 Hello everyone. Welcome to this side event, Tracing Money Behind Political Communication. This session is organized by International Institute for Democracy and Electroassistance. My name is Yuki Hamada. I'm a Program Manager at International Idea in Sweden. I know this session is one of the very last sessions on today's agenda, but I'm very happy to see so many of you have joined us today, and we'd also like to thank UNODC for this opportunity, of course. In this session, we're going to talk about the issue of money in politics, or more commonly known as political finance. As many of you know, article 7.3 of ANCAC specifically calls for countries to improve the transparency of funding in political parties and electoral campaigns. That in itself has been a very difficult, challenging journey as most of you know, but in addition to these existing challenges in the last recent years, we also start seeing the emerging trend that is the increasingly political parties spending on online advertisement and online communications has been increasing across many countries. And such trend is also more obvious during this pandemic time, as you can imagine, the many in-person activities are prohibited or restricted, or social distancing measures are further encouraging political actors to operate their campaigns on online spheres. But despite growing expenditure on online activities or online advertisements by political actors, the corresponding regulations is still very much non-existent. The lack of such regulatory measures and options has posing a lot of corruption challenges and also impeding for the implementation of ANCAC, and then hindering our collective effort to fight against corruption. So in this session, I'm very excited to join by, well, currently we have two, three originally, two distinguished, oh, actually we actually now have three experts. We have three anti-corruption and political finance experts to discuss this challenge relating to the increasing spending on online campaigns by political parties. And also we'd like to discuss several actionable solutions or policy options that can be considered by policymakers and practitioners in anti-corruption agencies and oversight agencies as well as civil society organizations. So I'd like to introduce very briefly into today's panelist to the participants. First, we have Ms. Sandra Martinez. She's a program director from Columbia Chapter of Transparency International with over decade, excuse me, of professional experience in anti-corruption advocacy. Sandra, great to have you here today. And up next, we have Ms. Kushibu Agrabo. She's a program officer of International Idea. She's been working on a number of projects in relation to political finance, anti-corruption, but also gender and inclusion related matters. She's also a co-author of the ideas recently published report called Begrating Online Political Finance. If you will, thanks for joining. And then, of course, last but not least, we have Mr. Jorge Baradales joining just right now. He's a policy and research expert at Transparency International in Bering. He's also leading a portfolio of political integrity and he is one of the leading authors of the TI's recently published excellent report called Paying Forward Views. Okay, thanks for joining. And in a minute, I'm going to ask you questions each one of you as well, but I'm sure that participants have also a number of questions as we go along. So in that case, I'd like to ask you to post your questions by using a chat function at the bottom of this WebEx platform, as you can see. Once you post your questions through chat to everyone function so that we can all read your questions and we try to have at least like 10 minutes at the end of the session to respond to the questions from the audience as well. And on that note, I think we are good to go and let's get started. And firstly, I'd like to ask Jorge a question. So Jorge, could you just tell us a little bit about how those online advertisements or online communications are being financed and what's the implications, corruption risks in relation to the increasing spending on such activities by political parties? Thank you very much, Juki. And it's a pleasure to be sharing this panel with all of you. Well, let me just say that, well, it seems a very simple question. It's actually requires a very complex answer. And because there is a there is the issue of definition and I would like to actually bring to the attention of the those of you who are listening that actually, the term political online political communication is actually quite accurate to try to describe all what we are concerned about. Because we are not only speaking about advertising as such, but also other types of communication online that may also be influenced by the use of money that should be accounted as contributions, political contributions. So but then let me let me say that if we are speaking about paid or sponsored online communication that are either as advertising or are organic, that happened in the context of an election and whose content calls to vote for a party or against a party or a candidate or an option in the referendum, we are speaking about something that needs to be regulated because that is a very effective way of communication that attracts intensive use. So the very specific risks that this poses to anti corruption are mediated, of course, for the risks that this type of communication poses to democracy itself. Online sponsored political communications are becoming the predominant ways of campaigning in the future. I mean in the present already is such as in the case of the UK 43 percent of total spending is already been used through online communications and 46 percent in the US in the last election in the last election cycle. So then from an anti corruption angle, this huge massive amounts of money poses two risks. The first one has to do with the transparency of all the financing that is going through this channel that renders accountability hollow because in most countries, we're not talking about those most developed that have developed some sort of regulations for this, do not have regulations that can capture this type of communications. So it is important for an anti corruption perspective to regulate who places or pays for an ad because in unregulated context, third party actors can circumvent regulations seeking to exert and you influence to secretly sponsor parties and advertising or communications in general. So and this can attract large amounts of dirty money or dark money into politics. Interesting. No, thanks. And following on that, perhaps I'd like to turn to Sandra next. I mean, you based in Colombia, perhaps could you just tell us a little bit about the perspectives from the national level? I mean, what is the situation surrounding about this spending, increasing spending by political actors on online communications and advertisement? Has there been an increase or could you share a little bit more examples and how it has been? Thank you, Yuki and good afternoon. Good evening to everybody. It's a pleasure to be part of this side event and addressing an issue that I think is really, really important for democracy, functioning and health. And of course, for the anti corruption movement, we do see the lack of information and transparency in campaign funding, a big door for corruption. So it's very important to be able to address these issues. So you were asking about Colombia and let me start by saying that in Colombia, a candidate, it's allowed to invest up to 100% of their incomes in political propaganda. There is not like a top of maximum money that can be expanded in political propaganda. So what we have seen since 2011 that we have been doing like a close follow of the incomes and expenses of campaigns is that regardless if it's a national or a local campaign, political propaganda is the biggest expenditure that is reported. And this excludes private channels, billboards, radio, TV propaganda and also recently we're seeing more and more the report on online platforms and social media propaganda. However, and this is I think something interesting to see because we could think that given this new trend and this new possibility to have a wider scope of communication through social networks, there would be a bigger report on expenses on this matter. And what we've seen is for example, if we go to 2018 that were the last legislative elections, well, only 6.3% of the propaganda, the whole amount of propaganda, political propaganda reported, was reported on social media. It's not a lot of money. I would say approximately was like $1.8 million for campaigns that are relatively expensive. And the only company that is one and over reported is Facebook. And this trend, this pattern repeats in the presidential elections of 2018 and the last elections that we had in 2019, the local elections, it was the same pattern. So I think there's one like challenge here and I'm not going to address yet like the legal frame that we have in Colombia, but it's like, we say, yeah, more and more propaganda has to be reported and detailed. The online platforms, it's a valid way to communicate. This wasn't allowed before or it wasn't completely regulated. Now they are like the electoral authorities moving towards regulating it, but still we see a really little report on the expenses in these items. Thanks. Just to follow up on that point, Sandra, if I may, we also received some recent questions from participants beforehand and some recurring theme is also the regulation of third party funding as well. So the third party is not necessarily candidates or political parties, but third party group are campaigning on behalf of political parties or candidates on the online platforms. Do you see that as a part of emerging programs or how has it been well observed and then evolved in Colombia? Do you have any views on that? Well, as I was mentioning before, for example, the National Electoral Council didn't have like one only vision, like if it was allowed to include the propaganda that was online or in these platforms, but recently they have started regulating it. And one of the things that they have like being clear for the upcoming elections, it's already a resolution, is not only that all candidates campaigns, all the political parties that invest money in these social media networks have to report how much money, but also if a third party is going to do so, they have to communicate with the campaign or with the political organization and report this as a donation to the campaign. So you can include it into the maximum expenditures that are allowed for any given campaign. Now this is in the formal way, we can later talk how can we really enforce this and use it in a practical way. Exactly. I'm looking forward to hearing that in the next round as well. Then let me turn to Cushibir. It seems to us that Colombia is not the only country that is struggling with this emerging challenge. Perhaps could you speak a little bit about experiences from other countries and also reflect on this lack of regulations specific to spending in relation to online activities. Thank you, Yuki. And first of all, it's a pleasure to be here today, sharing this panel with very distinguished panelists and also talking about an issue that is of growing importance, but still very loosely regulated. Well, Yuki, you highlighted in your opening remarks and our preceding panelists have already highlighted the problem of unregulated online campaign finance. Despite its growing popularity, the regulations relating to online campaign finance remains one of the biggest weakness of political finance systems anywhere, whereas traditional offline campaigns are generally subject to a mature system of regulations. Online campaign finance space is absolutely unregulated in most jurisdictions. According to international ideas, political finance database, which I also invite our audience to have a look at, only 12 of the 180 countries that we have included in the database have an explicit limitation on online campaign expenditure, either for political parties, candidates, and as you were mentioning, third parties. It's a relatively new phenomenon, although not exceedingly new, but still the regulation online campaign expenditure is not straightforward and there is absolutely no conclusive evidence of what works and how it works. Policymakers and oversight agencies all over the world are grappling with this challenge of how to regulate this ubiquitous and obscure online campaign finance world. We have explored some of these challenges in the report that you mentioned, the link to which I have already provided in the chat box, and I invite the audience to also have a look if they want to understand in depth, but I'm going to touch upon two primarily challenge of regulating online campaign. First, Jorge already highlighted the definition of online expenditure and campaign expenditure itself, and here I want to touch upon the very definitions of online campaign advertisement by different social media platforms, for instance. Facebook defines social issues under political advertisements, whereas Google does not include social ads as political ads. So these designations obviously matter because they eventually impact the calculation of total online political advertisement spending and obviously impacts the overall oversight. And not just the designation and the definition, there is also a disparity in how each platform has a very different approach to oversight or transparency of online campaign expenditures. For instance, there are several platforms which already has their ad libraries, for instance Facebook has it, Google has it, but the level of information, the details provided by each of the platforms is very different. If you go to Facebook ad library and try to search all the online advertisements placed by a certain advertiser, you can find it. But if you want to get a consolidated report of all the expenditures that has been incurred by and on behalf of a particular campaigner, there is no way to find that information. And this was clearly seen in the case of Argentina as well, where there was a massive disparity on the online spending reports provided by political parties and the information that one could find on Facebook ad library. Second challenge of then regulating online campaign finance is also the substantial use of unpaid organic content, which also was touched upon briefly by Jorge in his presentation. It is very difficult to track online organic content, obviously. It is a massive, how do you call a black hole, which is impossible to track or put a monetary value to it. And having said that, online content is actually quite good because it is a respite for small parties or independent candidates who have a very small advertising budget. But at the same time, if it is not regulated, well, it can be misused and abused by big campaigners who already have a massive budget for paid advertisement, but can also use it for organic, also use organic content to expand their reach. And this was evident in case of Canada and particularly for third party actors, a question that one of our audience also posed, as you mentioned to Sandra, one of the biggest third party spenders in Canada was said to have organically reached 15 million users every week during the campaign period through its social media page, very organically through likes, shares, posting of messages and the like. So despite making this massive investment on organic content, it was not tracked, it was not recorded or accounted for as online expenditures. So from the content side, these are the massive challenges, but then there are the challenges which I don't want to take too much time. We have explored those challenges in detail in the report. I invite the user's audience to explore them further. Thanks. And also just to just ask perhaps, I see you nodding throughout the two panelist interventions. Professor, would you like to add some other points from TI's recent report in terms of the challenges that you identified? Oh, yeah, I think you are. I'd like to add to what Cushu just mentioned, perhaps, because I fully agree that if the challenge, one of the challenges is to track the money that's going through online channels. I think we should probably be more ambitious when it comes to addressing this challenge. So far, I mean, what Cushu has mentioned is what we know about this is mostly because platforms, the companies, at least the big ones that concentrate the biggest share of the market have adopted certain policies that have to do with transparency. But then we also know, because of, for instance, in Myanmar or in other countries where electoral authorities, EMBs, oversight, or the government is active, and I also saw that in Panama, they can bring platforms in line and try to get them to enforce certain conditions or requirements to guarantee transparency. So I would say I think it is up to governments. I think they have to step up their game, update regulations, well define the targets. I mean, define what Cushu was saying, define very specifically what a sponsored political communication is in a way that includes paid-for content that is used to influence, but then they should take several other steps. And let me just briefly mention this. The next step would be to mandate registration. And platforms are doing this very actively in certain countries. The last time I checked, it was 68 countries out of, of course, 170 plus. But mandate registrations, so they ensure that these advertisers, whoever places the under intermediaries, not only those who place the ads, but then also those who broker, the brokers that sell or place the ads are registered and these are real people that are verified. But then once the target is defined, governments should also establish certain parameters. So online communication, of course, is complex and its working is very sophisticated. But then there is no reason for governments not to think about defining very well what's the timing for this type of communication to be regulated. Then quotas or volumes of ads can also be regulated. Tech companies have the tools to measure this. Prices, if necessary, why not? Then also silent periods of blackouts. Then the periods in which there shouldn't be any kind of communications. And then, of course, the issue of micro targeting, which is what makes this online advertising or paid communications online so attractive. But then once everything, all of this is defined, I think governments should also establish or impose some responsibilities on the companies or the platforms. They should hold them accountable for enforcing this regulation. Because one of the main issues when it comes to this issue of online communication is that EMBs oversight agencies do not have the tools, the level of technical sophistication to enforce or to track that the law is being complied with. But then the responsibility should shift towards the platforms. And I think that is possible. There are tools and there is some willingness to do it in that way. Thanks, Hohe. I think that you already jumped into so many other areas and also talked about the responsibility of platforms and all that. We'd like to get into a little bit in a minute. But perhaps if I may, I'd like to bring this discussion back to sort of areas of spending and political finance regulations and context. So in that, perhaps I'd just like to ask, could you first and then go to Sandra and then could you also talk about a little bit within political finance regulations? What are there existing good practices or what options there are for the policy makers to address this, to bring more transparency in the spending or increasing spending on political communications by political parties and political actors? Thank you, Yuki. It's a very difficult question to answer. Like I said, there exist very little good practices. But what I can share is the lessons that oversight agencies, governments have learned with the experiences they've had. For example, I can share the experience of the United Kingdom. So we must recognize that the world of digital advertising is anything but static. Ways of campaigning online are continuously evolving. How online campaigning happened 10 years back is absolutely different today. There are so many different platforms, there are so many different mechanisms and so many different ways in which political actors can campaign. However, policy makers have not been able to keep up with this dynamism of online political campaigning. We all know changing any regulation in any country is a long term process. It requires a broad agreement of political actors. But like I said, online platforms and campaigns are continuously evolving. So it's very important for legislators to stay ahead of the innovation curve. So I was telling you about UK. So following the Cambridge Analytica case of 2018, the Electoral Commission in the UK asked for or called for changing the campaign finance regulations to include detailed paperwork of how campaigns spend their money online and disclosing of funding sources for all digital political campaign material. However, three years have passed, nearly three years have passed since the revelation and the legislation guiding political finance have not been updated to take account of the digital revolution. So what I'm trying to say is it's very important for legislators and policymakers and governments to really stay ahead of this innovation curve. Otherwise, we will not be able to keep up with the way digital campaigning is evolving so rapidly. And Jorge basically very lightly touched on the technical capacity, which is very important. Monitoring digital spending, online spending is slightly different than how we monitor traditional offline campaigning and the ambiguous nature of online campaigns, which falls between organic actions, coordinated actions, and the data availability or unavailability. It complicates the capacity of oversight agencies. We saw it in case of Romania. It is one of the very few countries which has some sort of regulation on online campaign finance, and yet the digital capacity of the oversight agency has been quite a challenge. Auditors have not been able to effectively track and verify the expenditures in the online environment, which kind of undermines the whole purpose of having a regulation. If you don't have the capacity to actually oversee whether or not the regulations are being complied for. So it's also very important to upgrade that technical capacity of oversight bodies. And finally, I want to also talk about the engagement or involvement of multiple actors. It's not just the platforms or the political actors. There are so many other actors involved in this whole paradigm of online campaign finance, including not just oversight agencies, but also anti-corruption agencies, data protection agencies, private companies, PR agencies. So it's very important that all these agencies work in synergy. So we are seeing this in the case of Mexico, which coincidentally is holding its legislative elections next week. So in Mexico particularly, there are first of all three agencies that have a stake in the electoral processes. And then there are obviously the social media companies, anti-corruption watchdogs, civil society organizations and the like. Similar to what other countries are facing at the moment, Mexico has seen an unprecedented rise in the use of influencers, social media influencers, who have been used to promote the propaganda of political candidates or political parties. However, there is no clarity in terms of how to regulate them. In fact, there is an ongoing case of a political candidate who has been using his wife as a social media influencer to promote his campaign. So although the electoral tribunal of Mexico has kind of made certain statements in terms of use of influencers, however, there is no clarity particularly because there is this absence of coordination between the different agencies involved, the electoral institute, the tribunal, the prosecutor, social media platforms, marketing agencies, data protection agencies, advertising council and such. So this experience really shows us that there is a value or an indispensable need of interagency coordination. So that such emerging challenges, emerging issues such as the use of influencers, for instance, are addressed in a holistic manner. So yeah. So rather than having best practices, I think what we need to also see is how we can learn from the experiences of other countries because really this is very ambiguous. No, I think seems fair enough. Thanks, Kishibu. And Sandra, I think Kishibu also mentioned and Hohe to some extent mentioned the need for upgrading the capacity of oversight, need for interagency cooperation, also the need for the policymakers to stay ahead of this digital trend, for example. Reflecting on those sort of global lesson learned or good practices, can you also just share your views or insights on what has been successful in Colombia or what should be happening in Colombia to combat this new emergency program? I understand in Colombia, generally speaking, it's a good practice in Latin America regions that you have a good political transparency and so forth. But what more needs to be done and what do you think can be situation can be improved? Thank you, Yuki. So I think I would like to go a step back because we're talking here about like the electoral authorities or the oversight entities. But I think we have to look again into the responsibility of candidates and political parties regarding the reporting, fully reporting the expenditure that they are having, not only in political advertisement or online, but all the other activities. And as much as we have information in Colombia and we have been like pressing from different areas to have more transparency regarding incomes and expenses, I do think that we still have a lot of underreporting of the real amounts that are being expended. So there's one thing that I think we really need to work on and mostly now that all the campaigns are getting so sophisticated on the online platforms and also other elements that are getting into the campaigns. But we are not sure about how much a campaign costs. Not before and I think not now, but we do need to have some sort of references. So you were mentioning, for example, it is important to have some prices references. It should be important to perhaps put some limits of how much money you can spend on electoral advertisement. As I was mentioning in Colombia, you can invest 100% of your incomes in this area and this kind of creates unequal elements into the electoral campaigns. But going back again to the responsibility of the candidates and the political parties, I think this has a lot to do with the time of the reporting and more when we are seeing how to control the in platform or online platforms because it's so dynamic and it's changing. So if you wait, for example, in Colombia two months after the elections to start overseeing the expenditure, it's too late. It's not timely. So what we think it's a challenge and I would say perhaps a waste opportunity in our context because we were able to have finally an updated electoral code that is addressing some regulations regarding the political and electoral process, but for example, it didn't really address political campaign financing in a wide scope. It includes some particular things but not seeing it in a holistic way. But regardless of that, for example, they did regulate some things about online platforms, political advertisement. For these regulations to work, they need to come hand in hand with on time reporting or reporting in real time. It can be done if you wait until the elections are over, you take other two months and then you consolidate your information and then you report because then how can the oversight agencies take that information and compare it with what it's being presented, let's say by the platform, Facebook or whatever. So I think some other things can be taken to strengthen the transparency and the analysis and the control of these expenditures in online campaigns. No, thanks, Sandra. I think that was really interesting, especially the part of the need for instant publication of or live or most publication of political finance data. On that cushion, also, this doesn't only concern the online campaigns, but can you just speak a little bit of that, the global trend on online reporting and disclosure and what's the pros and cons of it if you could share with us? Thank you, Yuki. We are seeing that globally several countries around the world are resorting to digital disclosure and obviously, like you said, it just does not apply only to online campaigns, but also to overall campaigns. We have seen it, Sandra was mentioning about Colombia. Estonia has a very exhaustive system of online disclosure. What is important is that the online platforms are exhaustive and it should not put an added burden on political parties because it should incentivize. The process should be as efficient as possible and as non-complicated as possible. At the same time, from a user's perspective who wants to identify or understand what kind of income or expenditure political parties, candidates or other actors are incurring, the database should be searchable and it should be very easy to navigate. For any kind of digital platforms we talk, it will not fulfill the purpose of transparency until the users are actually able to go on and explore in very detailed way, in a very efficient way, what actually is happening. And relating it to now online campaign finance which applies to any kind of expenditures, but it is very important that the digital platforms allow for itemized reporting of both incomes as well as expenditures and by doing so, obviously political actors will be required to submit expenditures that they incurred online, whether it is directly through paying for ads on any social media platform or by hiring a PR agency who makes a spending on their behalf. So through such kind of itemized spending detailing, I think we also kind of allow for transparency oversight of online campaign as well. So that's that's what I would say. Thanks, Kashmir. And Hohe, now I would also like to get back to you. In your last intervention you casually or lightly touched upon the already the responsibility of social media companies and then on the intermediaries and so forth. In order to increase or transparency in political finance, what do you think or what sort of measures we can introduce to improve the or incentivize all those private companies on private stakeholders to come on board and then work together, let's say, with anti-corruption bodies and then other oversight agencies? Yes, I believe so the issue here is which is key I believe in the case of online advertising or political communication is the how to increase compliance. So this is an opportunity because platforms can be very attractive to attract resources during the campaign and then at the same time these are tech-based, these are technologies that may allow for some kind of tracking. So I would say this of course it poses a whole set of different challenges to democracy, the content of campaigns etc. But then at the same time we may be in front of something that can also afford opportunities to improve the financial information of parties, candidates, third parties etc. So the whole money flows through campaigns. I think in my experience since this is an area that is rapidly growing but I would say the future will show the real impact or the real share in the advertising market for in the case of election campaigns that part of the solution is in shifting responsibilities towards the brokers or the intermediaries of content, so the PR agencies etc., or the advertising companies that run digital campaigns but then also to the platforms because I think more and more I think we're the not only the democracy community but also in this side of this struggle to improve democratic standards in the anti-corruption trenches we also think that tech companies may also take on more responsibilities. They've shown willingness to adopt policies to self-regulate themselves but then I think it is about time that we have a better understanding of what's the minimum that they should take on. So I would say that perhaps holding them accountable for enforcing the law when it comes to registration of who places an ad disclosing the amounts invested in advertising or paid communications even identifying potential cases of people who are systematically campaigning third parties that who are online actively taking part maybe circumventing the law or becoming coordinating with the campaigns I think that's the kind of things that tech companies are more and more in better position to do it and the last point would be that it has to do with micro targeting. I think there is a very very valid point that micro targeting may improve in commercial terms in the commercial realm it really is a powerful tool to help small businesses thrive but then in the case of politics micro targeting it becomes really the the issue that of course attracts malign interference and in the case of foreign interference that is also a way to covert operations or covert disinformation etc because that's the way that by profiling users the people who are going to you to see the ads is how you create or polarize political debates. I think micro targeting may also be part of that compromise that perhaps tech companies and governments should also try to to come to terms with and micro targeting may be relevant to when it comes to geographical and contextual micro targeting but then when it comes to inferring profile psychological profiles or behavioral profiles of users I think that's probably an area that should be also off limits and there should be rules and for and the platforms not to use it in political campaigns. Thanks Hohe and I think you touched up on the really interesting point in terms of incentivization. I mean we talked a little bit about what works and then what what good practices exist in other countries but that my next question is exactly on that and perhaps I'll turn to Kishibir first but a lot of political finance regulations are meaningless if they are not actually complied or implementation is really the key and for example Hohe just mentioned also maybe more and more countries should actually start holding private companies accountable but what incentivize them to comply with such regulations or what sort of incentive mechanisms one can create to to encourage political parties to report more honestly like that's the program that Sandra mentioned as well and what sort of incentive mechanism do you think one can think of to improve transparency and accountability in online political finance. Thank you Yuki at an normative level obviously better transparency has an overall multiplier effect for all stakeholders involved with strengthens democratic accountability it also improves trust in democratic institutions in political parties and in democracy overall this should already be an incentive for political parties because we are seeing that there's a crisis of representation where citizens trust in political parties has significantly declined wherever you see in whatever region from Asia to Latin America to Africa political parties are the least trusted institutions and one of the ways to increase that trust is to make themselves transparent make their political finance transfer transparent. However we know it's not as simple and Hohe mentioned a lot about the onus of transparency lying primarily on private companies including platforms. I agree to some extent but at the same time I also feel that we cannot take away the responsibility that lies with political parties because they are financially they are the gatekeepers and the onus of reporting these expenditures really rests on political parties. In terms of incentives I would rather call them disincentives for the failure of compliance for any kind of political finance regulation whether traditional or online there should be proper regulatory framework requiring political parties to make their reports as detailed as possible with itemized spending that I already touched upon and failure to do so should result in imposing of effective proportionate and dissuasive sanction mechanisms so political parties who do not comply with the regulatory mechanisms should be sanctioned for failure so here we come full circle this will also require significant oversight from concern agencies to be able to identify those infractions so three steps first we need to have the regulatory mechanisms then we need to have a very strong oversight body and then we need to be able to impose sanctions in case of infractions of any political finance regulations. Thanks Kishvik can I just ask some follow-up questions I mean I think you mentioned a few times that the strengthening capacity of oversight is is crucial can you perhaps elaborate a little what what type of skill sets what kind of capacities are really talking about that needed in times of digital age? Sure Yuki of course oversight of any kind of political finance requires generic skill sets that any oversight agency obviously has in terms of identifying or checking the reports that that are submitted by political actors and verifying that information provided in that report is followed by corresponding bills in voices and sufficient information to corroborate what is being written in the reports itself what happens in terms of online campaign finance is it relates to what I was talking about the ad libraries and of course it comes to her his point as well the onus of reporting and transparency on political platforms so and any oversight agency and auditor should be able to look at a report provided by political party and be able to check that the amount of spending that they are reporting on any platform is corroborated by this eventual reporting of spending on a particular platform and that aggregated information adds up to what the report is saying however this requires a lot of integrity and a lot of coordination, collaboration to be able to read the ad libraries as well like I said it's very complicated to get the information from ad libraries themselves because there's no consolidated reports so the reports if they're mentioning about PR agencies so they need to be also able to go on the ad libraries and check what kind of expenditure was incurred by that particular PR agency and if it corresponds to the information available in the reports so this is basically collecting that information verifying that information is correct and then eventually asking political actors to submit additional information if required so this this is the capacity I was talking about interesting and I see also Sandra's nodding and agreeing with what Kush will be saying about Sandra and I love to hear your views on that as well and incentive mechanism in Colombia or what's your views on that and then also role of how can we involve or have a buy-in from the private sectors and then other stakeholders in this area. Thank you. Well before that I wanted to go back to what Jorge was saying about holding accountable these online platforms and I was thinking in how can we strengthen all this transparency and the promptly report of the expenditure in online and I think as much as I agree with Kush but that this has to be primarily the responsibility of candidates and political parties there's also a responsibility in these companies and they could be required to present periodically reports itemizing the information that is required. I was thinking for example there's a practice in Colombia that I think it's good and the electoral authority requires other media channels to every one or two months report how much of its advertisement is being contract with them the amount even if they apply any type of discount that they can be considered as an income or a donation to the campaign so this information could be useful it's not only like I mean it should always be available if you as a citizen or of an organization or oversight entity want to go into the platform and analyze the information but I think it would be useful to require them to produce these periodical reports and maybe if they are micro-targeting the information or what are being the requirements for this online advertisement that they can put that into this report so I think that would be a good practice that perhaps could help with this but then I think and this is for us we kind of understand it and see how important it is to strengthen our political organizations to generate again like some sort of credibility in them but sometimes I think they don't really understand how important this is and how for us from the civil society point of view how how important and relevant it's for them to become transparent and take like this a step ahead and and being completely and fully responsible on the incomes and expenses of their campaigns if they could see that as um electoral um how would you say that like like that would bring them in a step ahead into the into their electoral race because people will see them more transparent and I will be I will feel more prone to to vote for them this I think it's something that we could all work on it as I mentioned for some of us it's easier to see it from others not but but in the long term I think it's really needed so yeah I think that's like a way for political organizations to change this is not something just for us to to I don't know get our noses in their own businesses is that their actions is our businesses so we really need to know what they are doing and where the money is coming from and in what they are spending it so we can decide whether or not we vote for them and also so we can maybe have a hint on how they are going to perform when they are in power because we really really think as you finance your campaign as transparent as responsible as organized you are we can consider that you will do better once you are in office so I think using displaying the high level of integrity as a almost incentive or also the marketing value sort of the attract more both borders and then selling convincing that way I mean I think that's a very good interesting concept and then I think more and more anti-corruption experts are working on that more preventive side of anti-corruption rather than enforcement I suppose and perhaps following on what Sandra said I actually like to turn to Jorge and then Kushibu it's a little bit of bigger questions as well but you Jorge representing the civil society organizations and and also Kushibu coming from international organizations perspectives and I think it's very clear to us there's a lot of lack of empirical data or evidence or even coordinated advocacy I mean what role can international organizations like IDEA or other UN agencies or CSOs like TI could play to to continue making this as a short high on the anti-corruption agenda perhaps Kushibu first maybe or Jorge Kushibu please thank you Yuki for this question and it's very pertinent as we are sitting on this panel of you know DC you are rightly highlighted in your opening remarks about the important role UNCAC plays as a leading instrument for promoting political finance transparency article 7.3 mentions about it as an international intergovernmental organization international IDEA supports UNCAC and many of our member states actually of the 33 member states several of them are signatories to it so we invite our partners including UN agencies particularly you know DC to undertake monitoring of the implementation of 7.3 because we have 7.3 which is great because it is one of the most important international instrument for promoting political finance transparency however the monitoring of the implementation of this article is really limited so we invite our partners to collect objective and reliable data on its implementation and in the process also include transparency of online campaign finance as an indispensable part of UNCAC because currently it only talks about political finance transparency overall but we need to also understand the digital revolution that's happening and UNCAC should be able to reflect that new dimension in its articles. Thank you and overhead. Yes let me that's a very interesting question that you are asking but let me answer in two parts so on the first part on the first hand of course as more political entities such as the US or the European Union take steps towards regulating this there is being efforts of coordination and I think the organizations working on anti-corruption or democracy should come together because this is an area in which when there is a new regulation up for this debate or to be examined the level of sophistication, the understanding on the side of those who want to influence the content of the regulation is actually quite high and if you have a look at the submissions for instance in the European Union consultations with regards to the democracy action plan that the Digital Services Act or the initiative for sponsor political content so the submissions from the side of business the mobile companies or the communications companies and of course the platforms as well are actually quite sophisticated and go into the very technical details and at the same time this is an issue that involves so many it's not enough to understand how the marketing system works you also need to understand personal data privacy issues and some electoral regulations etc etc so it's quite complex and I think we have been trying at least in the case of the EU to come together with an international idea the European partnership for democracy and other outlets that come from different communities to join forces and do and do better but then the other issues what Kujibu was mentioning is that indeed we should also heighten the profile of the money in politics issues in the context of anti-corruption and I think Unkak indeed Unkak has 7.3 and perhaps other prevention measures such as the asset and interest declaration but then it basically stops there and there's being this special session I think it's being a missed opportunity at least as far as the latest version of the political declaration I've seen it's a missed opportunity because we haven't included the issues that correspond to the level of relevance money in politics issues have let me give you two examples the first one has to do with 7.3 the issue of transparency in campaign finance and the reality is that I remember international idea in 2017 or 2018 counted the countries that were using electronic or digital online reporting and disclosure and the best it could do was to count about I think 16 countries it's probably I know of many other countries such as Georgia and well the case of Colombia is of course known Peru etc and Panama maybe is trying that have adopted this but I'm sure there is more than 100 countries that have no system at all and it is CSOs like Transparency International chapters national chapters that are doing the job of collecting lots of papers and trying to digitalize that and making it available that's 1990s that's the 20th century we are in the 21st century and at least the political declaration could have included a call for governments to adopt electronic disclosure systems as it is doing it with regards to asset and interest declarations I think this is very symptomatic of that they don't look at the issue of money politics with the I mean governments with the same interest they look at issues of public integrity because there is a concern there and there is a call for governments to adopt this electronic filing but 7.3 is there really calling for some sort of uplifting or renewal or a fresh call to reinvigorate the issue of money politics and then there are many others issues of accountability checks and balances etc that could also be repositioned in the context of the anti-corruption world that's really interesting point and lastly perhaps Sandra I think you or the Jorge mentioned that money politics is often overlooked area in anti-corruption efforts you being the at the national level expert in working on anti-corruption for so long can you also reflect on the perhaps the shortcomings of ANCAC or what needs to be done to make this money politics a much bigger sort of agenda in broader anti-corruption debate do you have any views on that well I think as I mentioned before it's it has to become evident and unimportant how corrupt means for campaign financing really have a bigger impact in the whole democratic system in the government ability in the institutions in the credibility so it has to be taken as important as some other areas that are being addressed in these international compromises but then on the other hand I think it has to be made a call about it's not only having like online platforms to report it's about what we report the quality of the information and and I think even for our country that we have been using this on that platform already for 10 years this year is going to be but I do see that we need to work a lot on the quality and the honesty of the information that is being reported and in this case I just think it's it's something that it has to go also to the level of the individuals that are in charge of reporting this information and and then on the other side the governments can also work on how to to improve the quality and the and the generating like other systems so we can analyze this information not only to know where the money is coming from and what they are spending it but because through campaign finance there are some other corruption challenges they are extremely related for example with procurement or with conflict of interest in other areas so it's not only to have this online reports but what are they useful for and and how can they be helpful in a wider scope to fight against corruption thank you Sandra that's that's very much music to our ears and Kashmir perhaps I mean also we are running out of time so we have to wrap up but perhaps just one last also short comment from you maybe oh thank you Yuki seriously this this has been a pleasure and we all talked about the challenges of regulating online campaign finance and the risk that it poses to corruption it is a very growing and important field as as you mentioned that it is a really increased thousand fold over the last 10 years and organizations like international idea of civil society actors I think it's very important that all of us work together it's not job of one actor or one individual to really fight this fight everybody has their own roles we talked about the role of private actors the social media companies other role of cso's we also talked about the onus or responsibility of political parties but honestly everybody including legislators policymakers civil society actors social media companies other private actors all of us really need to work together and make sure that this really ambiguous this really new form of online campaign financing which we are all wrapping our heads around we can make sure that it is transparent and it does not leave room for corrupt practices thank you thank you and well and on that note we've been speaking over an hour so unfortunately we'll actually have to wrap up this session but I very much like to thank you very much for your time and all the points you raised all the panelists and I certainly learned a lot and I hope I spent a bit of time and we must also approach as I think there seems to be a slight technical problem that we couldn't actually see the questions being posted by the panelists on the on our Webex platform but the recording of this session will be also available on our YouTube channel so you're more than welcome to also get in touch with us after this event as well and more information is of course available on international ideas and Transparency International's website as well and the reports that both Hohe and then Kushibu mentions are also download free for download as well so we certainly continue to work on this issue beyond the session as well and we love to hear from you as well so please get in touch with any comments and feedback through other means as well and once again on that note thank you very much to the all the panelists and all the participants and I like to wish you a very good weekend ahead and thank you and goodbye thank you pleasure good night everyone good night bye bye thank you goodbye