 Good afternoon. I hope you're all keeping well and safe. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I'm chair of the Digital Futures Group here in PIEA. You're all very welcome to our webinar on misinformation, challenges for European democracies and the role of the European Digital Media Observatory. Our distinguished speaker, Miguel, Professor Miguel Madura, is chair of the Executive Board of the European Digital Media Observatory. You're very welcome and thank you for being with us today. We really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule. Thank you. Thank you very much. Miguel will speak to us for around 25 minutes and then we'll go to the questions with you, the audience. You may like to send in the question during Miguel's presentations. As you know, you can submit your question through the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. I'd really appreciate when you're asking questions if you could give your name and affiliation. I'd appreciate that very much and thank you for doing that. Please join us on Twitter and our Twitter handle is at IIEA. This presentation and the Q&A are on the record. Miguel, your presentation is timely. You couldn't have got a better day for what you're going to speak about. We all come to see how debates about public issues play out on social media and we see our news via digital platforms as we've seen, as we know only too well in the election and indeed in Brexit, politicians pitch their policies using social media. The internet now is our public square and I think we've all come to understand that but the exposure of all our citizens to large-scale disinformation including misleading or outright false information is a major challenge and growing threat to open societies and democracies and as part of the EU action plan against disinformation, the European Commission has established the digital media observatory in June of this year to help fight against disinformation. So today we're very pleased and lucky to have Miguel here with us as I said it's very timely and we're right at the beginning of the development of this exciting observatory, Miguel. So we're really pleased to have you here for that and I'd like to give a brief introduction. You've got a very distinguished career, an academic, advocate general and a European public servant. Miguel's research and publications have been recognised worldwide where he's received a number of awards for his work. Years ago you'll remember this, Miguel, you're a Fulbright fellow in Harvard but he's also been a visiting professor at the Yale Law School, the Chicago Law School, London School of Economics and Keo Law School in Tokyo. Currently as you know he is the chair of the executive board of the European Digital Media Observatory. He's visiting professor at the European University Institute where he was previously the director for the school for transnational governance and advocate general of the European Court of Justice. He was also a member of the EU high level group on media freedom. I'm so pleased to hear that you're with us today Miguel and we look forward to your presentation. The screen is yours. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invitation. Before I present briefly what the European Digital Media Observatory is about, what it will do. I want to start by some words about the challenge that we face today in terms of this information and particularly the challenge that it represents to our societies and our democracies in particular. This is a challenge if you allow me the advertisement that I address with a colleague of mine Paul Kan in a book that will be out in the coming days that is called Democracy in Times of Pandemic so I apologize for the advertisement for the book but it is something that we address on the extent to which actually this question of this information has also been rendered both even more relevant as if it was not already relevant enough by the pandemic but also because the pandemic has served to test some approaches on how to deal with this information that some now are thinking of transferring in how to deal with this information with regard to political speech but that transfer is not absent of risks and challenges and that's one of the things that we address in the book and if you want we can address that in the discussion too. But now I wanted to start by a more general overview of the kind of challenges that this information presents for democracy in general. Now the existence of fake news and this information is not new. We've had fake news, disinformation, forms of manipulation and intellectual dishonesty for many years including in politics but it seems that the phenomena has acquired a new importance today. Why is it so? Because of the role that social networks and the internet in general have had with regard to disinformation in increasing the impact and the challenge that this information poses to our democracies and perhaps it is important for us to first understand why is it so that is if it is not a new phenomenon why is it as it been rendered different and why is it impact more threatening in light of the internet and social networks and there are four things that I think we can identify in what social networks and the internet do and bring that increase the challenge of this information nowadays. The first one is that is scale and speed. Scale and speed matter. We can say perhaps that the internet is to the spreading of information and ideas today including false information and dangerous ideas what printing was centuries ago. Printed it was not simply a faster, easier way to spread information and ideas. It qualitatively changed the way ideas were discussed, the way information played a role in our societies in some ways very positively because it increased cooperation for example. The fact that you increase the scale and the speed of the spreading of information impacts on how it interacts on the nature of that impact as not only because it increases how easy it is to have access to information but the fact that it becomes much easier changes the way we organize ourselves socially and changes the way we think about things, our cognitive processes, the information we are exposed, the ease with which we can access and the ease with which we can convey our ideas. As actually science tell us regarding neurons and quantum physics large numbers is not something more of something it actually changes the nature of that something. Quantity also alters the quality of things and we see that with the internet as we saw that with printing. Now it can have a very positive effect and we saw that with printing too. It was crucial to promote cooperation. It made ideas, it made information much more easily accessible and therefore it had an exponential impact on development and economic growth but and it's the same thing with the internet but it also because it disseminates ideas and information it disseminates both good ideas and bad ideas and both truth and false information so it also brings challenges with it. The second thing that changes on the internet is the way that information is conveyed to us and particularly the role of algorithms and these algorithms tend to establish and determine that the information that is more easily available to us the information that is rendered more visible to us on our threads on our pages on our searches on the internet tends to be information that amplifies what have been our past preferences in one way again this is good it is good it is a shortcut it saves us time is it's it's efficient in terms of looking for things that we wanted things that we like but in other respects and particularly in the public in the political sphere it tends to narrow our perspective of the world it tends to narrow the scope of ideas and and and world visions and political visions that we are subject to and therefore this is this creates what is often referred to as informational bubbles that reinforce our prejudices and reinforce the creation of political tribes the reinforce fragmentation in the public sphere reinforce a polarization in the in the in the in the in the in the political sphere through these bubbles whereby we always hear the same things that we believe and for which we've expressed preferences in the past and I'm not subject to ideas that challenge our receptions that challenge our prejudices that challenge how we have always thought about something so this is the second risk that is associated to that is the creation of is informational bubbles as a as a consequence of algorithms and how the information is distributed and and target others the third thing comes from profiling and because the internet and social networks also collect a lot of information about ourselves and know almost what we think about certain issues it allows political messages to be developed and then to be targeted by the way that the internet operates to and in the view almost at an individual level fitting our particular preferences and and this politically political targeted messages have an additional risk it is that because they are almost exclusive to each one of us they are not part of the public the main and therefore on the one hand they cannot be checked by others they cannot be challenged by others because they are almost not known they are targeted to each one of us individually and moreover we might not be even aware of the inconsistency of those that address to us those political messages why because a politician who now through social networks develop a political message to myself that is very different than the political message that he or she sends to one of you and without this inconsistency almost being detected and therefore this facilitates manipulation this also facilitates exploring prejudices of concrete individuals the fourth problem is that of anonymity and again as with all the other problems this also has great advantages the anonymity that the internet brings in some instances allows people in authoritarian regimes in dictatorships to challenge power without being detected it also allows whistleblowers people that otherwise fear that they've denounced certain facts of public relevance that they may be target because of that that they may be sanctioned because of that and and the internet allows them to bring for this information in a way that protects them but at the same time anonymity also allows people to spread false information without being accountable for that it allows people to share hateful and violent ideas without being accountable for that it also allows the multiplication of fake profiles therefore artificially amplifying the impact of a message because many of these profiles may share a tweet may share a post and in fact it's not being liked by many people but it seems as if it's being liked by many people and requires a lot of visibility so anonymity also presents huge challenges in terms of hate speech in terms of radicalization of speech on the internet more violent language and also in terms of the development of these these fake profiles now these four challenges have an impact on the cognitive and epistemological character or dimensions of democracy in particularly with respect to how political preferences are formed in the public space and in the virtual public space that is increasingly becoming our dominant public space and its impact then on political deliberation it changes this is a democratic cognitive and epistemological problem and there's and this is also linked to a broader problem that we have in our societies of political trust of the loss of political trust now this cognitive and epistemological problem regards how we decide how we develop our preferences our political preferences how we think about some things how we come to form an individual opinion about something what we believe what informs our individual decisions and how we transform that into a choice about something and now in turn these different individual political preferences are then aggregated through collective deliberation and the cognitive and epistemological challenges that we have in democracy require precisely this how social networks are the internet changes how we think and how we decide individually and then how we collectively aggregate that into a common decision into a public decision now this is linked to broader aspects beyond the changes in what we could call the means of forming political preferences that result from social networks and the internet that I mentioned about this is also linked to deeper changes on the time of politics the fact that decisions political decisions are increasingly being taken at a faster pace reinforcing what in terms of how we think and how we formulate our political preferences enhances the emotional dimension by comparison to the rational deliberative dimension of of our political actions and is also linked and aggravated by changes in the space of politics and I won't be going into that but basically I'm referring to an increasing mismatch between the space where we need politics that is policies that often take place beyond our states and where we have politics where we still predominantly have politics that it is within our states and this mismatch in the space of politics and policies disrupts political accountability mechanisms and distorts incentives for political action now this transformation in the cognitive and epistemological dimensions of democracy these challenges to the cognitive and epistemological dimensions of democracy many of which as I said fed by the role social networks and the internet have in the spread of this information are aggravated by a broader structural problem that we're facing that is a problem of decreasing trust on on politics and decreasing trust on elites this is again link impart but not only in part to the impact of social networks and the internet that has increased distrust in authoritative sources of truth and this means that we lose our trust in what I've called the traditional editors of democracy media political parties unions that basically those that set the agenda and used to frame the discourse on certain on the political decisions that we'll have to take increasingly this is taking outside and independently from this traditional intermediaries of democracy these editors of democracy and one of the reasons is because social and economic developments have led to the increase distressed on elites but part of this increase distressed is also linked to social networks and the internet because the fact that people have more easily access to information leads them to often confuse access to information with knowledge the fact that we have very easy access to a lot of information does not necessarily mean that we have knowledge about all that about about those issues knowledge is a different thing from us access to information but the but the reality is that today people increasingly confuse and conflate the two aspects and it's easy for you to think about it how this happens even outside the political sphere you see how before we used to go to a doctor and the doctor will make the diagnosis of what we'll have will prescribe us some drugs we'll go to the pharmacy get those drugs and take them and today most of the people go to the doctor and then they go on the internet to second guess what the diagnosis that the doctor has made as made of them and this is a an anecdotical but truthful example of what happens in a much bigger scale regarding politics and and the fact that this more generalized access to information leads people to believe that they can become experts about almost anything and can second guess whatever traditional sources of authority be them experts scientists and we see that even with the pandemic today and say about about something now this in this generalized context of distrust fake news can more easily spread themselves because if you believe that you can if you don't have no reference points of authority if you don't have authority sources that you trust to define what is truth and false then it becomes much easier to spread this information to spread and fake news now what to do about this I mean there are many discussions going on on what we could do and and I won't go into all of them I won't address the questions regarding how we could regulate this digital space the extent to which traditional forms of regulation or on political speech or on this information can be transferred to the virtual public sphere instead I want to focus on the aspect that to a large extent is the one that underpins the creation of the European digital media observatory part of the answer must be first for us to know exactly what is the extent of the problem and how it works and second to increase resilience in the democratic ecosystem that is to try to make people more capable by themselves to resist to identify and resist this information this requires media literacy this requires transparency on the sources of information on the sources of your read but also on the data that is available for people to study this information this may require also strengthening traditional media as part of those editors of re-establishing trust on authoritative sources of truth and this is part of of the tasks of the European digital media observatory and it is in this context that I believe the commission launched the call for European digital media observatory that the consortium that is led by the European university institute one and and and that I know of which I am now the the chair of the executive board and let me very briefly present you what in five minutes what Edmo will be doing in the main tasks of Edmo now Edmo has five pillars that largely correspond to five tasks of Edmo the first one is to set up an online platform that supports on the one hand the analysis of this information and the cooperation between the state different stakeholders but there's also about raising awareness awareness to this information it also involves the creation the set up map of a governance body that is aimed to provide trust on what Edmo does and its different tasks and supports and facilitates coordination between independent fact checkers between media literacy experts and between these two sets of stakeholders but also supports and facilitates academic research on this area and and creating a repository for the research that is being done in this area and finally it provides academic input and and and methodological support to public authorities particularly national regulatory agencies that are in charge or monitoring EU rules in this respect and and notably at the moment the code of practice on this information now the first task as I said is setting up an online platform we are developing we are in the process now of making it available to to fact checkers it has both a public dimension that makes the general public aware of what is being done by fact checking what is being done in terms of fighting this information but it has also a private dimension that is it is also a secure platform to which fact checkers for example can register and can ask to be members so that they can cooperate on joint fact checking projects for example fact checkers from different countries in Europe can cooperate on a particular fact check or they can know what other fact checkers are doing and use that information. The governance structure of EDMO is a governance body that is the executive board that I chair that is composed mostly of the partners that lead the project and then an advisory board that has representatives of stakeholders from all the different sectors from academia to non-governmental organizations to fact checkers to media literacy experts we also have as one of the tasks as I said the support and facilitating of coordination of independent fact checking activities in Europe and aside from promoting cooperation within the different European fact checkers we map what's being done by fact checkings we map the fact checking community in Europe and we will be making available repositories of what these fact checking organizations are doing but in addition to the fact checking and to the media literacy including training for media literacy that we'll be giving we also facilitate coordination of academic activities in Europe and we do this by identifying the academic institutions by creating as I said a repository of almost a library of what's being done in this respect but we're also doing this by trying to make more easily accessible information data from the online platforms for researchers to be able to know and study the phenomenon on this information on this digital platforms one of the most often mentioned problems that I've heard so far and criticisms to digital platforms is the limited access to data that exists to know with more certainty and with more clarity how does it the extent to which this information occurs on those social platforms and also how it is taking place and and we want to make that data more easily available by engaging digital platforms in the name of our community and facilitating the access of our community of of academic experts or fact checkers to that information and then we also support relevant policy activities we report trends we are now in the process of working on a common methodology that could be used by the different national regulatory agencies for example using common standards or now to monitor the implementation of the code of practice and also be making recommendations on what will be necessary to make the code of practice work better in the future or if necessary what should be additional additional steps to be taken in that respect and we do that by engaging a broad community of stakeholders that includes regulators national regulators academic experts and the digital platforms themselves and in addition we will be cooperating and coordinating a series of sub of regional european union observatories that will mirror edmo but will mirror it at a level of a member state or of two three member states and that will it's a call the commission has launched and this in the in the first instance nine new EU observatories will be pulled together and coordinate their activities all through through the european digital media observatory and you can have more information about edmo on our site and i will conclude my initial intervention and and apologize by the fact that i think i took five five minutes more or three minutes more thank you