 Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, participants and viewers from all over the world. Let me give you a warm welcome to this webinar on how to defend democracy from disinformation. I'm Kevin Casasamora, and I'm the Secretary General of International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization with 33 member states from all regions of the world, with exclusive mission of defending and advancing democracy worldwide. We're very happy to be hosting this event on behalf of the Friends in Defense of Democracy, a newly established coalition of seven democratic countries, five of which are also IDEA member states that are committed to working together to safeguard and support democracy both in their countries and abroad. Today's event couldn't be more timely and important, not just because it's the first event of the Friends group, but also because it tackles a truly global, crucial, and decisive phenomenon for the future of our democracies. This is why we're honored to have eminent participants from five member states of the coalition here today, but also world-renowned experts who are going to shed light on these issues and, more importantly, share the recommendations of what can be done to halt the global spread of disinformation. For us at IDEA, it is a particular satisfaction to be working closely on this initiative with Sweden, our host country and longtime supporter. It is thus my pleasure to give the floor to Sweden's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Linda for her welcoming remarks. Minister Linda. Thank you very much, Kevin, and thank you to IDEA for hosting us. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, most welcome to Stockholm and this digital seminar Defending Democracy from Disinformation, which is the first joint event of the Friends in Defense of Democracy and International IDEA. Friends in Defense of Democracy was established last year by seven democracies from around the world who share a concern for global democratic backsliding. We want to collaborate to manifest our commitment to democracy and to step up our efforts to protect democracy. Our partnership has become even more relevant in the light of the negative effects on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. We see many places as a result of the response to the pandemic. Five of the countries in the group are also members states of the International IDEA, one of the world's leading organization for promoting democracy. We are very pleased that International IDEA is organizing this seminar with us today. As we know, today's seminar will focus on how to define democracy from disinformation. Disinformation is the term for deliberately spreading incorrect or misleading information with the purpose of achieving a specific objective. I'm sure we have all become aware of how challenging of disinformation has increased and become more complex in recent years. With increased connectivity and rapid expansion of social media. The expansion of internet access offers new opportunities for the enjoyment of human rights and democratic engagement, not least freedom of expression and access to information. However, one consequence is that disinformation has surged. We live in the age of information. To make the best possible decision and choices, we need to be as informed as possible. We need reliable and fact-based information. But with disinformation, facts are distorted. As International IDEA points out, disinformation affects our democracy negatively in several ways, including the ability for people to make informed choices at elections. But disinformation also weakens transparency and accountability. With no access to reliable information, the public will not be able to hold those in power to account. It is becoming clearer that disinformation undermines trust in our democratic processes and institutions in several ways. In addition, algorithms can amplify divisive content hindering access to information. Our common information space has become segregated and a joint understanding of reality can no longer be taken for granted. This is a challenge to both democracy and the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Disinformation is also used as an excuse to undermine the enjoyment of human rights and to silence human rights defenders, journalists and others exercising their freedom of expression. During the COVID-19 pandemic, disinformation has been used by some as an excuse to crack down on political dissent. International IDEA reports that this has occurred in at least 23 countries during the pandemic. Let me be clear. States are allowed by international law to restrict human rights under certain circumstances. However, any such restriction must be strictly in line with international law and must meet the requirements of legality, necessity and proportionality and be non-discriminatory. Therefore, it is imperative that our collective response to disinformation protects and promotes human rights including freedom of expression as well as the principle of democracy and the rule of law. We must also uphold the principle of an open, free and secure internet. We should not let the disinformation narrative be used to undermine our very goal of strengthening democracy and democratic space. In the European Union, there are several ongoing initiatives dealing with the issue from different policy angles. However, the issue is global and international cooperation will be crucial in shaping the global information space in the years to come. There are indeed many challenges related to disinformation and democracy. I am very grateful that my colleagues from Friends in Defence of Democracy are able to join today and share their perspectives and also that we have two renowned international experts with us. I look forward to our discussion after their presentations. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Minister Linda, for this very accurate analysis and for setting the stage for our discussion here today. Now I would like to introduce the first of our two experts present here today. Dr. Marco Aurelio Ruediger is the Director of the School of Communication and Information Studies at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He's a leading expert on political sociology and the impact of social networks in democracy as well as an advisory member of the Design for Democracy Initiative led by the National Democratic Institute from Washington, DC. And he's also a member of the Social Science One project. Welcome, Dr. Ruediger, Venbindo. We're very honored to have you with us today. I look forward to your words of wisdom on how we can build up society's defences against this information and more specifically on which measures have proven most effective until now. The floor is yours, Dr. Ruediger. Thank you so much, Dr. Pervin. I would like to thank you for this invitation and to the President of the Minister and President of the United Nations. I'm very honored and glad to be here. Let me share my screen. I hope you can see it in my screen right now. Can you see it? We can. Okay. So yesterday I was asked to change a little bit my issue, I would address. So the question is how society can enhance the ability to detect and resist the fake news and false facts. And that would be very quick since the time is 10 minutes. Basically the main issues I think we should have in mind is first, the lack of social platform regulation. This is key. Social platforms must be bring to a common understanding of what should be allowed and how they should be used, could be used in terms to not harm democracy. It is important, so sub-regulation is important to be figured out about it. The rise of negationalism and hate speech. It's something that hurts our democracies around the world. The rise of anti-democratic discourse, this is something important because narratives sometimes hide the elements that it's very corrosive to the public understanding of issues. I could say, for example, the COVID-19 problem, for example, is a very huge issue, some lies about it, that it's been very hardened by this fake news and false discourse. An extensive use of its information, so we are an environment that it's so important for democracies that can enhance the debate, that it is the social networks, but also is an environment for disinformation, so we can perceive bots, fake news, and enhance the distress interliquid by different social platforms. This is key because those who now use social networks and the social platforms, they are using it to combine it as just one ecosystem focusing different audiences, but the main narrative, the main ideas, the main disruptive ideas that are target and frame it to harm democracy are the same. So fragmentation, polarization, most societies have this. We have this in Brazil extensively, we still have a huge polarization in our political environment. The US is quite polarized as well. Other countries around the world, it's going to extreme polarization. This is really dangerous for democracy and frightens us a lot. And finally, we perceive international connections on this anti-democratic discourse. So countries are mimicking discourse from other countries and on this worldwide social platform, especially those who are related to extremes, extreme left and extreme right movements, and this is quite a concern for me right now. So just a summary, basically this information engineering, which is a concept that we are working right now, it's basically organized networks for the dissemination of extreme political dissents, hate, and fake news. So we have to think not in a problem in Twitter or in WhatsApp or in Facebook, but actually there's an engineering that gets all these platforms and makes the information flows from one to another in different ways. But the message in the end, it's very disruptive to our societies and our democratic facts. Automation, which is important, it's a huge part of this strategy. So it's really based on algorithms and anonymous and dissemination use of botnets that attack adversaries, but also spread fake news against democratic values. On the other hand, we still have human attacks, which is based mostly in aggressive and incisive narratives that works in a back strategy against politics, key figures in the political arena, and mostly of all trying to correct the trust that we could have in democratic institutions. This is just a graphic idea of different platforms, but here I would like to point out a gap, which is the frog here. The gap is an extremely right platform, basically, and Paula. Paula is a platform that has been used by key and on movements and other movements around the world to get information, to exchange information, and to develop the most dangerous, in my opinion, perceptions and concepts that go against democracy. In Paula, you can find a lot of extreme right actors that distress the results, for example, in the American election, and if you go to the narratives and the messages, there are a lot of incentives against the institutions and against, for example, the Congress, the Beja of the Congress, so forth, you can find that. So what we are saying is basically this information packed in three different moments. The first one, the production of this anti-democratic and non-scientific and negotiative messages and spread by anonymous contents and explicit contents many times that led to polarization, and from there, we have dissemination by automatic networks, mass posting influencers and community influencers that is very key in this strategy. So these people must be looked with a lot of attention and what they are doing. And they are doing this in an organized way, at least in Brazil. This is a huge problem right now, especially in terms of key issues like COVID-19 and combat. So the impact is basically distortion. So we have distortions on hashtags, links, attacks, information. WhatsApp, broadly use it here as a message media, and in the end, they use WhatsApp to get militants and give them orientation about how they should propagate these information messages. And break of trust. Trust is key for democracy. So trust is something that they want to harm because when they harm trust, they harm institutions, they harm traditional media, but they harm the social contract that we so much worked for in our democracy. This is an example of what happened in 2018. You can say that all different fields in the political environment use bots during the elections, but you have at that time a greater influence from the center right and mostly the far right that was really complicated in the process. This is just one day, one day that we brought here for you. If you've got the overall elections, mostly the disinformation against democracy came from the far right. By far, far right was really engaged in using social platforms to disturb and harm democracy, much more than other parts of the political environment, but still you have bots in other areas as well. So this is a picture of really recent research we did, we got data from Paula, and we got the narratives and discourse that have been used during the end of the year, at the beginning of the year, just after the Biden election and before they got in office, and the extreme right used mostly these kind of words to sustain their research and strategy to harm democracy and put questions and doubts about the results of the elections in the West. What we put in the red square is the same ideas and words we have been using, of course, in Portuguese, it can get from our political discussion and social networks from the extreme rights. So, extreme right in Brazil is bothered as well and get the same message and translate it in Portuguese and put it in the boundaries of our culture, but basically they are reproducing the same narrative, the same discourse, and if you get the same information from social networks like Paula, from Europeans, you get mostly the same kind of words like froud, stop-fraud, suppression, irregularities, and so forth. So that's what I'm saying that it's not only in an engineer that goes through different platforms, but also in an international movement to exchange ideas that harm democracy. So this lends us to the necessity to have broader policies to address the problem. We seem to have lost Dr. Rudiger. Let's see if he comes back on. My impression is that he was getting ready to go into the policy proposals. I mean, I can always ask him when we have the more interactive part of the discussion. So, since our time is so tight, I would suggest that we move on to the next presentation and we can always re-engage Dr. Rudiger when he comes back onto the webinar. I already have a lot of follow-up questions, but I'll save them for the Q&A session later on. Now I would like to give the floor to our second expert, Ms. Carlotta Alfonsi, who is an open government specialist at the OECD and who has recently co-authored a very, very interesting report entitled, Governance Responses to this Information, How Open Government Principles Can Inform Policy Options. I'll now let Ms. Alfonsi tackle the problem mostly through the lens of governments rather than societies. What measures should governments consider to tackle myths and disinformation while still adhering to democratic principles? The floor is yours, Ms. Alfonsi. Thank you and good afternoon. It's a pleasure to take part in this discussion today. I hope you can see my slide. Please let me know if that's not the case. We can. Thank you. Okay, so as Dr. Gensitsa Mora mentioned, I am a policy analyst in the Open Government Unit of the OECD, where we are working with our members to advance a culture of governance grounded in the principles of transparency, integrity, accountability, and so-called participation. This is the angle from which we are approaching the challenge of myths and disinformation. So I personally researched how to improve communication between governments and citizens, as well as how to strengthen the information ecosystem. And this is because the flow of information between government, citizens, and stakeholders is an essential element of open and inclusive societies. But it's also a prerequisite for government transparency and for citizens to participate constructively in public life. And as the opening emphasized, this is precisely the issue that large-scale myths and disinformation threatens. So in this presentation, I will discuss insights from two papers that are available on the OECD websites, as well as some of our work in progress. Based on what I just outlined, I think it's useful to frame the discussion about the problem of myths and disinformation within the broader issue of low public trust towards governments and towards information. In the sense, we see that contracting this information is part of a broader effort to support an information ecosystem that citizens can trust and that can serve as a space for democratic debate and engagement. And we can also see business information as a symptom of a wider vulnerability of the information ecosystem itself. And for example, we document in our working paper how journalism is in decline and this is in parallel to the rise of social media platforms and their algorithms and how they threaten the business model of the media, but also change the incentives for publishers towards sensationalism and to compete for limited users' attention. So underpinning this problem is a crisis of trust in government and democracy. And an underlying issue with polarization and fracturing within society that Dr. Rudiger is alluding to. There's also widespread distrust of information, no matter where it is found. And I've included some figures here in the slide on this. So this decline in trust predates the rise of misinformation. It is certainly aggravated by it. In this respect, when we think about what we want to solve, we should not lose sight of addressing the root causes that make misinformation dangerous, which is precisely this issue of trust. This is all at the same time of, of course, trying to curb its spread. This is all to say that there's a lot of debate about fixing platforms, which is extremely important and urgent. But that alone, in my view, will not quite make the deeper issues facing democracy go away if we don't also build a health information ecosystem and institutions that listen to citizens. So on this slide, I included a snapshot of what we see as a holistic approach for government interventions. And this seeks to address both the immediate issues with disinformation as well as more systemic issues with the supply of trustworthy and diverse information. From the top left, we have proactive public communication. And here we are not talking about PR or improving the image of the government. This is about delivering timely and accurate and comprehensive information to citizens and conducting listening to be more responsive. And when the public communication can then serve as a prevention to disinformation by filling gaps, for example, in available information that disinformation campaigns can then exploit. This is something that several WCD countries are recognizing explicitly. And this is something we've seen in our data collection. And it reflects a new understanding of the role of communication, if not quite just yet its application. So I would add briefly here that prevention actually should really be the priority. And this is because once people become exposed to false content, it is much harder to correct it. So that's something that's quite important in shifting a little bit how we think about responses. I'll mention briefly some of the key practices in this area, which include, for example, monitoring online public discourse to anticipate and fill information voids. For example, we've seen countries set up advanced structures to gather continuous and depth insights by triangulating different data sources, for instance, even queries on online search engines. And this is to help develop content that responds in real time to what people are looking for and talking about. We also see actions to better target communication to make it more inclusive. Research shows that there are some groups that are particularly hard to reach. There is, I think the news avoidance is something that is picking up in terms of the attention on this. But there's also other groups that are especially vulnerable to misinformation. So communication needs to be tailored. And this involves using insights, including behavioral insights that help understand which messenger specific groups will trust and also to craft content that will be persuasive and relatable to these groups specifically. We also, among these practices, see more rigorous application of behavioral insights. And overall, the practices tend to be linked to building towards more evidence-based communication and a stronger capacity to deliver information rapidly and transparently. Next on the right, we have interventions that monitor, preempt and respond rapidly to rumors and falsehoods that emerge. And these are still, in essence, communication activities. They stress the importance of dysfunction for government responses. There are some of the more common responses which include debunking, for example. There's a lot of guidance from very credible institution and academic research on this. And it's quite established as a practice. Then you have pre-bunking instead, which is an emerging practice that consists of anticipating likely rumors and dismissing them before they even surface and gain ground as a sort of vaccine. It's called inoculation theory, the principle behind it. Governments can also use communication to alert people to recognize mis-and-disinformation tactics. Some examples of these are campaigns that countries and the WHO, for example, ran that have an educational component about when and how to share information, retweet something to make people reflect about how they can have a role in amplifying misinformation. Then below, there's a category of regulatory measures. And for example, there's platform transparency, freedom of speech, besides options for regulating content, algorithms, and other specific features of platforms. For the purpose of this presentation, I will not go deeper in this complex policy area. This is in the interest of time, but also because keeping in mind that there is still relatively little consensus on the specific approaches here. And then finally, we have a broad category of interventions that is in that making the information ecosystem more resilient. These involve all stakeholders in the ecosystem and seek to empower them to contribute to the healthier space for a civic debate. A key policy here is to improve media and digital literacy, both in schools but also for adults. Then governments can also take steps to support independent and public service media to mitigate the trend for the declining quality journalism, which is so important to democracy. They can support also fact checkers, and this can be done not only with funding, but also with regulation of the mechanisms. Funding again is very, very important for research and for civic-led initiatives. For instance, some countries have conducted participatory processes that have brought together citizens to deliberate on the issues of misinformation and acceptable speech and the like. And then lastly, a very important practice that really expanded during the pandemic is government collaboration with platforms, particularly on amplifying corrections of verified information and also sharing analysis and insights to craft responses in a joint fashion. So I've tried to capture some of the emerging practices here. Of course, there is a lot more to say. I will be happy to discuss more of this in the Q&A, but I will move on to some of the more general consideration behind the specific intervention areas that I just discussed. And here the first important consideration to address is that the challenge of misinformation is a long-term project. Responding to it requires a long-term vision and the appropriate institutional setup to deliver these interventions. This is something we noted is still missing in a majority of the countries that we surveyed last year as part of a report that's coming out this year on public communication. And some of the missing elements include the adoption of comprehensive policies and strategies, the establishment of the right capacity and skills across relevant institutions, and especially given how rapidly the issue of misinformation is evolving. One important aspect is to design any such strategy to be forward-looking and adaptable. Something equally important is to take a whole government approach to this issue. It used to be that this information was a problem for elections. Now we've seen that in reality it stretches into any sensitive policy issues. Health of course, but also migration and climate change. So every branch of government has a role to play or will potentially become exposed and need to react. And then finally it's important for politics to be distanced from institutional responses. And for this interventions can look at building buffer, so that communication for instance is conducted with impartiality and as a public service. We'll move on next to discuss the role of cooperation. This is to say that this information is not going to be fixed by governments acting alone. I think we've seen that a whole society effort is really key to the solution. Governments have a primary responsibility and the ability to bring together all actors in the information ecosystem and these stakeholders should contribute to the design and the implementation of responses and by doing so can actually help them become more effective. And I want to stress also that despite the recent surge in research on this issue there's been thousands of papers or reports of webinars and beyond. Despite all this governments continue to lack a deep understanding of this information, its mechanics, which are extremely complex and also continuously evolving. There are also some big gaps in evidence on what actually works and how well it works. So what I talked about today is kind of the state of play in the field, but there is definitely more to still test and discover. So leading or funding research is a very important steps on government's part. The last point that I want to make is about cooperating with other countries and this is the OSD specialty if you will. Now our work aims to facilitate collective learning in the space by bringing together peers from different countries to share their experiences and collecting and disseminating good practices. For instance we are now working on a set of good practice principles on counteracting misandex information which are based on a comprehensive set of practices that we're gathering and analyzing. We also gather international petitioners and informal forums to discuss these topics and help shape our research and policy guidance and I will be happy to continue liaising with any of the participants today who are interested in being involved in these initiatives. And with this I want to thank you for your time and I hope to discuss all this with you further in the panel. Thank you. Thank you so much Ms Alfonso. Well international cooperation is what we're doing here as well and this is one of the great things of this event. But I will go back to Dr. Rudiger in the Q&A for the proposals. In the interest of time I will now give the floor to the member states of the Friends in Defense of Democracy coalition who I'm sure are eager to comment on both presentations. And this is a very heterogeneous group and that's the beauty and the power of it. So to do this in an orderly fashion I would suggest that we follow an alphabetical order. Hence I would like to give the floor to Mr. Vaktan Makaroblisvili, first Deputy Minister from Georgia for an intervention of three minutes. Your Excellency, you have the floor. Many thanks. Of course it's a great privilege and honor for Georgia and for myself personally to be part of today's event and of course I'll try to be very short although the topic is very wide to present and comment, make comments from the Georgian perspective and from the Georgia's experience but of course first of all I also want to underscore that in the era of new global challenges building international partnerships with like-minded countries and ensuring collective efforts for resilience to the rising threats gains particular importance and to this end of course I want to express gratitude to Sweden and personally to Madam Minister Annalinda for initiating establishment of this crucial platform. Throughout the years Georgia has demonstrated firm determination and commitment to foster democratic development and strengthen the rule of law through citizen participation. For this we need all views to be expressed freely where media and civil society can stimulate and open debate free from malign interferences as has been mentioned either domestic or foreign. As we all know democracy cannot be taken for granted it needs to be actively nurtured and defended increasing attacks and concerted efforts of adversaries engaged in targeted influence operations and disinformation seek to undermine democracy and aggravate social polarization. Digitalization has drastically transformed democratic processes enabling new and inexpensive ways to abuse online tools weaponizing information or carry out cyber attacks. I would also mention the COVID-19 crisis has had a significant impact on the global information ecosystem, endangering provision of free, open and reliable information spreading outright false content is only one technique used while others include distortion of information misleading the audience and manipulative tactics to artificially amplify narratives on specific issues and exploit existing divisions in society. Georgia is no stranger unfortunately to this information and together with the global pandemic country has been facing the outside infodemic. Russia our northern neighbor continues its aggressive opportunistic behavior to gain political dividends including by intensifying its hybrid warfare against Georgia when in parallel also continues its illegal occupation of Georgia's two regions. In light of the pandemic fake news and disinformation campaigns originating from Russia has been attempting to sow confusion about COVID-19 health implications and introduced various conspiracy theories as well as to instill division and panic in the society distributing government response efforts to the crisis. One of the most successful institutions in the fight against spread of coronavirus richer local center for public health has been under heavy information fire has been accused by Russia of developing biological weapons while also undermining its role in fighting against the pandemic is a very good example in that regard. The global crisis in the face of the digital information has set out few directions for us to focus on continuously changing threat landscape requires the use of more systematic approach and diverse toolbox for countering foreign interference influence operations. Effective functioning and coordination of state institutions strong link links between governments as well as tuned legal base civilian military cooperation constant preparation and education are layers of effective resilience building against disinformation threats as has been also mentioned by previous speakers. Many have come to realize that soft power is less hierarchical today which is mainly due to the role of social networks that project the power of information and need to take a stronger responsibility to ensure reliability of the information put out through their channels. It is only through the consolidation of forces and building greater synergies among all stakeholders such as state sectors civil society, media and business we will be able to reach tangible results. The whole approach whole society should become able to reject the idea of alternative tools that adversaries so heavily try to plant in our minds. Also media literacy is yet another priority that should be on the global agenda as an antidote to disinformation and misinformation. Media literacy, information literacy and digital literacy as has been also mentioned are the three most prevailing concepts that can be empowering journalists and citizens likewise with relevant skills. Development of modern technologies and weaponized information confront international community with new challenges influence operations and foreign interference call for a stronger and well-coordinated response which on the one hand should be centered on protection of individual rights and freedoms while also guarantee transparency and accountability. Georgia of course remains committed to engage in future initiatives export its experience so I mean because we do have a unfortunately the best experience in that and knowledge on the matter and engage in the process to ensure that successful frameworks are developed and developed. Thank you very much I hope I will in three minutes. Thank you. Thank you very much Minister Makarov-Rizvili indeed your country the experience of your country embodies better than most international dimension to this to this problem alluded to by Dr. Rudiger. Now I would like to welcome Mr. D. Maxwell Sakemaia the foreign minister of Liberia to share his comments on the on the two presentations and on the topic as a whole your excellency thank you for being with us and you have the floor for a three-minute presentation over to you. Okay thank you. Do you hear me? We can hear you we cannot see you. Do you see me now? I see you very well your excellency. Thank you thank you. Thank you very much and let me first say thanks to our dear friend and especially the foreign minister of Sweden for affording us the opportunity and for this great initiative is laudable. We are very pleased as a country to be a part of this group the friends democracy is indeed very much pivotal if we look at the issues in the world today this is why we consider it very serious as a country and for me as minister of foreign affairs yes as busy as we are we take this very serious because we think that one sure way that we can be able to transform the lives of our people the ordinary people is to democracy making them which enhance participatory decisions making and in democracy information of communication is very key and the role of the media like I always say we consider them an indispensable element to society so we again said this is a great initiative and it is needed we think in every aspect of the world Sweden continues to be a champion as it relates to this initiative I'm happy that we can be a part of it we want to commit to continuing to be engaged when I breathe his excellency our president of our involvement with this group and the number to question your problem this meeting he was quite supportive and stay quite of the initiative as I speak to you now I am in route to the airport catching trying catch up flight schedule this came after this came after our acceptance to participate in this process last evening to be precise and we were directed by our excellent excellent our president to lead a half-hour delegation to Cote d'Ivoire as it relates to enhancing our effort towards further enhancement of the sustainability of peace within the Manor River Union but giving the importance of the platform I thought that we could just do I have less 45 minutes to be able to get to the airport and go through so madam foreign minister as I see you on the screen I thought that giving the the importance and you still be a part to say a few words but I will appreciate and with your indulgence and understanding that I had today's you know you are foreign minister so you know that's one of the complexities of the job that in a moment you know you have to you know to to move and this I just came last evening thank you so much a minister Kamaya a now I'm very pleased to give the floor to miss but said say back book the foreign minister of Mongolia a proud member stage of international idea minister back book we're honored to have you with us today over to you you thank you thank you your pronouns my name perfectly you know but it's very quite difficult to pronounce so I hello everybody I'm sorry I don't have a flag behind me because now here 9 p.m. in Mongolia so it is very nice to see you miss your excellency and linked probably remember me we met few times before and I was almost 10 years ago in Sweden with my party job so foreign minister Linda honorable ministers dear cousin Zamora it gives me a great pleasure to attend this webinar I'm very pleased to meet virtually with my old friend then colleague foreign minister of Sweden and then outspoken advocate for a feminist foreign policy I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the minister of foreign affairs of Sweden and international idea for co-hosting this virtual event I also want to thank the two experts for the insightful presentations democratic principles have been central elements in Mongolia's foreign policy since our democratic transition we always support international efforts to promote democracy we are very proud to of being part of the network of the friends and defense of democracy this information is becoming a hard the problem in Mongolia this information spreads much more quickly than truth in this current situation defined by the development of media and information technologies as well as the COVID-19 pandemic it is often used during election campaigns this information is common in the mining sector COVID-19 pandemic is another area where this information is evident people's trust in democratic institutions and government is declining this information causes political polarization and division this is becoming more evident as the presidential election day is a fast approaching we view that our approach to this challenge should be holistic in 2020 the government of Mongolia set out its ambitious goal to build a digital nation as part of this goal there is an active discussion on the establishment of the minister of digital affairs last year in the parliament of Mongolia established the innovation and digital policies standing committee to create an ICT development legal and regulatory environment draft laws on personal data protection and cyber security have been submitted to the parliament of Mongolia is the same time at the same time we acknowledge the importance of media and civil society educated people and well-informed independent media are key to combat this information we need to train our people including public servants civil society activists and journalists we need to develop plans and guidelines to identify disinformation we also need to develop targeted comprehensive responses apart from this fact-checking reliable mechanisms are also crucial lastly I would like to thank once again the organizers for this opportunity I'm confident that we will have a rich discussion I thank you for your attention thank you so much for a minister for for these remarks Mongolia's experiences are always extremely valuable both for other countries in the region and more broadly unfortunately the portuguese foreign minister was not able to join today's event as he's currently engaged in events linked to portugal's current presidency of the european union well we are very glad that the portuguese ambassador to sweden messara martins can be with us today ambassador martins thank you so much for stepping on short notice the floor is yours for three minutes thank you very much uh mr secretary general of the international idea I would start by conveying the regrets of uh portuguese foreign minister for not being able to participate today at this webinar since this is a topic that he finds very important and that he's very engaged also very instrumental to defend democracy so you would like to to send a special salute to of course uh madam minister and linda and his colleagues present here um I would also like to thank the the very interesting presentations and to offer our brief comments first on the method um portugal sees the discussion of this issue in the context of the friends in defense of democracy group and in this format in cooperation with the international idea that's a very positive sign um that we are giving complete substance to the work of the friends in defense of democracy and that we are being faithful to the purpose of contributing to our best practices lessons learned and the ongoing academic research to to the joint efforts of this group to defend democracy uh on the subject itself uh we would share the view that this information is a growing negative phenomena and that it has increased um and been very interconnected with the COVID-19 pandemic context and so it is becoming even more pressing that we are uh working together to tackle it um countering this information was basically absent from the national and international agendas five years ago uh but since then we have collectively and nationally taken increased steps to defend an open and democratic society from this threat in portugal we have been working on developing a rule of government and whole of society approach something that was referred to in one of the presentations based on an inter-institutional coordination mechanism that helps identify prevent and defend against hybrid threats including disinformation this um inter-institutional mechanism the coordination lies with the ministry of foreign affairs uh entails a close partnership with the minister of defense but also articulation with all other national entities who are responsible in this field and civil society stakeholders we are of course as a EU member state supporting and contributing to the EU level initiatives to tackle this information the european action plan adopted in 2018 the code of practice against this information also from 2018 the european disinformation media observatory set up last year and most recently the european democracy action plan and the digital ag legislation which goes into another issue that was already mentioned the the regulation of social platforms and how to have stronger moderation by digital platforms of inauthentic behavior online and of course with the the objective of striking the right balance between freedom of expression but combating hate speech disinformation and insight into violence even more so as EU presidency during this first semester portugal intends to put forward in the EU a lisbon declaration in the digital assembly at the end of june on digital democracy with a purpose and this seeks to reinforce the human dimension and integrity of the digital ecosystem promoting digital literacy democratic values citizens rights and fundamental freedoms um i would end with the three topics that may be a contribution to the the following part of our discussion that the portuguese minister of foreign affairs highlighted in a recent intervention in this context the need to transparency or to address transparency of paid political communication online this is highly instrumental to combat disinformation and we do need to eliminate the abuse and manipulation of the current lack of regulation of this paid political ads to counter disinformation so this is again entering into the regulatory intervention and i would be also looking forward to hear the experts on this the other one is the promotion of media financial independence of course media literacy and the access to mainstream media by as many citizens as possible is is very important but we need to work on ensuring that media financial independent to be able to promote reliable and fact-based information as minister lily reporting the initial intervention that is essential to to to combat disinformation i thank you very much thank you very much ambassador and i can't resist the temptation to to engage in some self-promotion the issue of a regulating online political advertising is an issue that we are working on very intently with some of our member states precisely because it is a crucial a crucial angle to this whole discussion thank you very much and now we'd like to give the floor to our host country sweden minister linda once again the floor is yours thank you very much and it's so nice to meet some of my colleagues and also the rest of you finally managed to have this this meeting and thank you very much mark on calota for your very interesting presentation it really feels that i want to know more i will make a few observations looking ahead starting from the conviction that you need to lead by example and to use diplomacy and and collaboration to foster a global environment where the development and the use of technology is seen in a broader social context and it's underpinned by democracy and the respect for human rights and the rule of law and we must stand up against those who spread the disinformation and try to support the civil society actors who are are working with these exposing this and continue to to work together we work now in several ways to tackle this information we work to strengthen both the freedom of expression and support for the free and independent media the financing here is is as you said sarah very important and also try to support different initiatives that improve media and information literacy and fact-checking we also need to initiate a dialogue with the digital platforms i have invited some of the digital platforms like twitter facebook google for a meeting soon where we will discuss how to best cooperate with civil society in order to counteract threats and hatred but also to to safeguard democracy so it's two parts of the same coin and the addition of course european union is undertaking different ways to to fight the foreign disinformation campaigns there is also an increased use of digital tools to detect and expose and prevent the spread of this information and that's a critical part of the solution and we need to come together we need to bring media the tech companies the civil societies the politicians together to try to find better ways because those who spread this information misinformation they are much stronger stronger than we are now and we need to change that i also want to highlight the need to shift the conversation from content itself to algorithm that shapes the information space we see that the use of this algorithm amplification of content has consequences both for the freedom of expression but also from all forms of radicalization and conspiracy theories and the increasing lack of joint perception of reality and i guess all of your country like my country has had these kind of demonstrations because the pandemic with totally strange conspiracy theories of why we have the pandemic and we need to have strong strong multi stakeholders work against this and finally also what the portion even if we try to fight misinformation and disinformation we also must allow unwanted opinions and the risk is that if we block too much if we remove too much then there could be a pressure also to remove things that we don't like and that is something that we have to be cautious about we must ensure that our action do not contributes to this so they include proper safeguards for freedom of expression and human rights thank you thank you very much minister linde it is very very interesting i have to say the the question of the transparency or lack thereof a transparency of algorithms i think is a is a key part of this discussion i mean it's a key part particularly when we when we think about democratic control of information so i i couldn't agree more i'm very pleased to hear that like in so many areas a a lot of what sweden is doing on this uh on this field is done a through that collaboration with other countries and and this discussion is a testament to that and also more generally to sweden's commitment to multilateral solutions i would like now to give the floor to tunisia our newest member state and to the minister of foreign affairs and tunisian subroad mr oddman gerandi your excellency welcome ladies and gentlemen i'd like to extend my thanks to the friend in defense democracy and the international institute for democracy and electoral assistance and i think this is an event on an issue to present a global growing concern of democracy your your excellency if you allow me the the volume in uh the volume seems to be very low so if if you of our for our friends doing the technical support could help us with that that would be great because otherwise we're gonna miss your your remarks is it okay now like that are you hearing me well it's slightly better slightly that's slightly better so so x 70s ladies and gentlemen i would like to extend my thanks to the friends of defense of democracy and the international institute for democracy and electoral assistance for organizing this timely event on an issue that represent global growing concern over the future of democracy in the world i would like also to thank our experts miss alfonso and mr rodriguer for their insightful representation mr chair i it is widely established that media revolution and new technologies carry with them a transformative power that have since their advance brought significant contribution to the human progress beside processing the potential to empower individuals in ways like never before new technologies have revolutionized the way countries conduct their internal affairs and external relations their contribution in the spread of democracy in many countries is indeniable as these new tools have proven to be instrumental in reorganizing the public space shaping public opinion disseminating information promoting democracy values raising citizen awareness of the importance of elections for all their benefits social medias and new technologies have become a vehicle for misinformation stories are skewed quotes are dismembered facts are twisted misinformation is disrupting our democracy our economy and our health with the current pandemic it can even be deadly this information is also making it harder to tackle the world's most pressing issues the climate emergency the covid 19 pandemic the struggle for human rights once embedded such fake news can be used to create skate boats to normalize prejudice to harden us versus them mentalities and even in extreme cases to catalyze and justify violence to find a solution we need to work together to tackle these fake news and disinformation without endangering of course freedom of express in order to maintain an open democratic system it is important that government business and consumer must work together to solve these problems governments should promote new literacy and strong professional journalism in their societies the new industry must provide high quality journalism in order to build public trust and correct fake news and disinformation without legitimizing them technology companies should invest in tools that identify fake news reduce financial incentives for those who profit from disinformation and improve online accountability informant people about new literacy must be a high priority for the educational system finally individuals should follow a diversity of new sources and be skeptical of what they read and watch taking together these steps with further quality discourse and weaken the environment that has propelled disinformation around the world globe I thank you for your attention thank you very much mr minister gerandi a wonderfully succinct so thank you very much for for for that in an ideal world I would have now like to welcome your wife to take the floor unfortunately foreign minister Bustillo is not able to join today's event but he reiterates his commitment to the initiative and of course the commitment to the to the work that needs to be done with regards to today's subject matter this means that we have come to the to the section of the program where we open up the discussion we don't have much time we have 20 minutes left I would invite yet again all our viewers that have registered to the event via our Webex platform to post any questions that they might have through the chat function and some of them have been a post already before we go to the questions from the audience I would like to start with a couple of questions of my own particularly I would like to welcome back Dr. Rudiger and and and I would like to quiz him to pick his brains on on some of the of the more practical policy recommendations that stem from the analysis that he shared before you know one of the things that jumped from the screen when he was showing his slides is the the international dimension to this is a particularly important point and the and and the question of the ideological silos in which you know this tends to to happen so my question to you I mean if you if you were given Dr. Rudiger a magic wand to to enact a a policy to to reinforce the the fences of society when it comes to dealing with this information what would you do I mean what do you think is the key to enhance the ability of citizens to detect and resist a disinformation and false facts Dr. Kevin thank you so much for your question and I apologize for the interruption of the presentation but basically I try to summarize right now what we're saying is that well this question is is the the golden one that everybody is thinking right now it's it's a quite complicated it's a quite tricky situation because you cannot avoid people to have free free speech of course so otherwise would not be talking about democracy and preserving democracy but on the other hand there is a lot a lot of thinking about the extension that you can use this free of speech in a democracy for example Carl Popper or John Rawls for example they discuss extensively about this and the turning point basically is the point that you harming and trying the old the very old democracy that is giving you the the right to to to pronounce yourself so when you look for that and you look for the environment in the social social webs here basically people are working in an organized way it's just not one individual expressing his opinions but it's very organized focusing in the stud and harm profoundly the democratic fact that we have so this is key I think this is the principle so considering this I would say that the platforms and I very much agree with the mention of the minister and linds about the algorithms which is I think it's quite important but also the messages I mean the narratives the cultural aspects that are manipulated to to create this trust as well so we are talking about the two things at the same time and and and the the social platforms the social media uh companies are key in helping us on this they still they also have responsibilities they they must be they must be bring to to to to to the table and say well you have responsibilities as as a newspaper has for example to present information and support with evidence so uh in this case you're not just a way to to to to communicate it's not just a communication issue it's not just about cables it's it's about actually how to present certain information how give voice to people that that want to have democracy so I think expand regulation on dangerous dangerous speeches is is important establish some some some clear rules about the how how they deal with it for example in the u.s. they cancel accounts of of of mr trump at that time for example and other supporters that are are are creating by the their their their position and their speech that the the incentives to to attack congress this should not be allowed in the u.s. of course we should not be allowed in any country at all so what is the rules in a global wide spheres it since you uh company operate in a global sphere as well so we have we must have this this kind of understanding the second thing is the social society and institutions I think international fact-checking coalition it's important uh institutional enhancement in government so so government officials and and analysts can understand and give more transparency of data and points feedback to specific ski because a lot of uh fake news is based in information that has some part of of of uh true information but is modified so trans transparency from government is totally important in in this aspect and finally I would say that a network of research centers non-profit non-governmental together it's important to be incentive to work side by side on this issue and we must have a provision of reliable information from trusted media I think this is so so what I'm trying to say is we'll have to build and create and sustain a network of transparency and truth business must be active because what's going on right now it's totally stumped off any kind of uh uh uh uh democracy arrangement that we hardly fight to implement in our society in Brazil for example polarization is extremely high as in other countries as in the US and this is a very complicated situation since the world has to deal with huge and dangerous problems like environment like COVID-19 and others right now thank you so much and let me say that let me say that the question of enhancing research on the new threats to democracy in general is a crucial question for any democracy assistance agenda going going forward it now I'd like to go to miss Alfonso I mean you're quite obviously a very a very serious and circumspect policy analyst because you told us that well you know that the state of knowledge is tentative about what works and what doesn't and and I can understand that but I would press you on that point all the same and I go back to my magic wand I mean if you were given a magic wand to do something in the field of regulation a to help to help counter the spread of this information according to the existing evidence what would you do thank you I think the the the I I do agree with the points that uh like some minutes and Lynn mentioned and and Dr. D'Aire as well I think regulation is not the area where I feel have the most uh expertise to to talk about just because of the complexity and obviously I think you see that a lot of what is taking so long to iron out is because there's it's really hard to balance the the benefits with the downsides and the risks and obviously the incentives for all all stakeholders in the ecosystem which I think is why we see that there's some other interventions that outside of regulation that are that are quite constructive and that get to different types of problems than than just amplification I think I think one thing that I would solve that I would probably prioritize is is friction friction in the sense of reducing the the the pace and the volume and the visibility of the spread of all false content but not just false content in a sense slowing down social media is is something that some researchers have called for and and I think to make it in a way not to make it arbitrary which is another big risk especially because different different actors in different countries have different incentives social media needs to cater to all of them and I think making making the internet less fast and and and less massive is perhaps something that can help intervene and manage the the threats in in in a reasonable way again this is this is something that has repercussions for like the business models and the and the work of platforms but it's again something that I think is worthwhile to consider with a magic wand thank you thank you so much and we have quite a few questions coming from our audience and unfortunately we'll we're really a hard press for for time so I will I will take a at the very least one of the questions and and and put it forward to our experts and to the representatives of the different member states of the friends in defense of democracy initiative and anybody who wants to have a crack at this is is more than welcome and I guess this question goes to the to the issue of the role of the of the of the privately owned platforms in all this I mean the the business side of this and the role that it can play in encountering this threat the question says and I read here we saw instagram proposing automatically information about COVID-19 when detecting discourse about it do you think that is such automation done by the platforms can be an effective tool against this information engineering and and how do you think it would be possible to work with social media companies to extend the use of such strategies while ensuring that is not invasive and it doesn't become propaganda so anybody who wants to have a crack at this let's let's tackle the the role of the of the private platforms in all of this I mean what can they do can I answer because I have to leave in four minutes of course you may answer minister Linda thank you very much and thank you for all the very insightful comments so far but but this question you put Kevin is very important and also for us as politicians because on one hand we need to have a dialogue with the platform that's absolutely necessary and as I said I have invited the platforms to to see both positive and negative things that they can do and so on on the other hand we as politicians also have a limited possibility to hinder platforms they are private companies we can have rules of freedom of speech and so on but we cannot tell twitter for example you have to do this or you have to do that you have to engage in a dialogue we have a swedish government agency for the civil contingency and they are tasked to follow and counter this information for example now when it comes to covid vaccination and we have now also taken a government decision to set up a new agency for the psychological defense because we've seen how important the the platforms are when it comes to defense especially I think it's a problem when when a narrative in a foreign country gets into the domestic discussion and discourse and is actually forming the discussion from another angle than what is you know relevant in your domestic situation and that is very very difficult to counter so that's why I really really are looking forward to to continue this cooperation with all of you in the friends in defense of democracy but also you who are now working with this in online and in listening to us on youtube and this will be my my last intervention because like like old ministers I also have to keep exactly on time and I will now meet the the Swedish woman mediation network and to to continue so so this was my last intervention so thank you very much no thank you so much minister minister linde thank you so much for for doing this and for partnering up with international idea we're eager to do more more of this and I will continue the conversation for about five more minutes with the rest of the of the of the speakers and I would like to allow our two experts any of them to to enlighten us a little bit about the role of the private platforms in all of this okay so I think I think for one minute please okay I think a lot of folks they are not really transparent in terms of their policies I don't think that they have a a policy for for for as a standard policy for everyone in every case I mean they are just acting ad hoc in ad hoc situations so in extreme situations and and I totally agree that it's complicated to to to say oh this is this is allowed and this kind of thinking or or this course is not allowed I think I understand that I understand that but there are some core values in in democracies that should be preserved and and this information for example in case of COVID-19 that that is spread around this information about on it it's quite harmful for everyone in the world and you can say that by in brazil it happens we have an excellent vaccination system so we did but we didn't got the vaccines on time because because there was a huge political discussion and in the centerpiece of this political discussion was about the how how effective effective would be to use certain vaccines that came from China instead of others and so and so forth so in the end we lost time and and we in in losing time we lost lives so this is something that concerns me a lot it is very clear the the position that that part of us should have on this kind of discussion but they didn't have so I really would like to know what are the rules in terms of the overall situation that democracy democracy and society are harmed by this information thank you miss alfonso about the role of private platforms of course I think the the original question was getting to an interesting element that for example was trial with COVID-19 which is labeling content both labeling content that comes across the user's feed but also putting warning labels uh irrespective of irrespective of the content on permanent topics for example twitter did such for mail-in voting during the 2020 US election these are useful interventions I think this is where like the evidence part and doing the research is is really important because there's a there's some platforms on which it's easy to do so there's some platforms on which is really hard and then especially platforms like whatsapp or dark messaging are completely off limits and everything's encrypted so I think transparency and I think there's been various proposals there's continuous calls on platforms to allow at least a subset of group of researchers and independent analysts to have access to data to conduct studies on what is otherwise private data and I think that's something that is still feasible and reasonable and not and not it shouldn't be too controversial in essence but there's also I think a risk of developing too much responsibility to platforms on making calls on things like the the issue of whether to ban Trump or not and I think it's not so much about the the issue of the day is about questions that society as a whole hasn't necessarily answered and there's very big implications and I think we should go back to governments and their responsibility to lead a a social discussion and I think for example in Canada there's been a deliberative processes for citizens to debate questions surrounding disinformation disinformation conspiracy etc I think such exercises also in Finland are important to take a bigger social lens and consider their benefits and risks and really take the responsibility and not the responsibility the agency away from platforms on questions of this nature and and give it back to society so that they are the ultimate arbiters of democracy and not the platforms themselves thank you so much I mean I absolutely agree I mean this is a this is a very it's a very fine balance that we need to that we need to find and and there has to be democratic control over this this kind of decision so unfortunately we're we have run out of time so I just want to thank all the speakers that have been with us today I would like to thank in her absence Minister Linde but also Deputy Minister Makarovili Svili, Minister Kemaya, Minister Bakmunk and Minister Gerandi, Ambassador Martins, our deepest gratitude also for the insights shared by both Miss Alfonsi and Dr. Rudiger as well as for the participation of all the viewers that join us today it's been a fascinating discussion and it feels as though we merely scratch the surface I mean the fact of the matter is that we're barely starting to understand this emerging threat to to democracy but a very real one I really hope that we'll be able to continue this conversation and more importantly the collaboration on this on this matters and I think I speak for all of us when I say that for democracy to survive to renew itself and to thrive in the future it needs to be protected now from this information and from the erosion of trust transparency and truth which are prerequisites for a healthy democratic arena international idea stands ready to support all international efforts to better understand and counter this most urgent challenge so thank you very much and please stay safe