Our Reading Room › The Information Environment
AI, Algorithms, and Misinformation: Law, Politics, and Our Digital Futures
Jeffrey Layne Blevins
Publisher
Routledge
Year
2026
The Information Environment
Counter-Disinformation & Resilience
AI
algorithms
misinformation
big data
social media
political economy
media law
platform regulation
digital futures
Cogitavi commentary
Blevins approaches the AI-and-misinformation problem from the discipline that generated the most rigorous earlier work on media power: critical political economy. The result is a book that is less interested in viral false claims than in the structural conditions that make information environments systematically distortable. The “minority report” framing — that algorithmic systems predict and thereby shape the social reality they purport to describe — is an analytically productive move that connects platform mechanics to older questions about agenda-setting and ideological reproduction.
The legal and regulatory chapters are the most practically useful for policy audiences. Blevins surveys the existing toolkit — what current frameworks can and cannot reach — without the credulous enthusiasm for technical fixes that weakens much platform governance writing. The open-access publication via Routledge also matters practically: it removes the access barrier for researchers and practitioners in contexts where institutional subscriptions cannot be assumed, which is precisely where information environment problems are often most acute.