Modus Co-Operandi

The merging of generative AI with social media is bringing forth a new “media genre”: synthetic media. In a contributing article for HORIZONT, Clemens Pig explains why this new AI information society also needs a new, cooperative media system and what this could look like.

The United Nations has declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives. The theme of the UN is “Cooperatives build a better world”. Self-help, self-management and self-responsibility comprise the central idea of the cooperative legal form. Put simply, competing companies form a joint venture to fulfil defined services. These are generally services that would be too time-consuming, too expensive or too complex for each individual company to provide on its own. This cooperative principle is now becoming the driving force and role model for cooperation between competing media companies vis-à-vis the Big Tech platforms in a digital (dis)information society that has become increasingly intransparent. That is because the media are joining forces to form a new ecosystem, skilfully appropriating the mechanisms of the platform economy – to secure their own economic existence and thus to secure the democratic future of the “professional journalism” model. From shareholder value to member value, current and ongoing examples of media cooperation range from centralised login solutions for users (OneLog in Switzerland, MediaKey in Austria) and cross-industry media literacy programmes against fake news and disinformation for young audiences (Use the News in Germany) to the merger of media outlets and the founding of their own media LLMs featuring fact-based news (GPT-NL in the Netherlands).

International blueprints for cooperative newsroom management include the European Newsroom in Brussels, the Democracy Newsroom of the G7 countries and the Trusted AI Hub of all European, state-independent news agencies. A central feature of these cooperative media joint ventures in Europe is the key role played by news agencies in decision-making, organisation and operational implementation. The main advantage of this is that cooperatives or cooperatively organised news agencies bring even the strongest competitors together peacefully and profitably around a common table and are able to implement modern solutions for the media – without any competitive legal or financial risk for the participants (members) and with a rapid time to market. Cooperative companies and cooperatives are joint ventures and, in their modern interpretation, operate as digital cooperatives: their corporate value is realised through the joint services they provide, more as member value than as shareholder value. From social to synthetic media, the timing of this renaissance of the cooperative principle in the European media industry makes sense: for reasons that are well known, media enterprises are under enormous economic pressure, and in some cases the polarisation on social networks is also leading to a significant loss of trust in professional media. The internet platform has disrupted the business models of legacy media and led to a shift in advertising revenues (key phrases: winner takes all, cut the go-between, performance-based targeting).

Social media has torpedoed Jürgen Habermas‘ hopes for digital political participation and democratic involvement (key phrases: algorithm-based emotionalisation, polarisation and echo chambers).

Social media (which is neither social nor media) is now being followed by synthetic media: no one can say with certainty whether information is human- or AI-generated or a hybrid product. This applies to all formats, including text, image and video. The merging of generative AI and social media is simply generating a new “media genre” – synthetic media. 2015 saw the start of the first boom in fake news and “alternative facts” – traditionally produced by people in areas of political PR and in “alternative” media with reciprocal feedback and algorithm-based amplification effects.

Following a time lag, Europe experienced its first major pan-European wave of disinformation in the digital space of social media with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic after the United States. As a counter-reaction, a number of international fact-checking operations such as the International Fact Checking Network have emerged (up until Trump II still with strong funding from Big Tech platforms, which will be discontinued in Europe at the end of 2025).

The use of AI in social media to produce arbitrary content in all formats and the ongoing, controllable addition of this synthetic content to the agitation of social networks creates an “ideal” breeding ground for the development of autocratic regimes. Professional independent media and the independent judiciary of a democracy are always the first targets of autocrats, coupled with the establishment of their own communication structures and often nationalised media. The new world order that has emerged in recent months, particularly from a European perspective, and has become visible at a dramatic pace, is based squarely on this new communication order of social and “alternative” media in transition to synthetic media. This updated content generation of synthetic media likely represents a final tipping point:

• firstly, for social media itself: How long can the networks themselves and their users endure this?
• secondly, for liberal democracy: How long can a genuine democracy that wants to be more than just an electoral democracy, but requires fact-based and balanced public opinion-forming and decision-making in the run-up to elections, hold out?
• and thirdly, for the professional media: How long can the media and their financing, use and basis of trust endure? And what urgent systemic and operational areas of activity can be derived from this? From a dual to a cooperative media system, the areas of activity for the media are on the table and present themselves along the lines of acute economic and social necessities such as securing a commercial livelihood and securing democracy. The critical fault line in responding to and fulfilling these needs shifted fundamentally around twenty years ago and has now been definitively and unmistakably exposed by the transformation from social media to synthetic media: the central fault line for a media system in a European country in a liberal democracy no longer lies between private publishers and public broadcasters, but between national private and public broadcasters and global Big Tech platforms.

If we consider the founding of Facebook approximately twenty years ago and, shortly afterwards, the first tweet on Twitter as the breakthrough of social media, then this marked the transition from unidirectional to bidirectional communication as well as the beginning of the fourth phase of development for the Western media and communications system following the Second World War: from print-dominated (1) to TV-centred (2) to the multimedia diversity of the internet (3) to the establishment of groundbreaking social media in approximately 2005 (4). At this point, the foundation was already being laid for a shift from the previous dividing line in the media system (dual) to a new marker on the map: the cooperative media system as a demarcation between all professional media and social and synthetic media.

This distinction basically involves the essential differentiation between the nature of independent journalism (source diversity, source credibility, check-recheck-doublecheck, criticism and enlightenment) and the business model of professional media (paid content, legal certainty, public value in private or public service).

With the development of generative AI and the ominous – because often untested and maliciously intended – marriage of this technology with the production logic of social media, synthetic media is emerging as a new media genre, ushering in the fifth phase of the (political) communication system. Since the terms communication and media are related in nature but nevertheless completely separate entities, it is only logical that the permanent influences of the new communication order on the media system provoke reactions: the media system is an ecosystem that, like all ecosystems, evolves in response to environmental influences. From an evolutionary perspective, this further development occurs through adaptation to new circumstances and through cooperation within the ecosystem. A new operating system from within, along with the necessary European regulation of global platforms in the areas of AI and ancillary copyright to (re)establish the competitiveness of the media ecosystem, the professional media system requires a new operating system from within. The modus operandi of this new operating system is cooperation. The idea of a cooperative media system is based on a simple logic: platform technologies have massively changed business models and media usage behaviour and have allowed the phenomena of (AI) disinformation to grow in the digital spaces of the information society.

This calls for innovative technologies and digital solutions to counteract these phenomena and provide users with new answers and tools. It is now imperative that we, as quality media outlets and agencies, work together to build and operate these answers and tools as a joint “media platform”: in cooperative ownership, with autonomous management and control, and as an open-source service. A brief selection of areas for action in the field of technology:

• GPT-Austria: a cross-media service for users of transparent and legally compliant AI media chatbots (editorial retrieval-augmented generation) based on fact-based training data and news.
• AI Centre: a collaborative AI media platform for the automated individualisation and personalisation of verified content for users in the look and feel of the respective media brand (ready-mades for print and online).
• Shared infrastructure: shared IT infrastructures and IT operating solutions to reduce costs and standardise data-based editorial content exchange (editorial, content and digital asset management systems, workflow and planning systems, image and video indexing, digital publishing).
• Media lab: cross-media innovation management with a cooperative fund for the future to finance tools for fake news detection and trusted content labelling with a focus on young audiences.
• Media space: collaborative community solutions as digital, topic-related spaces for knowledge featuring age verification, login and editorial embedding as an alternative to algorithm-based media use.

Modus Co-Operandi is the operating system of the future aimed at a new, cooperative media system in liberal democracies – I look forward to it.

Clemens Pig is the CEO of APA – Austria Press Agency