 Good morning everyone. If we can come together we will soon start today's first session. Okay, let's begin. Welcome back everyone. We hope that you had an enjoyable evening yesterday and I want to especially thank the Central Election Commission on Moldova for organizing that event. Yesterday we spoke about the essential role of oversight institutions in bringing transparency to online campaign finance. We talked about the role of political parties. In this session we will consider another essential stakeholder which is civil society. As I'm fond of saying we don't actually have any examples on this planet anyway of countries where transparency in party campaign finance has been achieved with public oversight institutions alone. Their role is essential but it must be complemented by active engagement of civil society groups and media as well. And I've been thinking about it. I think this is probably even more so with online campaigning and online advertising than with many other areas that we are discussing in this field because this as we established yesterday is very much a new and very quickly changing field. It doesn't lend itself very well to oversight by those whose work is governed by legislation, governed by formal rules because those as we know tend to move fairly slowly. So it's essential that their crucial work is complemented by initiatives by civil society which may be freer in many situations to test out new approaches in monitoring and oversight of online campaign finance. I'm also very happy that in this panel we are balancing the gender representation which was a little bit shaky in some panels yesterday. And we have with us Francesca Bugeri, social media coordinator at the election observation and democracy support. We have Victoria Maximova, political finance analyst at Chesno in Ukraine. Mariana Foxa, analyst of political parties finances from Alex here in Moldova. And we have Anastasia Romanyuk at the Civic Movement of Pora also in Ukraine. I'm going to start by handing over to you Francesca. Thank you Magnus. Good morning to you all. I have a presentation. Thank you. I'm turning over here. Thank you. I'm here today to represent the EODS project, election observation and democracy support. EODS project is financed by the European Commission. It is a long-standing project renew every four years. What is the focus of the project is to provide support in terms of training capacity building to election observation missions. What is the state of play of the project and the novelty of the project is now the new component fully dedicated to social media analysis and to develop a standardized methodology to observe this very challenging field and area of observation. This is a global challenge. It's not only a challenge faced by the European Commission and by the European Union, but also by other international observer groups. This is why we try to respond together and to adopt the methodology together in cooperation. One of the novelty for us is also the presence in the core team that we deployed in the mission of its social media analyst is a specifically dedicated analyst to assess this area. So now the new election observation mission are composed by three media units, a traditional media unit, an extracian media unit and a press unit. So it's a new feature. The documents we have published, you can see. I encourage to have a look at the EODS website. The declaration of a principle for international observation issued the guidelines. Those guidelines are published in our public and published in our website. We are developing a methodology step-by-step guide to guide the experts in the field to provide this specific assessment of the ecosystem. Here I want to present the challenges, so the difficult aspect, but also some success and to share with you and to learn from you. Here some of the main challenges that we faced at the beginning of the project, 2021, we have a lack of methodological approach. We have experts going to the field and using different methods, different systems, different tools. So there was a need, big need of definition of which tools to use to assess social media. Operational difficulties within the experts, who is doing what? That was one of the challenges we faced. Time constraints of the mission. Of course, the mission is very limited. You know, all your missions, your missions are somehow longer, two, three months. And still the time for assessment is very limited. And also the use of a terminology seems a basic aspect, but to use the same terminology. What is hate speech, for example? There is not common definition for hate speech. Paid advertisement we've seen yesterday. Still, you didn't come up with a common definition on paid political advertisement. So all these definitions need to have a common approach. And then identify what are the main area of assessment, what are the main areas that in fact for the election observation mission is feasible to assess in such a short time frame. And there was a need for a technical guide to explicitly display the methods used for this assessment. Something important to say is that during an election observation mission, we cannot have an exhaustive monitoring of social media platforms. It is not feasible. In fact, it will be the speed, the reach, and the volume of the content produced. And of course, again, to the mission time frame. This is the reason why the election observation mission uses a complementary approach. It's a quantitative method, but qualitative methods as well. Important is the cooperation between the experts and the stakeholders, the interlocutors. This is an essential aspect of the mission, how to gather information and make assessment on online ecosystem and content. And then another aspect is the accuracy and credibility of this report. How can we give credibility to this EU reporting? We do it through transparency of methodology. And this is something that with the project we really insisted and we focus on since the beginning of the project. And the approach we have and the method we have is clearly explained in the annex, which are part of the final report that you will find publicly available for all the country where the EU observes. The social media monitoring findings are at the end of this report. And then an important feature of EU election observation mission is the fact that in fact, in the report, we can quote the work of civil society groups. In the country we observe, we meet credible and incredibly excellent civil society groups. And so the mission can give visibility to this work done in the field of social media. And of course there are essential partners, civil society groups are essential partners for us to understand what are the most challenging areas to assess when we arrive in a country. The mission rests on international and make assessment based on international standards and human rights. The important part is to refer to those principles when we make recommendations. Those are the main key standards where we assess the campaign online, freedom of expression, right to political participation, privacy and data protection, access of information, transparency, equality and freedom from discrimination. I would like now to present you the framework that we use to assess. We are developing as you can imagine, as all of you, it's a work in progress. It's a new area and the update of the guidelines is quite fast. So we finish one guideline and immediately there is an update to do on tools and methods This is the framework that we use and in this final report of an election observation mission, you will always find a general regulatory framework and assessment of the status of the legal aspect in the country. Agreements between EMBs and platforms and freedom of expression, access to information, all the most important rights and legal framework in place. The digital ecosystem, one introduction on the digital ecosystem is always present in the reporting, what is the presence of political contestants, presence of other state and other state actors, influencer, activist, how they're using social media during the campaign, what is the most relevant platforms in the country because this is also one of the first assessments to make. And then the malicious use of online platform, which means you can see different practices, information manipulation is one of them, derogatory speech, hate speech content, intimidation and threats to contestants, in particularly towards women, at least in my property, those are the aspects that the mission try to assess in the country. And then online campaign and online content to put forward by different actors. So not only official contestants, politicians, political parties and candidates, but also third parties and other actors, influencers and CSOs, EMBs and the areas we are really focusing, information manipulation and paid ads are the more complex area, especially in such a limited time in the mission. Where do we analyze those aspects mainly? I don't even see them. And where do we analyze those aspects? The most relevant platform for the EU election observation mission we have seen during those years remain Facebook, the most important ones for all the countries, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and now is an emerging one to talk in some of the country where we deployed the mission. The EU election observation mission includes only public social media content, therefore private messaging groups like WhatsApp are not part of the scope of the methodology. This doesn't mean that the mission cannot quote the work of civil society groups. If there are credible civil society working on WhatsApp, of course, that have been analyzing WhatsApp, of course, that can be reported by the election observation mission reports, but it's important to explain that the methodology are not part of the scope of the method we use. And other tools for visualization tools. Here I'm going to list the main tools we use to collect data from Facebook and Instagram, and that was one of the big projects right at the beginning. Facebook decided to grant the access to crowd tangles, so now we can give the access to all the experts in the field, and this helps us to have a very consistent analysis in the ground. To collect data from Twitter, from TikTok, and YouTube, we use CentiOne as the main social listening tool, is a user friendly tool and has proven to be an excellent method to collect data. One of the today's discussion, of course, and this conference is focusing on paid political advertising online, is the new emerging area, very difficult to assess and to track and to monitor. The most common types of political advertising and sponsor contents that we analyze are the label official ads by political party and candidates, ads by third parties and non-contestants. Those are very difficult to track and to assess, and then advertising by state institutions and public officials, whom I use those ads to support certain parties, circumventing campaign rules, and then dark ads which are visible only to the publisher and the target audience, so as well another very difficult feature to analyze and to monitor. But these are the most important aspects that we are focusing on. We also, I think it's important also to say that in the country where the EU observes online spending is not, compared to the whole campaign spending, is in some country negligible, so it's still very relevant to spend through traditional media means, which is something that has been in the context when we analyze this ecosystem. Advertising online by non-contestants is of course one of the most emerging interesting areas of analysis, but to report is very difficult due to the fact that overall lack of regulation consistent in all the country we observe, unclear online platforms, community rules, there is little transparency about who paid for those ads and who benefit from all these ads, and of course those are the ads where most likely there are instances of disinformation and patterns that can undermine the integrity of the process. And obviously those ads are the ones that will circumvent campaign rules more easily compared to other ads. I will conclude my presentation with showing something that has been said yesterday already, the lack of legal framework when it comes to political campaigns and political spending online, and here is one of the tools that the EU has to make recommendations to a country to improve its election process in line with regional and international standards, and what we have seen more frequently here in the area in all the region of the world where the EU observes something in common is the fact that the most common shortcomings in fact comes to campaign finance are the lack of adequate campaign finance regulations, lack of effective oversight bodies, the lack of transparency in online paid ads, and the rules are not in line with international standards. Those are the main features and the main shortcomings that we have observed. Thank you for your attention, and I'm ready for questions. Thank you very much Francesca. Any questions? You'll think about that while I can ask you a question, and I should say underlying everything, all the questions I might ask is we're all kind, when I think that became quite clear yesterday, we're all thinking about this issue, none of us have the final answers to these issues, so I'm not expecting the answer to any question I ask to be the final one, but thinking. And one was as you was showing, there is a clear connection between social media advertising and usage and of course the financial aspect of it. So what can EU observation missions do? We have a social media analyst, we have a campaign finance analyst, what can be done to combine that work to bring more, a better understanding of how that works in the individual countries? Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, what the, also in terms of how deep we can go into this analysis is very, it's a big challenge for the EU election observation mission. And in terms of reporting, I think we still are, the most powerful tool is the recommendation. The recommendation that the campaign finance together with social media analysts can provide to different interlocutors and stakeholders. Now online platforms are also included in those recommendations and suggest to, to electoral stakeholders in the country more to focus on what are the measures that they can put in place. So to advise them when we are there during the election, to provide them some data, we observe and to, and to suggest to take actions, also immediate actions that they can, for example, in terms of connecting with the platforms representatives, and more meetings, and more, and also political parties, code of conduct, and, and more awareness. And so this is something that, that can be done. As I said, there are, it's very complex kind of analysis. And so we have limitation by the time we remain in a country and how deep we can go into these analysis. And of course, for, for example, for paid ads placed by third parties, it's very complex. And we don't have the resources enough resources to go so deep in the, in the aspect. And when the ad library, for example, in the country is not displayed, is not open, we advise the social media analyst not to go too far, because it could be at the end a waste of resources for not much. But I think the most powerful tool remains the recommendation. Thank you very much. Any other questions? Yes. Can we, yeah. Good morning. Thank you for it. It's okay. Sorry. Thank you for your presentation. It was very useful for us what's coming from electoral management, which you made us thinking a little bit deeper. I'm from bossy and heads of the member of the commission to gather with my colleague, and we didn't have a chance during this event to present, but we really are learning and for us is dedication. And I don't want to bother you with our rules and regulations and weaknesses of the system. But let me just say that last elections for the first time, we as election stakeholders were for the first time invited by transparency international to be a part of capacity building for the people that they will engage for elections in the field to collect the relevant data. And all these data were then analyzed by transparency and then submitted to the election commission to assist to our audit department, but at the same time to assist to the electoral management body during the appeal process and to be as a form of initiative reported violations that these people find in the field. A lot of these things were based for us to officially start procedure against political parties who violated the law, generally in pre campaign period. That's not campaign period, that's much they are doing a lot of wrong things out of these 30 days. And of course in election silent period because online they cannot stop when they want, even if they pay only 30 days, it is coming later. And for us that was useful, but at the same time we got so many of these that we were overburned with the things that were not actually that didn't have any legal base and for us with the lack of human capacities it sometimes not enough. I just wanted to ask you when you mentioned in the beginning that you are doing also capacity building, do you plan to engage the electoral stakeholders, the implementers together with NGOs to provide training that will actually help this oversight to be very focused when you are trying to get the data, thank you. Thank you, thank you for this very important point, an aspect, the role of election management bodies. Well, the powerful tool that election observation mission has is again the recommendation. The recommendation are addressed to the countries, to institutions, to all the actors and the stakeholders and then the EU delegation that is present in the country, in all the country where we observe, they are the one who will initiate and will give promoting the possibility of these activities that you just mentioned, this is essential, capacity building to election management bodies, political parties and a civil society group. And then something important that you mentioned is the capacity of monitoring from EMBs because of course we as an election observation mission we observe what is this level of capacity when we have to make a recommendation, it's important to assess whether in fact this recommendation will be feasible, it's useless to recommend to do media monitoring when we know that this election management bodies will not able and we will not have this capacity. But then again there are other ways like outsourcing for example and found the resources and the funds to be able to outsource like we've seen an example yesterday for example, a successful example of EMBs outsourcing to media company and to have this capacity of analyzing social media. But definitely through thanks to the recommendation and through the delegation these are definitely a level of cooperation that is feasible and it's very, very important, more and more important. Thank you very much Francesca, thank you Irina. To make sure we don't run out of time we'll move forward with the next presentation from Victoria Maximova from the movement Chesno. Okay, oh you can hear me, okay I'm glad to be here and I wanted to, let me have this, thank you. And I want to talk about the role of observers based on the experience of Chesno moment in Ukraine. So Chesno moment has monitored political advertising on social media for over three years. We keep watching political ads on Facebook and analyze the activity of politicians on platforms like Telegram, Twitter and Google ads. Also we continue our advocacy on party deporting registration because all this monitoring is based on the chance to see these reports and try to connect all the expenses that we can see on Facebook or other platforms with actual expenses by parties. And also in the context of online campaigning we do research on how political parties use personal data of Ukrainians, also about like sites of political parties and how they can use it to do their online campaigns. Okay, yesterday all of us talked a lot about Telegram and like role of Telegram in Ukraine and in the previous two years we had a significant shift in media consumption in Ukraine. So the last June 2022 we saw the research that 67% of Ukrainians read Telegram channels as like the main source of news. The last research by sociological group rating shows that like the difference you can see here between TV and Messenger, a special Telegram and Viber are so small that like I can assume that in the reality rating of TV consumption is much smaller. And you can see that messengers and social media and also YouTube like we can see that now these platforms are the main sources for information, for news, for political questions and something like this. So I will stop by Telegram a bit more because now it's one of our main focuses. So to start working with this platform we had a problem with methodology. So we started to make ours and it based on social network analysis because we can see which Telegram channels is connected to which political party or to which politician. So we analyze large Ukrainian Telegram channels that has more than 100k followers. And also we analyze MPs channels and one of the significant like mark of Telegram and Telegram ads is this like we have two types of ads marked and hidden and the most significant part of it is hidden. So we have a big problem with this. So to start exploring this platform and to start exploring this like ad market we built a network of channels of members of parliament on Telegram and we found three main groups like basically they based on like political parties. So yeah and these clusters allow us to see a broader picture. Based on this network we built a much bigger network of Telegram channels in Ukraine to monitor also like which cluster is prefer which political party. So we find two three main clusters. We find Russian channels, Ukrainian cluster and you can see that they are connected. But the main bridge is these propagandistic channels and unfortunately some of Ukrainian MPs is also connected to these propagandistic channels and to this propagandistic cluster. So they keep their like advertising and their post about how they work on these channels and yeah and the security service of Ukraine claims that the most of those channels in this propagandistic cluster are associated with the Russian federal security service. So we have the big problem with this Russian money flow and I hope that next week we will publish like a whole study about like this network and about how it is connected with political ads. So if you're interested I can share it with you and yeah. So we have like the three main issues and like three further steps with this Telegram online campaigning. So since most Telegram channels do not mark advertising posts and payments for services takes place without the platform's participation, this is where the main challenges arise. So we have a totally non-transparent platform with like the most part of these channels are anonymous. So we don't know who owns these channels, who takes this money. So we need to fully understand how to classify such activity and prove that it occurred because we don't have any proofs and we have like really great like of evidence and this is like our first steps to find the clear vision of it. So this ad, this post hidden ad could be officially paid by party but without proper marketing like without marketing posts advertised. It could be advertising paid from like hidden cash box from the party or from the third parties. It could be the activity of third parties including those associated with Russia and this is huge, sorry, and this is huge like security issue. Like this could be activity in favor of the party with the agreement or without agreement so it could be anonymous, anonymous activity that it is forbidden like by Ukrainian law in context of political party finance and like the anonymity of the channel administrators complicates this process even more. That's why working with this platform has become one of our key focuses. I would be glad to talk with you colleagues after the discussion if you have thought about this because like I know that each of you with telegram is actual not only for Ukraine but also for Moldova and for like Baltic countries and for other countries. So I will be glad to share some thoughts but to move forward also we have another one big and not really a transparent platform in Ukraine and it's Google ads so like we have three main types of ads in Google. It's search, display and video and it's a huge amount of money but Google in Ukraine don't open the data about political ads such as in EU countries or in USA. So we did the research about like we tried to prognose how much politician could spend on Google so we based on spending in EU countries we prognosed that for the last four years Ukrainian politicians have spent $1.7 million on Google ads like it can be up to 2.4 million because it's really like rough approximate number of money and for the last three months it can be near 30k dollars because like now it's not like the most popular platform for political ads in Ukraine but it's still a big amount of money especially for like our situation without the party reporting and with the possible Russian influence and etc. And like so you can see the main issues so Google like even in the case that Google can open this data about political ads Google classify as political ads not all ads that could be paid by parties or by third parties because Google consider very few ads as political election ads don't include ads for product or services including political promotional merchandise like t-shirts or ads right by news organizations to promote their coverage of referendums or political parties or candidates and it could be a political ad and it could be paid. So also we have like it's connected we have private data for commercial account and they also could run a political ad and like the main problem of course it's no data on political advertising is available in Ukraine and the last one platform that I want to talk about it's Facebook so we have a bit more like transparent and successful history with Facebook data because Chesno has a well-established history of monitoring this platform and we collaborate with national agency for corruption prevention since 2020 the agency has identified relations related to Facebook advertising in party report and currently Chesno continues to provide quarterly data to the NACP regarding political campaigns on Facebook however the full-scale invasion has fundamentally changed the structure of how Facebook ads market works. In the past most advertising expenditures in Ukraine were focused on political campaigns but now charitable causes have like taken the lead. At the same time politicians actively promote their work through charity foundations so over the last three months they spent like over a $230 case on this and like the biggest spending is about charitable organization of politicians like charitable foundation of Vadim Stolar in Ukraine. But we have some issues with Facebook also so not all ads are correctly identified for the ads library. Sometimes historical data changes new pages are added or ads are removed so this particularly applies to commercial careers which spend significant money on political advertising during elections also when Facebook removes page and ads for violation standards they disappear entirely from the library complicating its analysis but it's still important. Another problem is that disclaimers often do not reveal who pays for the ad so often non-existent organizations are mentioned for example and one possible solutions that we like imagine and we would see meta could store ads from all advertisers including commercial ads but with the special requirements for political advertising all published ads should be displayed in the library regardless of whether it was removed or by the user or the platform because of the violation rules or something like this so we can analyze in the future like some propagandistic ads by political forces like even its violated rules of the platform but we would have access to this and so about our focuses based on what I said before so we continue to improve the methodology for monitoring telegram ads and that's the main issue because like we have a lot of non-transparent parts about telegram and like now in Ukraine it's the most significant platform so we need to put the most efforts on this monitoring also it's advocating for the opening of Google data on political advertising in Ukraine because still it's really important part of ads market in Ukraine also and continuing to cooperate with NACP in monitoring Facebook advertising because we can see that politicians keep making ad campaigns on Facebook even with like worse situation and much smaller budgets but it's continuing so like it's our main focuses and I hope we will keep successful movements so yes thank you very much Victoria we have questions about what we just heard yes Barbara thank you very much for a very interesting presentation have two questions the first one is about your observation methodology is it a document that is published on your website and my second question you know just like that I give you the floor you said that your organization sends to the anti-corruption agency quite early reports especially regarding Facebook my question is are you quoted as a source of information by the NACP whenever the agency initiates some investigation on the basis of your findings yeah about first question yeah it published on our website now it has only Ukrainian version but we our work to translate it to English and to make it more more applicable to like other countries and about the second question yes we work with NACP quarterly but we are open to any kind of cooperation with NACP so we can share our like results of monitoring or our like some products of like us to make this process of monitoring campaigns more successful so we we are open to all of this thank you very much Victoria and Barbara we'll continue so that we can respect the time Mariana Foksha party finance analyst at Promolex thank you thank you I'll better speak in Romanian so it's a pleasure first of all for me to be here today with you and to share our experience from Promolex in the field of financing of the political parties and in order to better understand what is our role in monitoring the finances in this context I'll show you a few slides but first let me tell you about who we are and what are we doing in Moldova so Promolex is an NGO that is working in two priority fields the human rights where we follow how the international standards in the human rights field are implemented in our country and the second are the democratic processes where our purpose is to increase the level of the citizen trust in the democratic processes in the Republic of Moldova so speaking about the democratic processes the main activities that are helping us reach this objective is the monitoring of the election process and the monitoring of the finances of the political parties and of the election campaigns starting from 2009 we started to monitor the elections developed in the Republic of Moldova until today we saw that we actually observed more than 22 election processes developed in our country so based on each of those we have elaborated with reports and we followed these with recommendations in order to improve the system starting from 2013 we understood that financing of the election campaign is not enough we started to focus more on the financing of the activity of the political parties in general starting from 2013 we have elaborated the list of analysis reports studies researches that had as a main purpose to follow that transparency in the process of financing of the political parties and of course we after that provided feedback with recommendations during 14 years of activity we gained some experience and last year when the Central Election Committee initiated the elaboration the amendment of the election code and they started to change the connecting legislation we have provided 250 concrete recommendations including the financing of the election campaigns and the political parties recommendations and what can we say now is that half of those at least half of those recommendations were fully or partially accepted by the Central Election Committee and included in the new legal framework so as regards the electoral campaigns and online political campaigns starting 2019 particularly we've remarked that political campaigns and electoral campaigns online have gained the particular impetus or magnitude both as the cost the number and involved subjects so because of this we decided to follow in details including the manner in which such campaigns are being carried out and the costs involved in their online campaigns upon estimating the costs for the online campaigns we guide to a large extent we guide by two key instruments and the previous colleagues also mentioned them these are the reports published by meta it's meta as reports which is updated periodically this is a very good report that contains relevant information about the expenditures incurred by the competitors and political parties but we found out that it is rather restrictive and does not contain detailed information regarding those who pay or those who stay behind the paying these costs so because of this these reports cannot be considered as a proof of transparency in the political ads online also we use google ads reports for the political advertising and our Ukrainian colleague mentioned that this report is not available for Ukraine it is not unfortunately it is not available for Moldova either maybe for countries such as India Brazil South Africa EU member states this report is available we understand it can it is possible and we are to make consolidated effort to obtain this report for Moldova as well why why do we think these reports are useful so they help us what types of advertising advertisements can be posted on google platform and respectively what would be the approximate the other estimated costs for such ads depending on the period when they are broadcasting casted our key conclusions the key conclusions issued as a result of monitoring over the years first of all are unreported expenses incurred by the political parties and the electoral competitors which means that as a result of the monitoring by promo x we've identified many more expenses than reported by the parties or the competitors to the central electoral commission so as an example we had presidential relations back in 2020 when the electoral campaign was focused mainly on online platforms we had 32 percent of the total expenses that were unreported for the ads for the online ads this this was an amount of minimum 2 million lei used or paid for the online ads the second major problem that we've detected which we see that it is constant constant of the past period is the involvement of third parties in the political finance electoral finance which means that online ads are paid by other subjects than political parties or electoral competitors oftentimes it is not possible to see who the fact are these third parties because as I mentioned the meta reports does not contain exact data about the payees of such ads and these might be persons from abroad as well as entities that may not be authorized by the legal framework to make such payments so thus we can state that online platforms have become a very efficient tool for the illusion of the legal framework on electoral campaigns and political finance in the table posted on the screen yes in the table that you now see we have 24 pages from the social media actually we picked them up from facebook it was more easier to monitor the facebook so within the period august 2020 april 2023 these profiles were used to promote political parties electoral competitors or political activities by third parties who exactly we don't know because in many cases this data is missing total expenses incurred for the 24 pages accounted for over 25 000 euro according to the meta reports a very interesting case in this table we have a physical entity under the name king cabalan it's said in the list during three weeks she spent approximately 18 000 euro to promote protests organized by a political party which means that she exceeded all the ceilings established in the legal framework another interesting case is the case of the jeslav platoon he who is announced on search who is wanted starting 2021 he sponsored the made a sponsored post on a public page paying the amount of over 29 000 euro these amounts de facto were paid by a company registered in the russian federation with the headquarters in st petersburg so as you see here the legal framework is really severely infringed what are the main challenges that we encounter in the process in the monitoring process first of all and i mentioned already during my presentation we don't have reports or this is the lack of reports on political ads expenses so that are published by google also no transparency with regard to those who pay or users of payers who had paid for political ads as i said in case of meta ads data about the payers real payers are not published and the last major challenge is that limited the search engine options for the meta ads report because we don't have the possibility to download them or print for specifically needed the period so we can see that they were incurred the course were incurred for certain periods to that is to our interest then what is published in meta ads what are the recommendations key recommendations that we consider that the legislator shall adopt towards diminishing the risks in the online for the regarding online campaigns to regulate political and electoral financing by third parties just because regardless of the fact that the venice commission and our c.e. and partially the council of europe repeatedly recommended to regulate the political electoral finance by third parties this process is not yet regulated however it is broadly spread particularly online platforms we do need to adopt clear and detailed regulations for online political electoral campaigns including by obligating to publish ads reports and information detailed information about the payers real payers of these also it is necessary to establish proportionate and this raises sanctions for subjects who violate the legal framework this has been it thank you for attention one thing very quickly regarding the issue of accessing data for different time periods in that library in the methods it reminded me that last week an Albanian civil society group who does very similar work raised that very point on the signal group for this online campaigning transparency community of practice that I mentioned yesterday and some other members mentioned that they have found ways around that by using the API I'm not sufficiently familiar with the technology around that but I'm very happy to talk about that later on the point about who actually pays is incredibly important and one we could spend a long time to talk about and we should also realize the platforms will never have sufficient data for us to be able to judge if whoever is the official donor is where the money originated we need to take several steps behind to find that out and I'm going to open for questions but I think just in the interest of time again if we move on to our final presentation and then we do wrapping up without all questions to allow panelists at the end so we hand over to Anastasia Romanyuk from Civil Movement Toporo thank you so much yeah first of all I would like to thank our dear partners for organizing this event it was very full-fledged and inspiring to hear so many perspectives in just one day in a how and I'm here to present the experience of the civil network opera which has been doing the monitoring of online spendings for campaigning as many of our colleagues as soon as the opportunity was presented in our country so since the 2019 when the facebook ads library was introduced for a Ukrainian segment of the social media and since then we've been through three electoral campaigns already the presidential governmental and local elections and we have already established some routine on how we approach the monitoring of online campaigning which are we waiting to come back as soon as we win the war and have the first post for elections so our monitoring includes first of all the monitoring of early campaigning because like from our experience the candidates and parties jump very soon into starting agitation agitation for them in social media like for example before the local elections of 2020 we found like 10 Ukrainian political parties who spent from 10 to 50 thousand dollars for online campaigning only on facebook and instagram and only three months before the official beginning of the electoral campaign so actual scope is might be a lot a lot bigger of the early campaigning and for us this presents an opportunity for first of all to see the future like potential red flags or any weaknesses we should pay extra attention during the when actual campaign starts because like the time matters a lot that is why we start early after the beginning of the regular electoral official electoral campaign we do the regular monitoring of party candidate spendings and facebook and instagram and only facebook and instagram for the first and obvious reason because they unfortunately for now only meta provides for us the transparent and useful instruments how to monitor the actual spendings by google this is not available and any other social networks like officially on paper ban political advertisement but like we all know that if it's banned it doesn't matter that it doesn't necessarily includes that this is the doesn't exist in other social media networks like twitter tiktok telegram etc was which was also addressed by my colleagues and providing the regular monitoring of this spendings we after the official campaign when the official financial reports are filed we can compare the approximate online spendings of parties and candidates with their actual spendings and recently we even had an opportunity to do these accounts a little bit more specific because like we in Ukraine also almost don't have any regulation regarding online campaigning but during the local election the separate graph for online spendings on advertisement were was introduced and this allowed us to see the actual like magnitude of how much money is not being reported on online campaigning especially but i'm gonna address it a little bit later and i just realized that i didn't switch my presentation i'm so sorry for that and the last part we are monitoring the the violations of silence days in ukraine we uh this is forbidden to agitate one day before and during the election day and here we are also empowered by facebook api together the political advertisement which is first of all wasn't turned off because like the many advertisement starting being broadcasted much earlier and some of them might stay on the platform from the basic mistake but many of them might not and some of them are also being like introduced in the day of silence days and we are doing like the monitoring for the entire silence days and oh amazing so yeah during the presidential elections we had the chance first to count how many how much money was spent important to note only on facebook and instagram where we could estimate these numbers and we found that approximately 1.3 million of dollars was undeclared out of 1.8 million of dollars spent by the candidates for the presidential office but of course there are a lot of but first but is that we we count to our estimations only like self-reported official pages but there's so many pages where the line whether it's official page or is it run by the supporters of this candidate is rather blurred and that is why like we on paper cannot include that but we have so many suspicions and if we had a chance to like investigate that a little bit deeper i believe the numbers would be much higher and also this doesn't include the google advertisement cooperation this like influencers on tiktok telegram etc like tiktok in 2019 wasn't that popular but it's important for our nowadays media landscape so yeah this is like approximate numbers of how many how much money wasn't reported and the most important thing that we are being compared comparing these numbers by the money spent on an entire advertisement so these are the numbers which are being reported on the spendings of like physical advertisement tv advertisement etc etc and we had to like give the benefit of the doubt that everything was included and some part of them so we didn't have any we didn't have a chance to see any proportions of different kinds of advertisement which was paid off on this reporting also the the next the next campaign for us was parliamentary elections and here are the numbers slightly lower the overall spendings on facebook and instagram were one point four million of dollars spent by political parties and about five hundred thousand dollars were undeclared by campaigning parties but there is also many bots which i'm gonna address a little bit more in details in drawing the conclusions and also like i don't if i'm not mistaken in one of the yesterday panels was mentioned when when we start monitoring it all it always matters because like the parties and candidates who feel that they are monitored they are more likely to report a little bit more diligently and i really hopeful that these numbers are also like supporting this claim and during the local elections we for our obvious limitations didn't have a chance to count the unreported amounts of money reported by political parties and candidates in every like ukrainian like romada where the elections were held but the spendings during the official electoral campaign were also a pretty significant it was about like one point one million of dollars spent only in these two social networks and here i would like to address like how do we approach our work and our role as a non-governmental organization regarding the monitoring financial financial sparing needs of parties for their campaigning like first of all as i already mentioned we are we are aiming to enhance accountability of political parties and candidates by civil watchdogging but on the other hand we are trying like doing our best to collect the most diverse and extensive database of cases for first of all to show how big the problem is which pattern which kind of patterns do we have in like spending like the types of political advertisement use like political promotion strategies used online and only facebook and instagram provides us an opportunity to draw any patterns because like in all other social networks where the trans which are not that transparent for us as researchers we can report or report only cases but not patterns and trends and this is like the biggest issue for us and collecting this database of cases and parties we could help the state and law enforcement authorities like by flagging they most like the weakest points the weakest points which deserves their attention in this like enormous field and to helping like to increase efficiency by sealing or everything which is going on online and also sharing our experience and our methodologies like to help to make their work also more efficient and also we are advocating for data-driven decisions in every this in every everything which regarding like regulations of social media and any changes which needs to be implemented because there is no way to make these decisions not data-driven and we are doing our best to provide the most of that data and also we have like several success cases and as I already mentioned we also regularly collaborate with national agency on corruption prevention and this is systemic collaboration involves like constantly assessing like their needs and our ways how to help with our knowledge our expertise our hands and we are also going to have been providing like first of all these cases and helping like to gather the data from the Facebook ads library on the regular basis or in the case basis where we collect some violations which we already know of and we hope to continue this fruitful collaboration in the future and also on the basis of our monitoring during the by-election of 2021 on the two districts two criminal we two criminal proceedings were registered based on the data we gathered about the unreported spendings on online campaigning of the two candidates but unfortunately and here we slowly move into conclusions where I'm going to address it with more details unfortunately those criminal proceedings like basically didn't end this anything because it's extremely hard to prosecute cases like that and here we come into our limitations and first and first and foremost as I mentioned several times that only meta provides a transparent ads library and this is especially important in Ukrainian context because with the beginning of the full-scale invasion Ukrainian media landscape changed dramatically because first of all like 78 millions of Ukrainians consume news from social media and in the context where we have like basically no regulation of social media and this is being such a crucial platform now for media consumption in the future for the future political campaigns in Ukraine and abroad this poses so many challenges for us and so many future risks and also before we were concerned that only meta provides us data but they were most like they were the most popular social media network among the Ukrainians but now it changed and now other social like Facebook is dropping down in popularity like frankly everywhere around the world and Telegram is number one a number one platform for Ukrainians where we have like no collaboration at all and no contact at all with the tech company which are so proud of not collaborating with no state agencies and giving like no no data no monitoring on their own platform no matter what the risks are like now the Lakhunas in Telegram security would risk like in some cases literally our lives and the lives of our our soldiers for example but in the future it's gonna risk the legitimacy of Ukrainian electoral process and even that is not important enough for for example Telegram and this is having no collaboration like we are quite a small market we couldn't have like any portion with the tech companies which are not registered under our jurisdiction we can only collaborate so we need to like to start this conversation we need to have regulation first we believe that without any legal framework it's extremely difficult to start any conversation with like Meta, Twitter or any other tech company because like of course if we have regulation but without collaboration we couldn't of course have the rules we made we made here but without regulation first we have nothing with which we can approach the companies and that is why we're in dire need for the appropriate legal framework of regulation like campaigning and also like the the last challenge I'm gonna mention now to respect our our timing the only approximate numbers are available for us and also only for example for Meta the amounts only in US dollars are available for us and for Ukrainian market is extremely crucial because like we we also need the localization of currency and to see the spendings available in Hryvnia because like this benchmark of seeing the the number of spend advertisement in user friendly way was chosen by American model where the most of the most of the political ads cost in average about 250 dollars in Ukraine price starts from 35 dollars it is the average price of political ad and that is why the most of the political advertisement go below this threshold and also with approximate numbers we also cannot prosecute we cannot do the prosecution with the uh with the screenshots with approximate numbers uh and so on and so on so uh to our opinion all the issues we addressed are like deeply interconnected but um I hope that with uh our uh collaboration with the state and NGO agencies and with our partners we will successfully tackle it before our next electoral campaign thank you thank you very much Anastasia with a bit behind schedule any final questions or comments yes thank you Magnus it's actually not a question but rather comment or a proposal because I saw almost in every single presentation our colleagues on the on the stage the same struggles the same challenges and sorry I didn't introduce myself I I'm Nikolay up until I'm representing from Lexa station my colleague Mariana mentioned the same challenges as I said we acknowledge that here in this part of Europe Moldova Ukraine we're not going to get this too early or too easy um the attention I mean of Google or alphabet or other uh companies that needs to be more responsible so my question or comment invitation if you want is whether we could put our efforts together actually to advocate at the international level to achieve that because this is very important area so not only the business models or the business results should drive these companies to pay attention to us to the region but also the challenges that we have that we face yes and also one direction of our attention could be also now European Union because both Moldova Ukraine hopefully Georgia we will have the same path yes and since we were talking about the European Union and preparation for some regulations in this regard I think we need to adopt these regulations now when we have already this status not to wait when we'll be becoming members to benefit from the same tools that the European Union will be implementing so I think we have a lot of work ahead so I'm inviting my colleagues on the stage from the civil society to to to work together and to think ahead of some maybe solutions in this regard I would like to thank you organizers that brought us all together because when you see the same challenges all around it comes these kinds this this kind of ideas and I think our partners also mentioned on the banner there IDA International IFAS NDI could be also very much supportive in this regard in this advocacy that we need to do so thank you very much all of you and looking forward to to work together thank you so much for that we can just simply agree with that statement I'm being told by the organizers that we have a coffee break on the agenda but we're going to take a brief break just so that we can change up the table here that's your chance to go and grab a cup of coffee and then we start again at 11 30 I want to thank our panelists I also want to recognize that we have representatives from three of the leading groups in the region when it comes to campaign finance Gala and Chesna and Opora in Ukraine and from Alex in Moldova so thank you very much seats we need to start we have our guests online ready so we will much appreciate if you can take your seats good morning good morning again it's me again so the next the next topic is a fascinating topic of the emerging threats in online campaign influencers trolls both farms third party financing and foreign funding we've seen before many many experiences valuable excellent source of information analysis from leading CSOs working on the issue which support very much and complement the work that international observer groups are doing the Carter Center NDI IRI the European Union ODIR and on this specific topic on the threats it's very it's very important to cooperate and work together we've seen in the recent years how much the online platforms change and shape the political communication particularly during election campaigns they open new possibilities of participation especially for for women for excluded groups minorities but we also see how much this the online platforms presented the threats to the integrity of the process we we've seen that harmful content disinformation information manipulation both trolls all sort of amplification manufacture amplification is affecting our democracies the objective today is to go and analyze and hear more about those practices experiences from our top expert they will guide us through the complexity of this topic and if it's possible at the end of the session is also to find and to look together for solutions or recommendations that legislatures oversight bodies media sector tech companies and all the stakeholders involved can adopt to protect the integrity of the political processes I'm I have the honor of introducing the first speaker Marchino Lander will join us online hi marching marching is a google government affairs and public policy manager for central and eastern europe thank you marching for being with us the floor is yours good good morning good morning bonas you are I am very happy to be with you but very unhappy to be with you online and let me assure you this is not just lip service as I have been actually to the very place the conference is taking place right now so castel mimi and I have very fond personal memories with it with a certain wine produced they're called russia the bulbaca and it has had a profound effect on my personal life if I may just end it there so I'm very envious of you and I wish I could I could be there in in person as it's an amazing place and the wine is absolutely one of my favorites so apologies once again I hope to join you in person as soon as I can in particular because recently my team my my team where I work from Warsaw so the central and eastern european public policy team at google has now officially become responsible for for issues in moldova so I hope to be more present even in my personal capacity by my team certainly my colleague in the crest will be engaging with with moldovan stakeholders from now so very happy a very big change and I think in a very important time for the whole region and moldova as well so thank you thank you again for for the invitation and thank you for allowing me to on a very broad level of course give a give a give a picture of what what we are doing and what is their approach of google to these issues as you kindly pointed out there are growing in importance and of course are concerned to many many people both on the political side but also of course us on the tech side we are of course committed to upholding democracy and these malign actors and and an abuse of our platforms that endangers political processes of course very high on the agenda for for us and we're trying to address this through several avenues or several ways both on the technical side on the policy side and through engagements with civil society and political actors as we believe that only cooperation and a concerted effort can can yield positive results so just very perhaps I will give an overview and maybe open up myself later on for for any questions if something needs more clarification on a very on a very top level of course any sort of fake engagement manipulation buying of views or prominence that sort of especially by covert foreign agents is absolutely not allowed by our policies so that's the baseline we we not just discourage but actively police and enforce this ban and if you look at the numbers of of channels that get removed as this is of course the most harsh punishment that we can impose on someone that breaks the rules on our platform so we can remove that certain account so thousands and thousands of accounts are being removed every year for this sort of engagement so any sort of covert manipulation so buying of views buying of likes is definitely forbidden and in particular of course by by well let's just say very generally outside influence operations that is a very particular kind of action so of course there's there's all sorts of fake engagement is banned but this sort of concerted influence operations are a special kind and they are handled in a in a special fashion there's a special team called the threat analysis group at google who handles these sort of operations that are not just done by an individual actor but we have reasons to believe that there is a powerful perhaps a state sponsor behind this sort of action and in particular when you look to the east a few months ago we published a special report called the fog of war where the threat analysis group analyzed everything that went on for the first one year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine how the cyber operations which we identify as coming from the Russian Federation and affiliated entities how they picked up in strength how they varied across time and what we did to to counteract these these operations a lot of them were of course typical cyber security attacks trying to infiltrate networks and and individuals as well so there's of course a huge huge emphasis on that but but a separate category where coordinated influence operations and and tag disrupted almost 2000 such operations within the first year of of of the war so these things of course are constant and if you like crunching numbers the threat analysis group publishes quarterly bulletins and they can see how many of these bot networks or however you wish to call them are removed every quarter and just as a funny fact Russia is not the biggest source of these bot networks actually there's another state which is about 10 times as big in terms of creating these these influence operations it's China so it's out there publicly so if you like to peruse these these numbers they're out there so this this kind of fight continues every day it hasn't started last year but of course it has become more more first of all more important and there's a lot more activity coming from from the east obviously which is correlated you can see that in the report if you like with certain development on the ground so this is not random the the cyber domain just supports supports you know policy objectives which are reflected in some physical operations on the ground and they also vary and change now depending on the circumstances so that's one side of the equation the policies against against fake fake engagement and manipulation and our enforcement on the political ad side of course we allow political advertising as such and we do not believe that an outright ban on political advertising is necessary but of course limits are are there and we do support limiting in particular you know the the the issue of micro targeting is often mentioned that this is something that is too dangerous to be allowed and we agree and political advertising on google including youtube can only be done on a very rough level so so the targeting of course you can target by country say or age group or location but nothing about the individuals themselves can be used so you know like particular preferences or some personal capacity of a person that kind of that kind of stuff that cannot be used as as a targeting metric for for ads and google and again this is i think this is an important and necessary measure the second so limitations on one side and transparency on the other side so there's a public register of political advertising on google that you can access and see at least this should be visible of course the system is not 100 watertight but when everything goes according to our policy so when the ad is properly declared it is put into those into that public register where you can see who paid for the ad how many views it received and how it was targeted which is which is i think what what transparency demands for this to function properly advertisers should go through a process of declaration and verification so no outside you know this is i hate to to say this is 100% true for the european union for now but no foreign actors can pay for political advertising within the european union that's the that's the rule as for moldova i will have to double check what the what the current status is i'm i'm afraid i cannot say for sure for now but this is the general idea that we were going for that outside payments political advertising should not be allowed because obviously that comes with with certain risks for for democracy um so political advertising has its is allowed but has its limits and needs transparency one last bit is of course the policies in terms of content this is especially important on platforms where we host content which is mostly youtube of course it is perhaps not the number one um platform for political campaigning or political speech i think other platforms are much more important in this regard but uh but we do have political speech that is also subjected to both the general rules for content on youtube so things like hate speech harassment and bullying that is not allowed even if you're a politician or you work on a political campaign but also there are some specific rules that um that strive to protect the democratic process meaning this information that is strictly aimed at disrupting elections and political processes like um misleading voters about how to vote or who's eligible to vote will be chosen uh about the times of voting also incitement to disrupt elections these sort of these sort of very particular kinds of disinformation or manipulation are expressly forbidden and are removed if detected as there is no general disinformation policy of course like most legal systems we allow people to say things that are untrue but there are some untrue statements that are particularly dangerous and harmful in this particular case harmful for democracy and and liable to disrupt the process in such a way that we feel that real world harm is a real danger hence they are they are not allowed on youtube now this is a very broad brush description of our approach to safeguarding political processes against undue influence and i'm happy to take questions or however else we want to continue the discussion thank you thank thank you thank you margin thank you this is a unique opportunity for us to ask you questions yes i see from poly thank you very much it's great to have you here with us and to have opportunity to ask you a question i'm vanya bielsa protein i'm a member of the central election commission of bosnia and herzegovina in bosnia and herzegovina we are dealing with quite problems with google ads and as i heard today other country participate of these conferences recognize the same issues i would like to ask you two concrete questions if you can answer me now the first question is which tool we should use in bosnia and herzegovina to find out and to get information about who paid for google who paid for some google ads that's the first question the second question is which tool we should use to report google ads which we find that violating our national laws we have one particular case i think on last local election i will be short one google ad actually was hate speech and it was available on youtube and on different web pages and even though we sanctioned that political party for that content and forbid that content we didn't know we really didn't know how to remove that from internet and to who to report that that and that's why i would like to ask you sorry for using this opportunity but i didn't have another one to connect central election commission of bosnia and herzegovina i think we should cooperate as we have cooperation with meta because we really recognize this problem with google ads as one of the main problem when we talk about online campaign thank you thank you thank you very much and and for the questions and first of all of course apologies for anything that goes wrong on our systems a lot of things you know given the volume of millions and millions hundreds of millions of ads that we go through obviously this is in large part a machine machine handled process the verification of these ads which is by you know despite some people saying that artificial intelligence will take over from humans very soon i i don't see this happening anytime soon and the systems even though we try to train them for for many years are still very as you can say fallible so um so apologies obviously this shouldn't happen hate speech is of course disallowed um the policies that regard google ads in general should be at least in in theory even stricter than most of our other policies so so of course hate hate speech shouldn't in particular appear that so in terms of what happens of of course if you find a google ad you should be able to click on this little um little blue button in the corner and there there is options to report these ads so that should work um but this is available to all all all all people on the internet everybody so that's that's the number the easiest route there's also special um special ways to contact us but if i could please maybe ask the organizers to provide my personal details for you to contact and we could discuss these in uh it just uh you know between between the government or a public entity and google there are some some options but um one of the problems is also as you are aware we have no representation in post-hours so that is also uh also an issue um until lately also our presence in moda there was limited but we'll hopefully improve on this uh in the coming months ah sorry there was a second part of your uh question about who paid this should be in the transparency report i am however uh unable to confirm if posnia herzegovina is is actually covered by the transparency that the political ads transparency provisions um i would have to confirm with my colleagues i do not i do not know this i'm sorry but for countries that are covered this should be visible in the in the um in the transparency report thank you understand yes um uh hello and i would would like to thank you for attending our conference and given us a chance to ask you directly and i represent one of ukrainian NGOs and now we are preparing for the how the future will look like after the first post-war elections in ukraine and now at the moment approximately eight millions of ukrainians are uh found temporal occupation in european union for example and my question is that we as we in ukraine have to be conscious that uh not everyone gonna come back in ukraine after the war is over and here during the first post-war elections we are encountering the challenge that um our parties and candidates need to fulfill the political agitation for abroad and uh taking into account how big like foreign um foreign electorate electorate is i would like to ask how google uh gonna treat the ukrainian electoral online campaigning for our abroad electoral electorate because like we need this opportunity but if it's uh if we cannot launch the uh advertisement from ukraine about ukrainian elections to the european union whether you're going to be treated the same way as the foreign influence or not thank you and that's that's an excellent question um and to be honest i haven't thought of this particular issue previously so i can i cannot answer this but you are right that this is a uh this is an important issue i cannot i'm afraid i can't answer this is uh you know perhaps the fact that the ukraine is a candidate country i can you know this is excellent uh i hope to find out myself um very soon and i can get back i don't know either through the organizers or again directly um please feel free to distribute my my my personal contacts to anyone who wishes to contact me i'm sorry this is a great question and a very important problem and i will um try to find out uh as soon as possible we don't know when when the elections will happen right this is not not yet hopefully as soon as possible so we should be ready thank you very much for pointing this out thank you marchin thank you nastasia some other questions from the public uh then marchin if i may i have a question uh the google transparency report is a very useful you mentioned but um very limited and a bit behind compared to meta for example on on some features so now with the u-regulation coming up soon before hopefully the european election um what are the how google is preparing for this for complying with the the requirements especially related to paid ads well thank you again thank you for uh um pointing out that we're behind meta i will take this feedback back to my uh my people at central uh hopefully we can we can improve there's a big effort right now and we actually filed the first if you see in terms of our internal reporting changes the the biggest effort right now is centered around the digital services act um so there's there's a lot of reporting obligations there we have filed this first baseline report also within the the framework of the the code of conduct uh on disinformation right so there's a lot of work being done right now it is all in a bit of a state of flux obviously some of these um um it's it is a complicated effort you know if you have to uh i don't i don't think i can convey convey what complexity it means to produce one single piece of data for such a huge uh organization it has to be vetted of course by hundreds of um of different people different organizations so there's a lot of work right now which i hope will bear fruit you know around august maybe even as one of the deadlines in the dsa draws close but you can you can look at the first kind of glimpse uh at the baseline reports we filed them a meta file and most of the big platforms that sign up to the code of practice have filed them so this is a step to improve this it actually one of the things it does it has a lot more um country specific data but it's not very readable i have to admit that so there's a lot of data there but it needs uh you know a lot of dedication from someone to really analyze this i hope it will kind of trickle down into the transparency report which is much more readable it's better in terms of presentation it's easy to use but as you say it has a relatively few features although these are also growing if you look over time when i came to google it was a was a very basic tool with just i think copyright takedowns and a few other things and it has since then grown tremendously to include a large number so the direction of travel i think is clear and our commitment to give more data more transparency is also clear especially now with the dsa there's also provisions there about better cooperation with researchers and more access to researchers so i think you're going to see a lot of improvements hopefully even in the coming months but this is still all in the works and believe me when i say these things are complicated thank you marchin we believe you and we thank you for also being a focal point in the future thank you very much we go to the next speaker yulia shpilova idea program officer for eastern europe yulia will be talking about the role of influencers in countries like usa filipines khazakhstan and about coordinated operation in other different countries thank you yulia thank you francesca yeah and when designing this conference we were thinking about these emerging threats that are appearing with using different tools somehow to manipulate campaigning and we were afraid that people will be discussing these issues in other sessions we will not have enough opportunity to focus on them and it's maybe one of the most complicated issue comparatively even to many others and when trying to find how to name the presentation i was thinking whether we can actually call all of them just elicit practices because in many contexts these issues are not regulated and do not necessarily are illegal or elicit so it's a kind of a very complicated question for all of us to discuss and to think together and i will start with the influencers actually e you in one of the reports provided a kind of explanation whom do we consider is supposed to be an influencer and one of the key features that this is a person who is creating the content but also importantly building trusty relations with the subscribers so that then this person could influence their opinions and actually somehow to impact their behavior and also it is someone who is engaging with commercial enterprises in order to get some kind of income from his or her activity and this is important because i mean like there are many other users that might have many followers but some of them do not are not paid for such activity so in this regard it just also important to mention that preferably when we are referencing to influencers it's good also to keep in mind that they should get some profit from the activities that they are providing and in terms of country examples i selected three different cases which are very different in the nature because for example in the united states of america it is actually allowed to engage influencers for the campaigning and they are even paid officially and park political action committees that are getting donations and contributions for the politicians they are even reporting on influencers the only one problem that is referenced in the literature mostly is that they are reporting quite comprehensively without detailization so it's difficult then to check how much it was paid to actual influencer and to check whether this data is correct or not completely different story is in philippines where there was a presidential candidate durate who was campaigning using his social media accounts and he was quite popular and in 2016 he actually was more successful than his competitor marcus who was not so active on social media and starting from 2016 marcus became much much more visible with millions of followers on social media and actually he won elections with 31 million votes which was an amazing amount for the country but what was interesting within his campaign while he was campaigning on himself quite actively on social media he was also building a network of influencers who were following him and who were spreading his messages but one selections were over strangely enough i guess that no one was expecting these consequences but those who were originally just taking these messages as part of the coordinated campaign which was quite united they were then polarized some of them were supporting the leading administration and some were quite critical so those he convinced some of his supporters to be critical to the opponent so while it was a kind of coordinated campaign but the consequences were quite natural and not expectable and in kazakhstan it's an interesting case because on 16th of june the parliament of kazakhstan adopted a new law which is called on online platforms and it is now from what i saw on 29th of june it was approved by senate so it's under signature of the president of kazakhstan and once it will be signed and i guess since it was already passed by two chambers more likely it will be passed influencers will be first of all responsible to pay taxes while many are saying like okay everyone's supposed to pay taxes in kazakhstan so it makes no sense on the one way on the one hand to regulate somehow specifically the role of influencers but also they will be responsible for sharing this information and many experts civil society experts in kazakhstan are saying that this is the way how to restrict actually the operation of opinion leaders some of whom are influencers so by saying this here are some challenges which we see in terms of engaging influencers to the campaigning first of all this area is mostly unregulated globally or regulated within general political finance or campaign finance regulations at the same time it is completely neglecting the nature of the phenomenon and how actually these opinion leaders are appearing and how how that they are not legal entities and they are sometimes acting in their personal capacity and what kind of influence they may have while they are not state institutions they are not civil society organizations or political parties and of course it is mostly not reported in many instances it's not reported there is no special requirement for reporting on influencers and I guess Amelia can tell us a little bit more about Latvian example in terms of this but it's a kind of very unreported area mostly also it's very difficult to split where is this is a freedom of speech or organic content so influencer is also a person so he or she may have some preferences political preferences and in theory can actually express these preferences at the same time what is concerned for us as political finance experts is whether it is paid or not and this is a big question because if this is organic content and this is a real preference of influencer how it should be then regulated or not regulated and what is the balance between regulating or not regulating how we can for example restrict some person to express preference and opinion and challenges of course for detection investigation and prosecution since it is not regulated in many instances it is not possible but also even in those cases when it is somehow regulated to detect how much influencer was paid is quite difficult since mostly in many instances it is done unofficially and never declared to any state institutions and authorities but also Kazakhstan experience is showing us that over regulation in the countries with weak rule of law may lead to censorship because this is not a way to ensure transparency of political finance but it's the way to restrict freedom of speech so these issues are challenging and should be somehow further regulated and then Marching was already sharing good practices on bots and just to somehow so that we can discuss who are bots and trolls so bots are mostly those who are producing it's a software actually that is producing behaviors that is similar to human being behaviors so adapting messages but they are produced automatically and trolls these are real people who are hired in order to produce certain content in coordinated in coordinated manner and in this regard we have also three case studies and I guess all of them are also quite different but quite interesting the first case study is Russia and internet research agency it was quite well known for the interference in the US elections in 2016 it's quite difficult to say when it's actually appeared but different sources say from 2007 from 2013 when this network appeared and this network was hired just it was just simple advertisement on social media in different newspapers at time that oh we are hiring people who need just to produce content just to post something on social media to comment and so on so then they had a big office in Saint Petersburg neighborhood where all these trolls were located they were coordinated they have plan how much posts and how much comments they need to produce during during the day so it's very regulated area with quantitative indicators for actually how for the effectiveness of their role and they are paid and sources are very different so it's also difficult to say in US dollars because the currency exchange is so changing but around one thousand dollars per month they are paid and what is interesting about this network that allegedly they are paid by Russian government so comparatively to many other networks and both farms that we will be discussing there are many indications and investigative journalist researches that it was the contracts are quite legal so the government is paying to this internet research agency for informational services so it's a real contract and the government can pay for informational services for providing information but also the activities of these internet research agencies showed that they were largely engaged in Russian propaganda against Ukraine and overall against European Union and Western countries and once again interestingly enough on Philippines this is a lady who is troll and she is sharing with public how she became a troll so her family doesn't know that she is a troll she is working from home and she has her own plan how much she needs to produce during the day so she is getting tasks and she is working from home very distant remote working very convenient working arrangement and she she didn't have employment so for her it was just a good way to earn some money it was an easy way since it's not so much qualified work you are getting some messages and you need to disseminate them and to post so you have a plan and you need to act according to the plan and in December last year we were conducting also a baseline assessment on online campaign finance in Moldova and within that assessment we also heard a lot regarding troll farms here in Moldova and allegedly trolls are paid from 500 to 1000 euros per month and usually political forces may spend up to numbers were very different from 50 000 dollars to 450 000 dollars so it's a kind of very rough estimations and that political experts were sharing with us during the assessment but we also need to mention that this case studies both for influencers and for trolls and bought farms they are not unique most of the both of these phenomenon they exist in most of the countries it's very rare that country doesn't have such example it's just to share some practices how this is operating but they are usually used for disinformation campaigns through bought farms so it's very simple you are developing core narrative so there is a core team that is writing what should be said in Russian case it's Russia today propaganda TV channel that is producing actually in coordination with Russian government producing some kind of content then onboarding influencers and fake account operators bots we can also call them fake account operators and then dissemination and amplification on social media what we've also heard during our assessment here in Moldova that interestingly enough it could be also used on tiktok for example where they are on telegram where there is where there are a number of groups which might be not related to politics it might be some group of lovers of flowers or dog flowers or whatever and then these core narratives are adopted by copywriters to the content of these groups and placed like organic message so it's not it's not usually as paid ads so it's difficult to detect it's just one of the messages that you will see in the group and then it's quite difficult to differentiate what is real information and what is just part of this coordinated campaign lots of challenges and I guess we all need to discuss them the way forward thank you for your attention thank you thank you Julia that was really really interesting and how complex and how difficult is also to assess the link that those groups have with political parties for example it's not always clear whether those groups are working for political parties or a candidate sometimes we've seen in missions those coordinated efforts that we're supporting one party and against another and then vice versa at the same in the same electoral process and so mostly are for disrupting the integrity of the process so it's not really it's it's very difficult yeah if I may reflect yes indeed we were actually openly shared that you know like anyone and this is relevant for Ukraine as well it's a kind of there is a network and different political parties are using this network so these networks are created far beyond elections so they are prepared well in advance and then different political parties may use them as the same networks the only issues transparency in this regard so many political parties are violating this the same way and this is just not clear who paid for this thank you we go to the next speaker mr. Amelia Raitouma Amelia is the head of the investigation of violation of a very specialized anti-corruption authority of Latvia called NAV Amelia will be presenting the work and the activities of NAV and her significant experience gained over many many years in prevention of political corruption thank you thank you thank you Francesca dear colleagues good morning I am from corruption prevention and combating bureau the bureau is an institution of the state administration under the supervision of the cabinet of ministry which performs the function determined by law in corruption prevention and combating as well as in controlling fulfillment of financing provision of political parties there are about 150 people walking in the bureau and 10 people walk are walking in the vision of control of political parties financing our bureau check if a political party has received an illegal donation violated limitations of financing for example third party mediation in donating to a party received an an an e-mails donation violated limitations of the pre-election expenditure amounts use a state budget according with the law and submitted to our bureau the following information annual financial declaration election income and expenditure declaration legal acts are following is a law of financing of political organization and pre-election combined law legislation in the field of political party financing and pre-election combining has been consolidated in Latvia since the establishment of the bureau it has been achieved that the role of money in politics has been reduced and pre-election campaigns have become more effective from the point of view of public interest that is less expensive advertising more decisions and direct meetings of candidates with voters political parties in Latvia may be financed by private person membership fees and joining fees donations from private person and the state budget the political parties must submit such reports decoration of income annual report report about the nations and in Latvia there is a certain limits for pre-election campaign financing they are aimed to reduce the role of money in party pre-election combined financing in this slide you can see limitations of pre-election campaign spending for parties for example there are spending limits on advertisement in television radio public space press and internet and sponsorship during the election campaign and the pre-election spending limit of a third party is 7 000 euro however the results of latest parliament election in 2022 show that there are significant changes in pre-election campaigns and the limitation that we adopted five or ten years ago are not working equally and effective now in the last election parties used more advertising on social networks facebook tiktok instagram telegram and other platforms and here is a summary about the general legislation on the placement of advertising during the pre-election period including the placement of advertising on the internet we use facebook library add tools to monitor party activity on social networks and platforms also we use app that call informed nav and everybody can use to file a complaint or report of violation user can also add screen photos and video in this app the role is buying independent monitoring report about pre-election spending but the best results are from our app facebook library use and daily information analysis with which is done by our employees internet costs are so insignificant compared to other pre-election campaign expenses that currently those parties that were focusing on campaign and social platforms get as good or even better results as those party that we went traditional way with advertising in radio television press and other sources in this slide you can see party that according the surveys had 2.3 percent of support in the beginning of the election campaign but got 6.8 percent votes and 11 seats and the parliament name of this party is stability and it is supported mainly by russian speaking voters this this party used social platform like tiktok a very lot and they influence in tiktok this case caused a great resonance in latvian society because due to russian aggression in ukraine there are a lot of decisions about how to prevent influencing the results of election made by other countries this case proved that with small financial and digital resources you can influence the choice of voters and the bureau has very limited resources to control advertisement at various social platform in this case we stability the party spent only 37 000 euro on pre-election campaign of which only 1600 euro were expenses on ads in internet and social media but the total limit of parties spending is 700 000 therefore we believe that this is necessary to discuss more about restriction and control possibilities of different social platforms so we can reduce threat of interference by other countries in the future election therefore the currently available tools for controlling party pre-election campaigns including the internet arm checking and analyzing information notification media monitoring of posted agitation we purchase the service from mass media we are checking information from residents application complaints submission and animal skulls and volunteers audit of declaration and reports bureau ask society to report election related offenses and citizens can send report about possible pre-election campaign violation in our mobile app as well as on facebook and twitter after audit we can discover illegal donation violated limitation of financing for example third party donation for election violated limitations of pre-election expenditure amounts used administrative resource in pre-election campaign and violations in the use of the state budget for social media we do monitoring and it means that we are tracking hashtags skateboards and mention in platforms like facebook instagram twitter tiktok and telegram but as you know internet has no limits so it's really hard to check every single platform especially telegram and tiktok tiktok which nowadays is the main source for all kind of information also if we see some violation in facebook or some another platform we need to inform party to take down the post huge help we get from social media users who are aware of illegal activities so they get in touch with us but by using off our app but best results we are took from facebook library use and dial information analysis which is our employees but as i said monitoring is a huge challenge in a digital age and we are always looking to improve it thank you very much thank you amilya i suggest we listen to the other presentations and then we open the floor for questions at the end the next speaker is marchin valetsky senior senior resident country director of ukraine for ndi marchin will give us an overview on foreign interference and foreign funding in different countries thank you thank you francesca and i'm going to take you to a dark side of politics for the next seven to eight minutes as we say power corrupts power port corrupts absolutely so there will be no powerpoint from my side i would just try to focus on some key findings of my own research but also you know some of the reports which i would like to you know to bring to your attention and again in seven minutes we cannot cover all the cases but i will focus on some of the recent activities of russia and bring your attention to what china is doing and maybe suggest some of the key recommendations for our stakeholders and then for agencies represented here in the room so just to start normally we would probably go into our region central eastern europe we would talk about some oligarchs you know all you all of you named you know the names you know we we have certain oligarchs in moldova georgia armenia ukraine you know who they are you know how they made their money and they know how they've been trying to influence the process but this is a wrong assumption if we only focus on this region and i would strongly encourage all of you to look at the recent report of the uk intelligence and security committee of the british parliament the report on russia which was published in 2020 and if you were to read carefully paragraph 49 to 59 you will see how russia managed to penetrate polka party repriming the tentative of one of the entities in russia that is implicated in the policies of the country but it still dates back to the 18th century russia and we've seen the system of permanent penetration of democratic at that point poland was a elected monarchy and kings were elected so russia was influencing most important votings and most important elections and my colleagues from ituania are smiling because we then had joined kingdom lituania and poland so already in 18th century russia was penetrating the neighboring countries research my own research and other colleagues shows that since the second world war kgb was influencing influence more than 100 elections in in in europe and kgb was very active in italy and in many other countries um so you know you have we have many cases almost every country in europe was affected by foreign funding russian funding but what is more shocking is recent report of atlantic council showing that russian oligarchs and there are about 15 17 oligarchs who have been particularly influential when it comes to funding that russian oligarchs and russia is still controlling as of 2021 750 billion euros parked in different organizations different networks and and this money been and will be used to influence european politics so this is a huge problem and again i will be happy to share with you the the reports um the satlantic council report is very detailed showing how the system operates and when i had discussions with colleagues from maniwal and from greco the monk experts we knew that few years ago with this phone with this phone you could within two days open a foundation in austria get a notary in Liechtenstein create four layers of shell companies malta virgin islands cyprus to influence politics in most of the central eastern european countries and question to all of you colleagues guess which country is the number one investor in ukraine which country number is number two investor in moldova cycles uh so you know if you look at how um russia was penetrating business politics you know as i said until 2022 february 2022 we had a huge national security issue i think most of us do realize what is going on many agencies we've had from colleagues from a national intelligence agency do risk analysis but right now the biggest challenge would be is if you look at most of our countries every country which allows for companies to contribute to political parties to contribute to campaign um to campaigns this is your number one risk career um russia used to use shallow companies proxies and individuals and you know without knowing real beneficiaries without knowing who is behind those companies with those mechanisms of freeball layers we are not able to really control who is paying for politics in europe so you know we definitely have a unique moment to address this issue russian money is still in europe and some of those companies are still operating and i would like to congratulate my favorite commission lithuanian commission they were the first one to create online database for financial donations and in 2004 2005 thanks to this system they were able to trace money which were going to the campaign of president paksas and this was the first orchestrated mechanism for russia to influence decision about lithuania joining nato and trying to influence elections and there are many many cases which i would be happy you know to discuss with you during the debate but second point since over the last 15 years there is another important player which we need to be aware of and i would very quickly tell you about what is happening in china so you know traditionally china had mostly contacts with ideological parties sister parties communist socialists this approach has changed since 2010 2012 and there are three new departments being established within the central committee those departments are coordinating very closely chinese investment with building links with polica parties china has organized five major forests for polica parties right now china is controlling about 500 parties globally and about 150 parties in europe with close personal links and they are using them modifying the business model which russia created they have chinese billionaires oligarchs also operating in the same way mostly in australia new zealand in asia but we've already seen a penetration going into central eastern europe there was a youth forum organized by china which brought together young politicians from central eastern europe in 2021 china organized world polica parties summit which was represented by more than 500 parties including as i said 160 politicians from central eastern europe so you know that's another worrying trend they are very professional and have very well equipped departments one of those departments is international relations department ild and you know we should be also very careful about chinese investment chinese connections with our polica parties they're doing in a softer way they definitely are not involved in the same levels of direct corruption against russia but this is you know an issue which we should be working looking at very carefully so i mean i could continue for for hours telling you about what are the risk areas and how to address it but let me focus on four which in my opinion are fundamental for for you know what can be done and that's what francesca asked me to to focus on things which can be done first of all starting with polica parties polica parties really need to take this approach of know your client really have to be very careful with contributions coming from some companies really assuming that any company which has links with russian business through you know overseas companies is a high-risk company the same applies to chinese companies you know those donations always have strings attached we have to be very careful also looking at other initiatives which involve college institutions think tanks ideological institutions they've been created by ld in china and they are also used to influence politics and pay for polica parties three other areas one definitely closer collaboration between central election commissions anti-corruption agencies with those agencies which are involved in charge of money laundering peps there needs to be a better exchange of information when it comes to animal anti money laundering and close exchange of information when it comes to publicly exposed persons and their financial transactions and definitely the needs to be and i've been already discussing with magnus for four months we need to organize a major forum for civil society organizations to discuss what they are doing in terms of observation monitoring you know and there needs to be a closer collaboration between leading civil society organizations working on this issue colleagues from opora from chestnut from ti we have 2030 leading organizations in europe there is really time to start exchanging information and start monitoring certain individuals and certain companies which are involved in foreign funding and finally for a separate discussion definitely not a public discussion there is need for closer collaboration among security services by vice national intelligence agencies the issue of foreign funding of political parties is the issue of national security and it should not be underestimated we have a unique chance to address the issue of russian funding and we need to be prepared for a future problems we'll have with chinese funding thank you very much indeed thank you very much marching and now i give the floor to olga snopo media analyst of the leading cso opora from ukraine olga will present today an analysis of online platforms mostly facebook during local election ukrainian local election 2019 thank you olga hello everybody thank you so much for invitation to this amazing event and i want to continue my speech in ukrainian well this today's panel is dedicated to modern day challenges which result from online propaganda so promotion when some non-authentic accounts are used trolls bots for such promotion and these are the challenges which are relevant to the ukrainian electoral context the pora organization is overseeing this process of elections since 2007 and most of the electoral campaigns were quite common and standard so you have your tv stations you have your advertising outside in the streets and then since 2019 the social networks spearheaded the popularity in ukraine and they become a very powerful platform for promotional campaigns and campaigning in general during presidential campaign and local electoral campaigns so during those campaigns we've noticed how actively they use political advertising on facebook and when they use non-authentic accounts and coordinated pages and unauthentic behavior foreign influence those were the biggest challenges we faced over the last couple of years so that's the scale of using coordinated unauthentic behaviors just have a look at these numbers so based on the information from the meta company over the last five years ukraine took the fifth place in the world in terms of using coordinated web pages in different platforms and since 2021 over 1000 accounts on facebook were blocked also in instagram and over 900 groups and accounts created inside ukraine by different ukrainian politicians and political parties who were trying to influence the electoral process inside the country now what's important so you don't see these numbers here but still since 2019 facebook blocked six large coordinated networks which were created in russia and they were trying to impact ukraine's political situation they were trying to impact our voters and at the legislative level i don't think we can produce any kind of prosecution for using those unauthentic accounts and those coordinated campaigns it presents a lot of challenges so in this case we can only rely on the tech companies and they had desire and the good will to delete those malicious networks which we identified now speaking about our experience observing elections during the latest local elections back in 2020 during campaigning just our organization alone identified three coordinated networks which were used by the candidates and parties for self promotion and in total 65 facebook pages were used by these networks and eventually we identified 154 inauthentic accounts run by baza trolls now that's how the biggest network looks like which we detected 19 facebook pages and all of them were supporting a mayor of one of the ukrainian cities they supported him quite actively and they discredited his main opponent we identified 55 bot accounts and what else is important for this network most of these pages belong to local municipal media which is funded from a local budget or a central budget and that was the campaign run by the local mayor so that already has certain features of misuse of public funds and again the facebook promotion campaigns are outside the regulation in ukraine and outside the illegal framework so we could not really do much to counteract so we um you know we heard that they said well we want to help you with your campaign and uh the price tag is this much so we complain to meta unfortunately this network is still there and it is still developing and growing and we cannot complain against this public relations agency because formally for self promotion they still can use those web pages those platforms and for us for cso's that's a huge problem because we do have the resource to detect those influence companies we do have the resource to inform the big tech or the government uh but their response usually is minimal or non-existent also we have some success stories which uh are connected to the fact that sometimes big tech is talking back to us so this gentleman his name is andrey palchersky and in 2020 he uh ran as a candidate mayor of kiev and during the monitoring we identified three facebook pages which were broadcasting same exact promotions with fake information but polls were somehow that candidate was ranking seconds in uh in the ratings the actual unbiased polls were showing only two percent of support now all these three pages they were all broadcasting advertising and they did not correlate with the official campaign of any candidates or parties and the disclaimers that met us talking about did not say a word about who was paying for this advertising who was promoting this advertising all the websites all the addresses were fake and the facebook ad library was used to find out that $38,000 was spent for the fake polls as you've seen on the screenshots also these are the comments made by bot accounts and what's interesting this were the bot accounts that were using Russian language for promotion they were all praising the candidate they were claiming that he was the best and when we published our investigation facebook responded very quickly and i think on the following day or one day after they deleted the political ads for that candidate and also the pages were eventually deleted so um the success stories uh when the big tech is helping us they do exist and the public sector in Ukraine has a lot of issues in terms of tracking the inauthentic behavior we do not have direct contact with social network companies who could quickly respond and delete a compromised network or account or fake account and we do not have any guarantees you know that those fake accounts will be deleted even if we can talk to them to the tech company so these are exceptions the success stories not the rule and also we have to cooperate with other social networks we have to cooperate with youtube the ad library that is working just for a small number of countries it's not open for Ukraine and we cannot track political advertising in Ukraine and from Ukraine and it's very hard to track any comments on youtube and identify bots or bot accounts also messengers are a huge problem especially the telegram because you know it has become the key most prominent promotion platform in Ukraine for political campaign i think they talk about 70% of support in Ukraine to telegram so this is how many people use it and we talk we try to talk to them but they do not accept criticism in telegram they try to say it's not our fault that's the typical response and to summarize i must say that you know if we talk about all these important campaigns influence campaigns when there is some foreign funding involved when they use coordinated webpages all that does not start on day one of campaigning and it doesn't end on the last day of campaigning so during elections there's tools they just you know expand they gain momentum but they exist even before the campaigning starts so they're there and they start influencing the voters before the campaign starts before the electoral process we cannot allow ourselves to just introduce regulation all those challenges covering only the campaigning period because that problem is very comprehensive and it needs to be addressed in a step by step fashion and it also needs to cover the periods between elections thank you conclude now the round of presentations with Mr. Levan Natroschili deputy director of the international society for fair elections and democracy i've said Georgia Levan will give us an overview of their expertise and their activities concerning monitoring of political parties and other actors not only during election campaign but also thank you thank you very much apparently i'm the last speaker before the rep up session so of course it would be hard hard for me for to surprise you because my colleagues actually covered each and every aspect of this issue in the previous panel and this panel as well but still i'll try to put my two cents to the issue and highlight the activities my organization has been doing for many years in this regard i will talk about specific tools how we monitor especially the social networks in terms of political campaigning not only election campaigning and my colleagues here already said that of course social networks became very popular and it is the case also for Georgia i will provide concrete statistics about that and i will talk about the specific examples of cooperation between my organization and the social networks and how we managed to for instance take down some pages on facebook and so on so this issue is as i said is very relevant for georgia as well because the popularity and the usage of social networks basically are on the rise facebook is number one social network in georgia but you can see here that other social networks also became quite popular like tiktok for instance and telegram the good news is that naklasnik is not popular anymore in georgia so the challenge here is that we hear we heard here that meta has a very good kind of cooperation platforms but for instance tiktok does not have such kind of you know cooperation channels so that's why of course it's a kind of significant challenge for monitoring organizations including the public organizations and the civil society organizations as well in addition to the popularity of social networks in georgia so georgia basically was named among the countries where this so-called coordinated inauthentic networks behavior networks are kind of very actively used and unfortunately here we talk about not only the networks governed and organized by foreign stakeholders and in foreign stakeholders we mean of course russia the unfortunate news is that the local ones also local stakeholders also very actively use these kinds of services i would call them services including the government institutions and i will show you exact examples of that as for the tools how we monitor these kinds of platforms first of all i would say that of course our work basically transformed has transformed during these years from just monitoring pre-election periods to monitoring in general political campaigns these two issues basically became quite intertwined so from time to time we have seen that the campaigns political campaigns are relevant and became relevant not only during the official pre-election campaigns but also they are relevant on everyday kind of in everyday life as well so each and every political issue which is relevant today will be relevant tomorrow these issues are basically attributed with this kind of actions propaganda information kind of warfare the attempt to influence public opinion through social networks because of its popularity and my organization's work is that is a classical kind of election observation organization but over these years so we kind of transformed our activities not and focus not only election observation but also the observation of other kind of political developments in the country happening outside the pre-election period and here of course we focus on each and every kind of stakeholder domestic and international ones like the pages groups individuals certain individuals like influencers or government or position or russian so we actually cover each and every you know stakeholder which is more or less kind of active on social in social networks and especially on facebook as for concrete specific platforms we mainly cover these four platforms and we are using these tools for monitoring of these platforms and information campaigns on these platforms part of these platform tools are kind of paid services but part of them are not paid services and i guess these platforms can be used and tools can be used not only by the civil society organizations but also public institutions as well oversight institutions because you know these tools provide a very good kind of opportunities to for instance to take the data be a bunch of data and then analyze this data and especially when yesterday when we talked about the public oversight issues we heard that one of the main difficulties public institutions oversight institutions face is a lack of expertise and lack of knowledge in in terms of technologies in terms of tools advanced tools how to monitor this kind of you know campaign so that is why of course these tools can be used for that purpose as well as for specific examples so we have published a lot of you know publications regarding the networks identified in various years you can of course find these publications on our website they all of them are translated into English as well and you can of course look at them here for instance we had many cases when facebook based on the information we should send by our organization and other partner organizations took down certain pages groups which basically had this kind of inauthentic behavior and what is the kind of sad news which basically happened a couple of months ago in May the Facebook actually took down the pages and groups which were coordinated by the strategic communication department of the government of Georgia so that's a kind of scary thing of course because when usually when we talk about this kind of information you know operations we mean that these are kind of anonymous pages anonymous actors which are kind of influenced by foreign governments but in our case what we see is that the our government is using these kinds of you know services I would call them services because these are services paid services actually we know people who work on them they just sell their kind of resources to any interested person and one of them is the government of Georgia and that's a very scary scary thing because you know when we talk about the public oversight of such kind of actions so it's very hard to provide any kind of public oversight when you see that the government itself is an organizer of such kind of you know operations how can you oversee these because you know political lack of political will of course is one of the top problems when we talk about the public oversight in general and when we saw or see this kind of example so of course it's it becomes more and more relevant as well yeah this is for instance another example how we monitored election campaigns on facebook and these were official election campaigns and spending of political parties during the election period here is another example how we monitored TikTok for instance this was quite new thing for us as well and we used a specific tool for that and that was also quite interesting for us and the telegram so telegram also became quite popular in Georgia especially after Russia started the war in Ukraine you know these channels became very popular in Georgia and some ultra conservative groups are using these telegram channels very actively in Georgia to organize their actions and we also covered this topic as well all this information actually is accumulated on our separate website so we try to develop a website which somehow unites all these resources we we received during these years and we try to somehow to gather all all all issues all news all all research publications on this topic in order to inform public about the importance of this topic importance of this problem just to make sure that public public awareness is kind of raised because unfortunately in such countries as Georgia so political culture of the society is not very high and it's very easy to misinform or disinform society so that's why we think working on these issues and in this direction is very important in countries like Georgia yeah this is I guess very briefly from my side if you have any questions yeah please let me know thank you thank you Levan thank you to all the experts today and I think you are keeping the time very well Julia we perhaps now we've been hearing about these big challenges and very concerning especially the new artificial intelligence and new technology emerging new platforms what was relevant yesterday is not relevant today anymore and so but now I think we have a big role to play all of us and there are opportunities recommendations we can make all together and so we go home and we are a bit more we are sure we are not just only concerned and I would like to open the floor to those who would like to make comments or recommendations ideas actions thank you yes please hi I'm Andrei Rusanovsky from India and Moldova it seems and thank you on the panel for turning the stone which show reveal the world of creepy crawly things right that's happening you know behind the closed doors and sometimes you know influenced by big actors states big money and so on of course you know the tech companies are in this mix as well so it seems like there are two types of actors in this world some good faith actors which are probably political parties that are promoting democracy that are relying on volunteers and sort of small donations that we've heard a little bit yesterday but also the you know the emerging lots of different new parties that need to be establishing themselves in this new world so it seems like there is this good faith actor that needs to be supported and there's also a lot of bad faith actors that are not legitimate and that are pretending to be legitimate and they're trying to be sort of using the you know the excuse of freedom of speech and the excuse of political freedom of association to undermine that particular political freedom so does the panel agree and and if yes what can be the criteria that we can use to differentiate between the good faith and the bad faith actors you know it sounds like a stupid question but I think it's quite difficult to to in fact look at the world and see who are the good faith actors and who are the bad faith actors and if we do have the criteria what kind of incentives can we provide in order to actually get the help that we need because they are the counterparts they are the sparring partner we are not the political parties can be defeating the bad faith actors and what incentives can we provide to those you know legitimate actors that can be our allies or you know can be our defensive lines in in this new world of social media AI tech online interconnected world thank you thank you for the excellent question criteria to differentiate between good actors and bad actors incentive for those who are legitimate players please thanks Jeff for following the criteria so every time I mean this also in my opinion included some of the big tech companies which were represented yesterday and today they maybe were not always aware of you know the platforms that they were you know creating but definitely everyone who is contributing to a toxic polarization be encouraging public unrest undermining electoral integrity lowering public confidence in democracy those are the sort of like a criteria I would say if you see actions aiming at those four issues you should definitely be concerned and I think what we need to do collectively also put more pressure on big techs to be a part of this critical democratic infrastructure which is protecting our democratic values and not allowing them to use the excuse we were not aware we were not you know involved you know they have the same obligation as we do in this room I totally agree with the marching and I would add one more thing it's fake news actually fake news can be cannot be a good thing even you have a good kind of reasons or goals to achieve you shouldn't use fake news other ideas I think also political parties should be accountable and accountability of political parties they cannot say we didn't know we don't know what's going on they know and they should be accountable for what's going on on the online ecosystem so and also electoral management bodies as well they should take more initiative in cooperating with the platforms more agreement with the platforms more someone also already mentioned so yeah someone else I'm not sure you can see my raised hand but if I just maybe yeah marching you're still there I don't I don't know how I appear to you is it a screen or something just shortly I'm sorry on this exact vein that we can only of course speak for one of the platforms but I'm sure at least some of the others would agree that we definitely see this see this this obligation to better engage and just as an example we have two two elections this year in Slovakia and then in Poland both high stakes elections both that could be very contentious and problematic and we have already since the beginning of the year we've set up special you know both task forces and you know channels of communication with the electoral commissions and and other bodies were training political actors and and campaigners and government agencies and NGOs on all our policies all our tools just to make sure everything is set and in place and everyone's informed so I think you'll see it a new era of what the platforms are doing at least again some platforms around elections kind of trying to step up and trying to take all your comments and expectations but obviously there'll be always some things to be improved but generally you'll see I hope you will see improvement on this end thank you thank you thank you very much to all the participants you all and now we can go to lunch sorry just maybe a short announcement as many of you have asked about the history of this wonderful castle before our great lunch we will be guided to a castle for a short excursion a short guided tour by our colleague Anastasia Stendine there she will accompany us and then we will have the lunch and closing remarks thank you very much can I ask you to make your way to the tables and take your seats please for the final session okay we're waiting for the last photo opportunity in the back say cheese okay all right welcome back from lunch for this final session which is really a closing on behalf of all the co-organizers and what I've agreed with all the five co-organizers is to share a few of their takeaways we're going to be really brief but I think it's important that we sort of collectively see what did we get out of these two days I'm the moderator but I'm also one of the co-organizers so I will take that liberty to make a couple of points that that I took away from this and first of all for me it's that I think we somehow agree on the problem we somehow agree on the problem we saw a couple of points come back throughout the day and a half of some improvement that we need from social media you know they are doing quite a lot Google Facebook especially but they can do more and I think we have narrowed down on what they can do more so that's one very concrete one two is the need for legislation that is generally lacking but also there I think we've got a good model in what the EU is currently preparing and given that Eastern Europe is looking at accession maybe that's the model to follow and three is the capacity issue right I think we also found that the oversight bodies generally lack the skill to know how in this new and rapidly developing area of online campaigning so that's also an area where we need to invest but luckily we have five organizations here that actually provide that type of support so I actually feel that we came out of this discussion with a very optimistic note we know the problem we know where the solutions seem to lie and they're within reach and all the actors that have to work on these solutions are actually here in the room it's the oversight bodies civil society some of the politicians and then the international organizations that can help in that effort so what I'd like to see can we come to one or two things that we collectively feel we can push for and put that on the horizon so that if we come together in a year from now and some of you mentioned that we want to come together again in a year from now somewhere in Eastern Europe that we can say we made progress right so those are the points that I took away an important other one is that nobody seems to be ahead and already have that framework in place so even in the US even within the EU you see that some are a little bit further we heard from Latvia and Lithuania for instance but most are struggling to get this right so we have to do this together right we have to exchange lessons internationally we have to work with platforms so I think another reason why this conference really was not just at the right time but also with the right international crowd so just to say again we have that opportunity how do we seize it that's my starting point I'd like to hand over to Alexi Gromov from OCE ODIR to give his reflections thank you thank you and again as I told already for ODIR it's very important to participate in such conferences and such discussions and we were very happy to be co-organizers of this important topic as you probably know we are dealing and we are contributing quite essentially to the development of our methodology but methodology also for all other OCE participating states how to tackle tackle the campaign political and campaign finance issues including online now you probably know that quite recently it's actually not recently already some one and a half years released our new guidelines on how to observe campaign campaign and campaign finance online but maybe it's my takeaway and I could feel it also from all categories of our participants that's true everybody considers that not the campaign as such is an issue it's fine it's just a modern tool but maybe it's not even so modern no problem with this but there are two main principles which should be should be kept in mind while the authorities try or want to regulate these these activities and financing of the campaign online but also among the political parties among the voters the transparency and integrity and we have just discussed it with our keynote speaker Barbara Johnstone street about this the political finance and campaign finance online is a two ways to it it is important to set some legal frameworks some benchmarks so that everybody were on the same page of what are the main rules rules of the game actually but it's very important also to be to understand and to engage not only oversight agency who will as marching has said who will raise the red card and say no no no it's not allowed no it's it's not the main aim it's important that civil societies engaged and political parties also understand and take part in this process so that everybody could not see okay am I complying with the rules but to see whether there there is a level level playing field there is an integrity in the whole campaign process and campaign finance as well but as we discussed it today in particular it's very important also to provide certain safeguards or barriers against illicit illicit not campaign I would say but really misuse misuse of the campaign or the electoral process and of the democratic elections as such as an institution against some foreign interference some malicious activities and approaching to some disruptive disruptive elements and this is important to keep in mind and this communication and cooperation between different actors oversight agencies civil society political parties first of all will enhance I hope so increase the accountability accountability of the main players political parties first of all accountability accountability before their population before their voters and people before all of us but also it will create a kind of common common share and common responsibility that we have all of us we have to take care of and really be aware that there could be manipulation but we should be acting as one entity against these misuse and thank you again and as it was already mentioned there should be some more workshops and this joint joint activities organized and co-organized it's very good thank you over to Magnus thank you it's work right okay so I just want to one point that I'm taking away so I don't repeat what's been said in meeting the big challenges that we have ahead of us it's then essential that we find a balance between applying existing regulations and techniques on campaign finance the balance between that and the type of radical changes that that some and Nana was talking about yesterday and in that I think the point that the guitar also made yesterday in her virtual presentation is very important about identifying the principles for campaign finance oversight why are we doing this and the principles that apply to all forms of campaigning and then based on those principles identify the tools and regulations and monitoring techniques that are needed specifically for online campaigning which will be different from monitoring and regulating other forms of campaign finance in moving forward in these discussions this is excellent we need to involve political parties more we need to continue involving tech companies that we did yesterday and today but bearing in mind that the popularity of individual platform changes very quickly so if we invite one company one year doesn't mean that that's necessarily the company which will be my next time on behalf of my first one of the organizations behind this event I want to thank all of you for coming and participating so actively I really want to thank the central election commissioner Moldova for hosting us so expertly and kindly and I want to give a special thanks to Julia Shubilova to be honest if it wasn't for her we wouldn't be here so thank you to round off I want to nominate topic for the next time we meet a topic that's very close to what we've been discussing yesterday and today but we haven't had chance to get into a lot of detail it's the campaigning and the spending of non-contestants what used to be called third parties that is one topic we really need to address further as well and I want to end by sending an appeal to Verkhovna Rada in Ukraine to restart a party financial report it has to assume once the war is won Ukraine needs to win the peace and in doing that ensuring transparency fighting corruption would be essential thank you thank you Magnus over to Martin Engelbi of NDI Moldova thank you thank you Sam I have five conclusions big and small the first one is my conclusion is that we have a really really good invisible team here everything has been flawless I want to extend my thank yous to the NDI office staff Ina Karolina and Istina who have been doing a lot of logistics but everybody else as well interpreters tech team photo even photography I think everything has been completely flawless and now going into the substance one of my most cherished moments that I would remember from this conference is actually the speech of the president I think that was really showing the value of political parties political parties is the essence of democracy citizens coming together to make a better future that's why we have democracy so political parties are not it's not a bad thing it's a good thing and they need to be protected the genuine genuine actors need to be protected and the bad faith actors have been taken out and of course all parties have to combine but parties if we think that parties are in essence a good thing we should help them with compliance we shouldn't think about punishment we should we should help them with compliance and secondly and and another really good takeaway for me was actually today's section seeing the really great research that's being done in civil society and I think that with donors also being able to actually channel more money to civil society sometimes than the channel to government actors it's really important that civil society organizations that are interested in monitoring are given the right resources and that there is a permanent dialogue between the authorities and the civil society so that the civil society can produce research and results that they're actionable for for the for the authorities I think that's very important third one um no fourth one now Sam was saying can we do something before next time and I think we can I think there is a low hanging fruit and I think it's it's a political what they call the Google political ads report I think that there should be political momentum actually to put that on the table certainly by the international partners international idea has an office in in brussels and the eye and I first have offices in in washington dc I think and the eye has a has a tech team who's who's interacting with silicon valley all the time I think that it should not be given the world situation it should not be impossible to to to take that step with google telegram seems more complicated but that would be a major win I think and there are lots of elections coming not maybe in Ukraine we don't know but in mold over we will have three consecutive election years and my last conclusion is that I really look forward to keep working with all of you at both the international partners and the local partners when we meet the formula cc regularly it's very fruitful and I'm very looking forward very much looking forward to this cooperation thank you thank you Martin last but not least the cdc chair miss caravan go ahead thank you dear colleagues dear partners thank you very much from my side for these two amazing days full of discussions days in which we discussed about very important subjects for all of us and now we can make certain conclusions definitely today thanks to informational technologies elections are not as they were at least a few years ago and we talked about the fact that everything has potential and sometimes it can be fun to see what are the tools and we all together through special synergies can actually use the it tools in our favor to try to make the election process to to be a modern one but in the same time transparent and credible we spoke about the influences within the elections and it's a problem but not only a problem but also it's a crime against democracy this is how we see it and this is why we have to be well prepared we need specialists we need expertise we need experts and that is why I believe this exchange of information is crucial in our common path we talked about the fact that monitoring and control of the online space could be designed could be given to a special institution and we understand this very well that alone the election commissions or certain institutions state institutions that are controlling finances they cannot face this challenge alone because it's too complex what it's important is that we already talked these two days about these problems and how we can within our authorities underline the commonalities the problems that are similar for all of us we spoke about the regional context but the challenges identified are the same lack of regular regulatory framework enormous space that needs to be monitored and this is of course a challenge to cover it everything and also there is this financing by third parties there is the danger of financing from outside that can badly influence the result of the elections and as a consequence to denaturate the governance act itself so despite all of this we cannot limit us in using this space because it is already too spread and this way of disseminating information and communication with the society with the community is crucial today another very important thing we spoke about statistical data and the statistics show that the place of the social networks of the online is increasing the role is much higher than a year before and it becomes also more credible we talked also about referral documents and regulations at the european level but it doesn't matter how good those regulations are it could be perfect they can be perfect but they are not a universal solution in every case and we should focus on tools tools that would function in our context context i for example made a few notes about some very useful tools that our colleagues presented and we can implement those starting from today verification register of the eligibility online of those that are promoting themselves online also we have the monitoring system online monitoring system the colleagues from ukraine told about talked about that the analysis of expenses from Lithuania and they also talked about some courses and we are the first in line to enroll in those courses it's it's very interesting for us also we talked about the creation of a database that could identify geographically where a problem appears where a red flag appears where we should focus our attention and all of these tools can help us in our path of monitoring where the problems appear and how we can ensure a fair competitiveness with same types of weapons in if we can say so in a election competition we talked also about the paradigm about transforming the paradigm of transforming the challenge into the opportunity and I think the digital solutions are the ones that can help us collect that information assess that information properly and to compare that information in order to understand better where the problem is so I encourage everyone to transform all the challenges in opportunities and I think these practices must always be guided by some basic principles that my colleague told talked about efficiency and how fast we react is very important and it has to be proportionate and of course efficient efficient predictability we know already about some vulnerable points so we should focus on them we should focus all our resources on them because of course we cannot keep everything under control it's impossible continuity this is an extraordinary idea we were talking about the fact that even when the central election committee that was elected let's not forget that the mandate is a huge responsibility not only for the central election committee but also for each candidate each party that gets to the power let's also mention the cooperation cooperation through different platforms that can give can make available tools but also cooperation between election authorities different state institutions and of course central election committees they cannot cooperate only among them they need to be supported in their cooperation by the civil society but also by the other law enforcement agencies because all together we can enforce and we can apply our expertise in the benefit of the final beneficiaries who are the voters the voters by the way they should help us in this process to fight against misinformation and illicit financing of those parties through political culture through election culture through education education of the citizens about how we choose what information from the ocean of internet to consume and talking about ideas we made an exchange a beautiful exchange of ideas and we also talked about the importance of the post-election campaign of course there's there are always money in politics it's impossible to function without them but I remembered in this context about the paradigm that I liked a lot if I have an apple and if you have an apple then when we exchange those two apples we stay with the same apple one apple yes it's a different one but it's an apple if I have an idea and you have an idea and if we exchange these ideas we actually exchanging are becoming richer we now have two ideas so it doesn't work like in the case of apple so let's just use this treasure of having those amazing ideas shared so I encourage everyone to ensure the continuity of this exchange of good practices and experiences to be ready for the next challenges and to contribute together to the new interactions let's see each other at the next conference that my colleague mentioned already my panel colleague and this being said I would like once again to thank our partners international idea always see the national democratic institute ifs foundation and every single partner that helped us in our path and is are continuing to help us and thank you very much also for choosing us as a host of this event we hope that our host you felt at least a little bit of our hospitality in moldova and we are always open for your new visits to us so thank you very much thank you madame chair uh just by ending I'd like to go back to what the president maya sandhu said yesterday who referred to the political momentum the window for reform given that her government but many governments around this region are currently driven by reform minded people so we have an opportunity that wasn't around it just a few years ago let's seize that opportunity and make sure that the solutions that we bring about here in eastern europe are not just as good as we see in other parts of the world but are even better so that eastern europe starts to lead the way not just for its own region but really globally I truly believe in that and I think we can all help the CECs of this region to get there so thank you for that I think everyone in this panel mentioned the next conference so I think we can always look forward to that next conference I look forward to seeing all of you hopefully next year the jury is still out on the the topic of that conference I think a small campaign on the topic of campaign finance conferences has already started but count on us we will reach out for the next event and I'd like to end by a warm thank you to of course our partner starting with the CEC who was so kind to host us here and all the other partners that made this happen a few people in my own team that I'd like to really thank personally Julia Nanak Senya you did a fantastic job together with all the partners the staff of the CEC thank you so much for making this happen and thank you to all the participants for traveling from far and close to this conference I look forward to seeing you again in the next one thank you messages the translators yes translators of course I don't know how many languages but we will thank all of them all four languages you did a great job we didn't see you but you did a fantastic job it's a very heavy job and we thank you are there any housekeeping messages