power. A new paper warns that today's information platforms are vulnerable to authoritarian capture, turbocharged by AI persuasion and Big Tech dominance.

Drawing on Paulo Freire's emancipatory pedagogy, the authors argue for a shift: from "experts fix the system" to communities most affected co-creating it.

First: Technologists should start by posing problems to marginalized communities, inviting them to make and unmake tools that affect their lives.
Second: Redesign the stack so communities can co-opt and co-construct: transparent, remixable ranking; community-governed rules; participatory audits; data cooperatives.

The goal: information access platforms that resist capture because they're built with, not merely for, the oppressed.

Emancipation isn't a feature, it's a practice.

Read: Information Access of the Oppressed (Mitra, Neophytou, Gururaja) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09600v1

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09600v1

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ai informationaccess platformgovernance digitalequity techethics communitypower freire

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