 Hello and welcome to this Davos Agenda Week session, Protecting Press Freedom. My name is Adrian Monk, I'm managing director here at the World Economic Forum. But before I joined the forum, I spent nearly 25 years as a journalist working in places like the Middle East in former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and many more. So I have a little bit of experience of the topic that we're gonna be talking about now, but I'm joined by three expert panellists who have far more experience and who are gonna give us their perspectives on this topic. There's Sarah K. Ellis, who is the president and CEO of the GLAAD organization that advocates on behalf of LGBTQI people. They are Matthew Karawana-Galicia, who is director of the Daphne Karawana-Galicia Foundation. Also a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and investigative journalist of one of probably the best investigative journalists working in the field today. And Randall Lane. Randall is the chief content officer of Forbes, which I think is the posh digital way of saying he's the editor-in-chief or something like that, but he is the editorial power behind Forbes and its phenomenal success online and offline. And he's also behind an initiative called One Free Press, which helps to put the names of journalists in danger into the public sphere. So I'm gonna kick off our discussion, which is dealing with the pandemic and the threat that it's posed to press freedom, but it's not just the pandemic. We're in the middle of an information crisis with hoaxes, vaccination queries, with misinformation, disinformation, people broadcasting as if they're journalists, who is a journalist? And I wanna get all of your perspectives, but I guess I kinda start from the position of, we're not in mainstream media anymore, we're a long way away from that, but are we in need of a kind of values-based media? And if so, what are the kind of values that we can look to to help rally people around this wonderful idea of protecting press freedom? Sarah Kaye, I'm gonna turn to you first if I can. And you've been both a media executive, but also an advocate for a really important group. Can you give us your view on what we need to kind of focus on here in this debate about protecting press freedom? Well, hello, and thank you for having me. You know, I think we have two enemies here, two conflating pressures on press at this moment. It's like the two peas, it's the pandemic, and there's populism. And out of the populism is coming this misinformation that's driving agendas that are singular in view. And so I think when we see all of this pressure that's happening on the press, and then we compound it, if you saw last week Edelman release their trust barometer, right? And they said that there is an information bankruptcy that we're experiencing. Basically, the trust of the global community on press, on media, and on government has plummeted. Yet when I then add to that last year at Davos, we released a piece of research with Proctor and Gamble that showcased how important media was to change hearts and minds. You can't move policy anywhere until you move people and you move people through media. And so I think that there is a entire ecosystem that's happening that's being disrupted. I heard on a panel earlier today that this is the decade of disruption. And our press and our freedom of press is feeling that disruption now again. And we just came through a disruption in press as a decade ago when the internet really took fire and social media took handle and we had new ways of communicating and new ways of disseminating information. But I think what's really important too, and that is something I wanna point to is that there is a direct correlation between freedom of press and human rights. And our freedom of press is critical to ensuring that people globally are treated humanely and that press has access to tell the stories so that we can continue to build a better world together. But there are many ways that we can go on this as you can see. And I think another thing that's really important to bring up in this forum, there's a lot circulating here is CEOs responsibilities, right? You saw in the United States of America two weeks ago, now two and a half, maybe three, the power of two CEOs to stop disinformation. And when they finally put this burning, ravaging forest fire out that's been going on for five years, what happened was you saw in a survey within 48 hours the misinformation that was being put out there fell by 76%. So CEOs have a big role to play in this as well. Sarah Kate, thank you so much for that. I think you've raised some really interesting points already that we can kind of address. And we talk about protecting press freedom, Randall. I mean, the name Forbes is kind of hugely celebrated and storied in journalism. But these days, anyone with a Facebook feed can set up and call themselves a journalist. And Sarah Kate just talked then about the responsibility that falls on some of the companies that are running these platforms. I mean, are we suddenly discovering 15 years after the invention of social media that they are publishers and they need to behave like you have to behave as a publisher? I think they're gonna find, it's coming to them whether they like it or not. And I think there's been kind of a wake up call over the last few months, but a lot of what Sarah Kate talked about is not, Donald Trump and listen Forbes, he's been kind of jousting, it was interesting to have a president who was literally obsessed with your publication because he cares very much about where he ranked and the billionaires listen, he's felt that way for 35 years. We've had him lying to us for 35 years. So we were well aware going in about Donald Trump's relationship with the truth. But in many ways, Trump was a symptom and it's not gonna, while Sarah Kate talked about what's happened over the last few weeks, this is just a lull and the idea of the definition of truth is here to stay. And fundamentally when we talk about, we have two counter narratives here where what is the press if I am a individual and I have a million Twitter followers, in some ways I'm a bigger publisher than a lot of local newspaper publishers, I have a bigger platform, a bigger audience and also what is the truth in that what has been happening and you even see it among younger people who are growing up in this is that the idea of objective truth or that there is one truth is being blurred and that's very dangerous because here in the States, there was a famous US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who talked about the need in a democracy, you can disagree on opinions you got different opinions, but we all have to have the same fact set or the thing doesn't work. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, I think that kind of fact finding and that factual kind of edge to reporting is what makes press freedom so valuable. It's not merely the power to say things, it's the power to say things that are evidenced and that are backed up by serious, reportorial work. And somebody who does that kind of work every day is Matthew Corona Galizio and Matthew, I just want to turn to you and ask you a little bit about your reflections on this, partly to understand what the impact of the pandemic has been on you and the colleagues you work with in investigative journalism, has it been a kind of break where it's allowed you to kind of do deep exploration or has it put a break on some of your investigations but also to get your perspective on that responsibility set and where we need to put pressure and what needs to change. Thanks, Adrienne. The pandemic has made some of our work easier because we spend less time on travel and we have more time to do research, building up evidence and so on. But it's also a time when you realize how much of your leads in investigations into corruption or in my particular case into my mother's murder are based on serendipitous connections that you get when you meet people at events, on your travels, at conferences and all these different kinds of engagements. Even for police investigators, they depend so much on being able to travel to different jurisdictions, speak to their counterparts in those different jurisdictions and move investigations forward. This work has halted completely and the result is that investigators have become pretty fatalistic, saying things like we have no hope of moving this investigation forward if we can't travel to collect evidence and so on. So it's looking pretty dismal on that front at the same time as an organization that works in the field of anti-corruption. There are some kind of broad observations and the first of which is what a poor understanding people have of what constitutes corruption or what constitutes wrongdoing or what even constitutes a conspiracy because I feel like sometimes saying, look, there are so many conspiracies going on that are real conspiracies in the world of organized crime or in the world of money laundering or in the world of tax evasion or in the world of the people who conspired to murder my mother. Do we really need to invent new ones about Bill Gates controlling a vaccine? For example, there's just no need for that. And that's when I realized, wait, it's just that somehow this information on corruption, on organized crime is simply not getting to most people. And the kind of information that is getting to those people is just a load of rubbish. It's disinformation, it's misinformation designed to deceive people, to kind of ramp up support for a populist politician. And how is it that it's mostly that kind of information that's getting to most people? I think that that's where we have to start looking at access to journalism. The way that algorithms on social media are built, whether people have fair access to news media, for example, even things that you might not necessarily be thinking about that aren't algorithmic, like most people in the world can't afford a broadband connection at home, or they're on mobile plans that only give them access to YouTube, for example, which means the only kind of news they consume is disinformation or misinformation on YouTube or Facebook. That's a trick test. Yeah. I'd love to jump in on that. So one of the things that Glad, we're an LGBTQ media advocacy organization that works globally, one of the things that we've been really famous for was early in the days, we started measuring representation in film and TV shows that were coming out of Hollywood. And the idea behind that was building visibility for the LGBTQI community, who was largely invisible. And outgrowths of that have been, now President Biden saying that what changed his mind on marriage equality was will and grace. So what we've decided to do because of exactly what you're talking about, Matthew, and Randall is we've decided to now measure social media and look at them from a safety perspective and a responsibility perspective and start to assign to them grades and an understanding. When we started doing that out of Hollywood, it changed the way Hollywood interacted and the way they created films. It took a while, I'll give it that, but it's changed the way that Hollywood interacts. And now you can see other marginalized communities use the same recipe and the same model in Hollywood. We want to do that for social justice with social media as well to measure and rank social media companies because that is the only place a lot of people are getting information, like you said, Matthew, and there is no responsibility. Now, I agree with you, Randall. I think it's coming fast and furious from this new administration that's in place and it is 15 years too late. But we also have to remember that marginalized people are marginalized and don't have a voice. And that's our job is to be a voice for them and to measure these platforms. And we're releasing an index in about another two months that is going to simply do that. And we'll put them then online to answer the questions of why it's not safe to be LGBTQ and on your platform or where is your responsibility in taking hate speech down, in taking inciting speech, misinformation, disinformation down. Yeah, I was going to ask you if advocating into the media has been replaced by advocating against algorithms. And you've kind of answered me with that description. But I mean, turning to Randall for a moment, Randall, we used to talk about protecting press freedom in very, very concrete traditional ways. And we still have to do that. Journalists are arrested, they're threatened, they're bullied, they're tortured and worse. But is there also a need to protect them algorithmically? Because that's where a lot of the press freedom battles are being fought. They're actually the journalism that people like Matthew are doing and putting their lives and livelihoods at risk to do is just not being surfaced sometimes by the algorithmic dominance, if you like, of big platforms. Is that something that concerns you and something you think we should be looking at? Listen, this is obviously, anytime you get, the platforms are incredibly democratic and in so many ways that's good, but there is a danger when there are so few platforms who have algorithms that favor certain outlets and frankly are not top media outlets. And what we see is the whole spectrum. I mean, you mentioned Adrian, what the stakes are. I mean, in 2020, according to CPJ, committed to protect journalists, we had 30 journalists killed and that was up three-fold from 10 in 2019. So you go to that extreme and then you go all the way down past journalists who are imprisoned, which I think we're pushing 300, and then you talk about how all the way to, I mean, the platforms are more than just, it's not just how they're sorting news, it's also, listen, journalists are harassed via the platforms. What you saw in America a couple of weeks ago, again, with the insurrection on Capitol Hill was a manifestation of what happens when there is no filter, and again, a lot of that is good, the danger, of course, Adrian, is that we have to be very careful about filtering news. I mean, everybody here believes in an unfettered pre-press, but when misinformation comes through these platforms unfettered, it leads to very dangerous things. And we saw that before because society is losing its ability to tell they're seeing the truth they wanna see, and it goes fundamentally to what it means to be, we're talking about protecting press freedom, what it even means to be a member of the press. Yeah, I mean, I'm old enough sadly to remember when people used to write death threats by hand and make a real effort. The old fashioned way. But you know, your point about protecting journalists is not just physically, is a really important one because Matthew, you touched on this disinformation, misinformation, and I think your point is a really powerful point because we've seen the way journalism's opened up, we've seen things like, for example, Bellingcat where open source intelligence has really used the public to shine a light incredibly on a whole range of different things, but then against that, you have to put this tsunami of misinformation, disinformation, and also targeting of journalists like yourself. I mean, who are trying to get the truth out there, and you know, you can probably speak to experiences you've had in investigating the murder of your mother where you became the object of real, really vicious online attacks. I mean, don't platforms have a responsibility to protect people in your situation also? What's your view on that? I think the most horrible thing is that, first of all, I always have to sort of preface an answer to a question like this by saying that I'm a man and for a woman, it's like a billion times worse. The kind of abuse that I get online is no way comparable to the kind of abuse that a woman would get online in my position. But for me, I guess the worst thing is that it's just become normalized. I got used to the fact that, for example, if someone says on Facebook that I'm the person who murdered my own mother, there are kind of three dots next to that post, and I can click report and submit report, but I know that nothing is ever going to happen. It's like just sort of pressing the elevator button over and over and over again, hoping that the elevator is going to come faster, but that's not going to happen. And I've just gotten used to that. So now I don't even bother. I just kind of let it slide because I've grown thick skin, but that's really dangerous. I mean, do we have to kind of live? Not just me, but thousands of other people in the same position or in worse positions, journalists and activists, do we really have to live with that and grow accustomed to that? It's quite horrifying. Yeah, I mean, to come back to Randall and Sarah Kaye, I mean, this issue of protecting journalists, and if we widen it out to talk about the kind of attacks we've seen on journalists online and that we see online, is there a case for saying that, you know, journalism because it's values based because of the role it plays deserves some extra level of protection from some of these platforms because of the risk that journalists are running or are we special pleading for journalists when, you know, maybe everyone should have that kind of protection? Randall, maybe I can turn to you and then Sarah Kaye. Listen, it's tough when you're in the journalism field and you're in the business of free information to ever advocate. I'm not saying that the systems obviously broken, but, you know, we always have to be very careful about limiting free speech. And that's the conundrum is that there need to be more systems in place. But of course, we instinctively want as free and open society as possible because that's what our entire field is based on. I mean, so that's the riddle to solve. It's even, you know, as we touched on earlier, it's even a question of who is a journalist nowadays? And if we did designate that, if we did ask for protections, I mean, who would qualify? And, you know, what we pretty much don't want is for governments to be deciding who is a journalist and who's not because we can all see the road that could go down in different countries. And it's not a good one. So that's the trick. There's unanimity that there needs to be reform, but it's very tricky when you start to talk about the need to restrict and censor because we fundamentally are people that embrace the idea of free speech and the marketplace of ideas. I mean, how do we balance that out? I mean, Sarah Kay, you know, LGBTQI people are often very much in that category that Matthew talks about people who are targeted by some of this online hate, both as journalists and as members of the public. And perhaps exploring Randall's point a bit more, you know, when we think about the journalism environment 30 years ago, there wasn't the capacity to magic up a kind of invisible mob of anonymous people to direct hate consistently at people. I mean, that just didn't exist. You couldn't pay people to, you know, put masks on and follow journalists around. And yet in the online space, people can do exactly that. How do we kind of square that circle, if you like, of trying to protect people and also trying to keep open what we're trying to defend? Yeah, it is the million dollar question, isn't it? And I think it's a little bit of twofold. One is, you know, especially in the United States, we have lacked any kind of value-based leadership in the past four years. We've had a bankruptcy there, if you will. And especially directed squarely at the press, right? So we've had leadership that has created them or sanctioned them an enemy. And so we've seen the culture go that way. I do think as we see a new administration, an administration that has a deep respect for the press and a deep respect for diversity to get to your other point, we will see that more and more take form within our society. I also think that what we were talking about earlier is holding these platforms accountable that they are a distribution unit. So what happens, what is distributed on their site ultimately needs to be monitored in a way by them. And that is up for a lot of debate on how that is and what it tends to be because we do have freedom of speech, we do have freedom of press and those are vital to our society and to democracy. But I will say on the other side of that, especially when you look at marginalized groups, you did say they are targeted more often than not. And there needs to be these protections of some sort in place. But also these platforms have created a ability for our communities to connect like they've never been able to connect before. So I do want to point to the greatness of them as well because we are spending a lot of time on the negative side. We would not be as organized. We would not know our community half as well if we didn't have these platforms. So they have brought us together but they do have a mob mentality and they are dangerous at a level and that needs to be handled as well. I want to come with drawing our conversation to a close but I really want to come back to both Matthew and Randall to maybe close with you with some details on the One Free Press Coalition. Matthew, Randall and Sarah Kay are in the US and the platforms are in the US pretty much. And there is the freedom of speech is absolute. It's not absolute in Europe. Where I grew up in the UK, racial hate speech is outlawed. You'll go to prison for it. In Germany, there are laws about speech and you're a European. Is there a clash here of cultures that needs to be addressed as well or are there lessons from Europe that maybe the US could pick up on? Rather than a clash of cultures, I think it's more of a problem of jurisdiction. So Malta can create whatever laws it wants. For example, the smallest EU member state about broadcast media, about distribution channels and so on. But what are those laws against Facebook or against Twitter or against whatever platform? They're meaningless. They're completely unenforceable. Facebook is practically a state now. It's more powerful than many of the world's countries. So it's more of a problem of jurisdiction, I think, rather than a problem of culture. And unless, I mean, if Facebook kind of remains within US jurisdiction and isn't broken up, then things would have to change in the US or laws would have to change in the US to have an effect elsewhere in the world. And of course, this is a problem. I mean, we're talking about hate speech in general, but the effects are really extreme in some cases in the case of media. I'm going to stop you if I may, not because what you're saying isn't fantastically important but because I don't want to bring Randall in because we're just about a minute away from closing our session. Okay. I think what's been really interesting from all of you is to understand that press freedom is not just the traditional sort of press freedom we think about, it's also a lot about protecting journalism and protecting individuals in the online space. But Randall, can you just tell us very quickly about the work that One Free Press is doing to actually protect journalists who are really under threat? But well, it's a two-year anniversary this week and Adrian, you were instrumental in getting this started and Matthew were there too, it's about getting, instead of waiting for somebody else to protect journalists, we can protect ourselves. So we have a coalition of 35 the largest media organizations in the world, whether it's Forbes, AP, Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, Time, Al Jazeera, you name it. And what we do is every month we publish 10 journalists who are in danger and we get a billion, an audience of a billion people behind them so they're not forgotten. And Matthew, we've had your mom on, as you know, six times to make sure there's justice to the crime against her, same with Jamal Khashoggi and we did a count last week and 12 of the 137 journalists who have been imprisoned have been released. And several have three at least have credited us and credited this pressure directly with helping get them released. So there is a difference we can make without waiting for somebody else to take action of we as journalists take action ourselves. Randall, thank you so much. And I want to thank all of our panelists and all of you watching for joining this discussion. We've really, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, touch the tip of the iceberg of the issues affecting journalists and journalism, but you couldn't be in better hands than with Sarah K. Ellis, Matthew, Karana Glitzia and Randall Lane. Our thanks to all three of you for being such great panelists and for really touching off, I think a lot of thoughts amongst everyone watching and sharing with us. So from us here in Geneva to all of you, stay safe, stay well and see you soon. Thank you.