Online information access (IA) platforms are targets of authoritarian capture. These concerns are particularly serious and urgent today in light of the rising levels of democratic erosion worldwide, the emerging capabilities of generative AI technologies such as AI persuasion, and the increasing concentration of economic and political power in the hands of Big Tech. This raises the question of what alternative IA infrastructure we must reimagine and build to mitigate the risks of authoritarian capture of our information ecosystems. We explore this question through the lens of Paulo Freire's theories of emancipatory pedagogy. Freire's theories provide a radically different lens for exploring IA's sociotechnical concerns relative to the current dominating frames of fairness, accountability, confidentiality, transparency, and safety. We make explicit, with the intention to challenge, the dichotomy of how we relate to technology as either technologists (who envision and build technology) and its users. We posit that this mirrors the teacher-student relationship in Freire's analysis. By extending Freire's analysis to IA, we challenge the notion that it is the burden of the (altruistic) technologists to come up with interventions to mitigate the risks that emerging technologies pose to marginalized communities. Instead, we advocate that the first task for the technologists is to pose these as problems to the marginalized communities, to encourage them to make and unmake the technology as part of their material struggle against oppression. Their second task is to redesign our online technology stacks to structurally expose spaces for community members to co-opt and co-construct the technology in aid of their emancipatory struggles. We operationalize Freire's theories to develop a problem-posing framework for envisioning emancipatory IA platforms of the future.

翻译：在线信息获取平台是威权主义攫取的目标。鉴于全球范围内民主侵蚀程度的加剧、生成式人工智能技术（如AI说服）新兴能力的涌现，以及经济和政治权力日益集中于大型科技公司之手，这些问题在当今显得尤为严重和紧迫。这引发了一个问题：我们必须重新构想并构建何种替代性的信息获取基础设施，以减轻威权主义攫取我们信息生态系统的风险？我们通过保罗·弗莱雷的解放教育学理论视角来探讨这个问题。相对于当前占主导地位的公平性、问责制、保密性、透明度和安全性框架，弗莱雷的理论为探索信息获取的社会技术关切提供了一个截然不同的视角。我们明确揭示并意图挑战这样一种二分法：即我们作为技术专家（构想和构建技术的人）与技术用户之间的关系。我们认为这反映了弗莱雷分析中的师生关系。通过将弗莱雷的分析延伸至信息获取领域，我们挑战了这样一种观念，即（利他主义的）技术专家有责任提出干预措施，以减轻新兴技术对边缘化社区构成的风险。相反，我们主张技术专家的首要任务是将这些问题作为问题向边缘化社区提出，鼓励他们在反对压迫的物质斗争中，去制造和重塑技术。他们的第二个任务是重新设计我们的在线技术栈，从结构上开辟空间，让社区成员能够共同选择和共同构建技术，以支持他们的解放斗争。我们将弗莱雷的理论操作化，开发出一个问题提出框架，用于构想未来的解放性信息获取平台。