 really significant seminar. My name is Jiu Chiang Tam. I'm a professor at the Law School at Melbourne University and also director of the Electoral Regulation Research Network. It is very exciting to be able to chair this particular event. This event is part of a series of online lectures that's being organized by International Idea and Friends. And this is the second one in terms of the series. And what we have in terms of the series and the lectures will actually occur on a formally basis is that the next one will be by Therese Piers Lanella speaking on a very topical issue on special voting arrangements between the convenience of voting and the integrity of elections. Before I move on to today's topic and introduce the speaker. For those who came in a bit later you'll notice on the bottom right hand of your panel that there actually are a series of polling questions that are relating to this particular topic. Can I strongly encourage you to fill out these polling questions? They'll be very valuable in terms of feedback for this particular event. And what will also occur is that at the end of this particular lecture there will be a set to your polling questions which also allows us to inform ourselves in terms of organizing of these events. What we'll also have in terms of questions is actually through the course of this event after Tom Daley has spoken there'll be discrete questions that will like your feedback on. So do keep an eye out for them because there'll be one minute snap questions. So they'll have to be answered very, very quickly. It is my privilege to introduce my friend and colleague associate professor Tom Daley. Tom is really a veritable expert on democracy globally. He's also an associate professor at the University of Melbourne and deputy director of the Melbourne School of Government. Now Tom is a real dynamo. That's just his day job, right? Alongside his day job, Tom is the convener of DEMDEC, a database and you'll see that the database link is actually on the chat which DEMDEC which actually is transformed to COVID DEM in the pandemic. And an important event to just bring to your attention is that Tom is co-organizing with Professor Wojciech Saduski of the forthcoming virtual global round table of the International Association of Constitutional Law. And that particular conference picks up on a team I think we'll all consider to be highly significant a question of constitutional decay, breakdown and democracy. And you see the information in the chat together with the links. Now Tom will speak for about 20 minutes or so, yeah. And then we'll open up for questions and discussion. Now in terms of questions which you can put right now if you'd like to. And in fact, thank you to Gopal from Nepal for kicking off the camaraderie in terms of this particular event. Put your questions in the chat, address them to all so that we can have a nice fluid transparent and inclusive process of questions and discussion. And then what I'll do is that after Tom has spoken for 20 minutes, I'll put those questions to Tom and really look forward to actually a robust discussion and really learning from all of you. So really without any further ado, can I pass it on to you Tom? Well, thank you to Chu Chang for that really fulsome introduction. And thank you to International Idea and to Adi Amman for the invitation to join this great series. It's really necessary series, really worthwhile series. And I'm delighted to have my colleague of course, Chu Chang in the chair. So I was asked to speak about this issue, how does distant and online election campaigning affect political freedoms? There are a whole different ways we could slice this, but we wanted to focus on how the need for physical distancing during the pandemic has raised the need for innovative campaign methods to be developed by election candidates, given that they're under serious restraints and constraints, as regards conventional campaign methods, the usual rallies, public meetings, fundraising events are prohibited in many states, of course. And so distant and online election campaigning can be seen as restrictive because of the barriers imposed, both physical and technological. Now I have produced a paper for this talk and I'm going to speak to it relatively closely, but I am going to add in a few extra observations here and there. I also should say from the very outset that I really, really welcome the audience's input in terms of knowledge about the country experiences we're talking about, knowledge of other experiences not covered in the paper. So really the paper, all it tries to do, it's a sort of initial preliminary exercise, trying to give an overview of key issues and discussion of selected case studies. And what I wanted to do was to show through the case studies that it's possible to navigate these challenges imposed by the pandemic and achieve good outcomes that support legitimate and democratic government. But I also wanted to talk about how those good outcomes and those possibilities are dependent on a range of factors. And in a number of states, both the possibility of well-managed online campaigning and legitimate democratic outcomes and a sort of a legitimate electoral process is undermined by broader, intensifying political trends that caught against the support of framework we need for informed and free and fair voting. So it's really aiming to give you an impressionistic picture of recent experiences across Asia and the Pacific. And what I wanted to do with the paper was to start by framing some of the issues in hopefully a helpful way. So I started it by talking about the relationship between elections and political freedoms as a starting issue. Then key challenges that sort of any country is going to face when you have to deal with these constraints imposed by the pandemic and a regional overview, short regional overview. But I wanted to give that broader regional context before discussing the case studies. And the case studies are covering success stories or perceived success stories from South Korea and Mongolia concerning trends in Singapore and Indonesia. And I wanted to finish as well with a hopeful insight from Australia and from the local elections currently taking place here in Victoria in particular. Now, I should say from the outset, and Ju Chang mentioned it, that in this short presentation and the paper itself, I'm drawing heavily on the policy and academic analysis gathered through the COVID-DEM project I launched in April, 2020. And that project is aimed at charting the pandemic's impact on democracy worldwide. And it's part of this broader project on democratic decay and renewal. So COVID-DEM is a free online database, as it says in the chat there, it provides access to over 2,000 carefully curated items. So it aims to make it easier for democracy analysts, policymakers and the public to understand how the pandemic is reshaping our democracies. And COVID-DEM itself is now a part of ideas, fantastic global monitor of COVID-19's impact on democracy and human rights. And I definitely recommend looking at that database, which is an even bigger undertaking. So I'll move to the relationship between elections and political freedoms. And some of this is going to be completely obvious. But I thought it was necessary to just state some of the principles at play here, just so that we're clear on what we're talking about. And I wanted to start with, you know, our general understandings of this relationship, even before we get the pandemic into the mix. And, you know, even at the best of times, in the best circumstances, running elections and running in elections as a candidate is a huge undertaking. That is absolutely has to be recognized. You know, it's got such democratic and political importance. It has enormous logistical complexity, especially the bigger the elections are, the bigger the state is, the more fraught the political context might be. So there's no such thing as an easy election. In terms of defining modern democracy, of course, elections are at the heart of it, but elections themselves don't equate to democracy in and of themselves. They're a necessary condition, but they're not a sufficient condition. We need more to have a true functioning democracy. So to have that true functioning democracy, we, and a legitimate electoral process, more specifically, we have to have at minimum adequate protection of core democratic rights, such as the freedoms of speech, assembly and association. And there also has to be, as I said in the paper, more broadly respect for the rule of law as the sort of supporting matrix in which the elections take place and the entire campaign period. So I simplify this in the paper somewhat as an acceptance among the political classes that constraints on political power are not just acceptable, but desirable, that the average individual knows where they stand and what will happen if they break the law. And that includes electoral candidates, of course, that those with political power are equally subject to the law and that the law is applied impartially and not used as a partisan tool against opponents or critics. And I'll be returning to that issue in the context of Singapore and Indonesia. So ultimately, I sort of say in the paper, where these criteria are not met, elections might be run with admirable efficiency or innovation, but they can't ultimately be deemed to be fully free and fair. And I think that's one of the sort of main takeaways I would want to take from this discussion of that relationship between elections and political freedoms. So taken within this broader context, elections do remain the core mechanism reflecting what is democracy's ultimate promise, which is giving real power to the people. And so, understandably, elections do have this totemic importance as the ultimate accountability mechanism for government. So that possibility of voting out the government, selecting new representatives, whether it's the top tier government, local government, a state government, if you're in a federal system. And it's one of those key features, not the only feature and not the most important perhaps, but it's one of those features that marks genuine democracies from undemocratic regimes that present a democratic facade. And sort of thinking about how elections work in general, as we all know, and once again, this seems very obvious, but it's useful to keep in mind is that the political atmosphere becomes highly charged during electoral campaigns. So as I say in the paper, errors have higher stakes, outcomes are subject to even more intense scrutiny and contestation than usual. So for candidates and for electoral regulators, and those organizing elections, elections are a fraught time. It is a time where putting a foot wrong can really, really matter. And where not dealing adequately with constraints or having constraints put in your way can really change the outcome for you. So when you consider that as our issue when we don't even have a pandemic involved, when you throw in a global pandemic and all of the constraints that it puts in place, we have what was already an enormously challenging context becomes even more complex. You get all of these extra layers of complexity and difficulty. And so you have these serious potential implications for the conduct and legitimacy of elections and for political freedoms more broadly. So from there, you know, based on this survey of material that we had already gathered through the COVID-Dem project, I started to put together a list of some of the key interrelated and often mutually reinforcing challenges that we face under the pandemic conditions when trying to campaign or organize elections. And the first most obvious ones, I suppose, are that physical constraints placed on campaigners and reaching the public sort of preclude or at least limit the usual campaigning activities like rallies, public meetings, debates, in-person leafleting. And, you know, it's important to recall just how ingrained those activities are. These are how things have been done for a very long time. And it's difficult to move away from what has been done a very long time. We also have campaigners technology skills. You know, it might not just be down to a willingness to embrace technology in order to engage in distant and online campaigning, but you might also have disparities in knowledge of and access to online technologies, both among campaigners and the public. Moving from there, you have the same issue affecting regulators themselves. You might have disparities in knowledge of certain online technologies and access to technologies across different states when you compare them. But even within the same state, you might have in a federal state different levels of ability or access. Moving on down, you have the prospect of public disengagement as a result of the constraints placed by the pandemic on electoral campaigning. So in some cases, this might be the intensification of a preexisting trend of disengagement and something to be very worried about already and you don't want it to get any worse, of course. On top of all of this, you have in many cases a degraded information landscape. So you have this dramatic impact of the pandemic on the media landscape in many states, especially local media. And there's increasing talk about deliberation deserts or discussion deserts in the sense that in some areas, local media especially has been so hard hit that the potential for discussion through simple local media as has happened in previous election campaigns has been seriously hit. On top of that, we have misinformation and disinformation. So you've the increasing prevalence of online misinformation that has intensified during the pandemic. So the WHO has called this the infodemic. You have just this increasing fake news, rumors, the scapegoating of minorities for regarding COVID transmission and so on, which has really complicated the task for candidates of reaching voters. And you also have the problem of ensuring that the public vote on an informed basis. Big issue for electoral regulators and government and for the democratic system more broadly. Of course, we have the issue of some candidates being the sources of misinformation as well. And that has to be noted. On top of this, we have state censorship. So the excessive actions taken by some governments and officials to curb the growing misinformation about the pandemic in practice has simply expanded their powers to silence critics and curb scrutiny. And then finally, we have worries about turnout. So in many cases, when you have this, you know, elections being run and campaigns being run in this much sort of more challenged and constrained environment, the potential, there's a potential for much lower turnout than in previous elections, which could really seriously affect the perceived legitimacy of the elections. Now, in the regional overview I provided in the paper, I just wanted to give a sense of, you know, the different contexts that different states are facing and just the sheer level of diversity across Asia and the Pacific when we're talking about this issue. And as I say in the paper, it's routine to say how diverse the region of Asia and the Pacific is, you know, regarding the size of states, the wide disparities in income levels, development, state capacity and so on. And that has real implications for both pandemic preparedness and electoral preparedness. And that diversity has become even more pronounced during the COVID crisis because it's hit countries so unevenly. So some states facing elections this year had brought the virus under control largely before elections began. So that includes South Korea in April or New Zealand at the moment. Or they had only registered a small number of cases, so including New Caledonia earlier this month for their referendum. And a whole number of states have had to postpone elections due to the virus. So Sri Lanka's 25th of April elections were postponed twice and finally held on the 5th of August. But the region as a whole, according to statistics from idea itself, suggests that the region has bucked the global trend towards lower turnout in elections held during the pandemic. So, you know, it looks like turnout has been higher in states like South Korea. And I'm going to be discussing that a little bit more below. Singapore, Mongolia, and turnout has only been slightly lower in some other states like Tajikistan this month, or the March local elections in Queensland here in Australia. But of course, once again, the challenges being faced in organising these elections once again differ very widely. So you have, you know, an enormous difference between a single by-election as we've seen in Taiwan with the Kaohsiung mayoral by-election in August to the National Assembly elections in South Korea with the population of 50 million people. We have local elections across a very large and populous state of 270 million people, which is Indonesia and December. So these are all entailing different degrees of complexity, at different COVID contexts, different official capacity contexts. But that makes it all the more important that we build our body of knowledge of best practice as more and more states undergo this process of reorganising elections due to the pandemic. So I want to turn to quickly to our success stories before I then talk about some of the concerning trends. So the real poster child of, as I put it in the paper, turning lemons into lemonade is South Korea. Because South Korea was, you know, one of the first states to organise national elections during the pandemic under COVID conditions with very relatively little guidance to draw on. So the state has been pretty rightly recognised internationally for its success in not only organising full, free and fair elections on the 15th of April for its 300 seat National Assembly, but also for showing really considerable innovation and achieving a high turnout. So there was the highest electoral turnout since 1992 with 66% of eligible voters voting. And in the paper, I identify six main features of the South Korean approach to organising its elections under COVID conditions. So the first is building trust. The National Election Commission issued an early statement reassuring the public that it would take measures to ensure safe voting. So getting out ahead of the concerns of voters. Second was ensuring transparency. So the commission communicated by a whole variety of traditional and online means throughout the campaign period so that people, both campaigners and the public could remain informed and know where they stood. The third is clear rules on what was not permitted for campaigners and what was permitted. So for example, it was very clear that all in-person campaign activities were prohibited. The fourth was innovation by campaigners themselves. So we saw candidates making this remarkable shift to digital and online technology, primarily by sharing video messages on social media platforms using text messages and smartphone apps and even embracing augmented reality technology in some cases. We also had fifth early voting. So this was a real saver in the South Korean context where they had permissive eligibility rules for early voting, covering about one quarter of the population. And that had the double advantage of allowing more people to vote while also taking pressure off in-person polling stations. And finally, there were clear and effective safety measures for in-person voting. So for those voting on the day, the commission issued a code of conduct for voters which provided very detailed instructions and outlined actions, safeguards and precautions. So once again, voters were reassured that their safety was being kept in mind and was being protected in order for them to actually exercise their democratic right to vote. But I think it's important here when recognizing the extraordinary success in the South Korean context to emphasize that at the time the elections were held, the state had successfully flattened the curve. And also South Korea had benefited from a starting position of pretty high quality democratic governance, high state capacity, public servants adept with technology and extremely high internet access. So South Korea is among, if not the world leader with 95% internet access across the population. You also had the practical issue that the infections that had happened in terms of the virus itself in February and March were in a specific area. And so it was easier to get the virus under control in advance of the elections. I should say as well, the elections weren't perfect. So overseas residents in some countries weren't able to vote, for example, due to the suspension of election affairs at overseas embassy offices. But it is a success story and it deserves to be recognized as such. Mongolia too is broadly seen as a success story but a lesser known one. So the parliamentary elections there took place on the 24th of June under fewer constraints than the Korean elections three months before because the state's virus suppression strategies had been very successful at that point. So even today, there have only been just over 300 cases and zero deaths. So campaign rallies were permitted in-person rallies but those attending were required to sit two meters apart. There were 670 candidates in total running including 208 independents and the incumbent prime minister from the Mongolian People's Party campaigned in-person as well wearing a protective face shield and his party won a landslide victory with about 45% of the vote. And sort of mirroring the trend in South Korea, it seems that campaigners made much greater use of online campaigning tools. So even making use of social media influencers to get across the core messages in their campaigns and election day reports suggest that social media was a buzz with voters indicating that they had just voted encouraging others to vote. And there's been some suggestion that active use of social media presented an opportunity for a more level playing field for new and established candidates to connect with voters. But it's important to note here, there's a big difference with Korea in the sense that internet access is only about 22% in Mongolia. So this suggests that perhaps social media played a more limited role or perhaps it was limited to metropolitan areas. But overall it is a success story voter turnout was high at 73.6% and I would really be interested to hear from anyone who has knowledge of the Mongolian case study for more detail because there's only so much detail written up so far. Now with that said, I just want to say a few words about the issues in Singapore and Indonesia before I wrap up. So some governments have been careful to preserve the maximum of democratic functioning while effectively suppressing the virus. South Korea is a clear example but in other states the approach to elections and increasing curbs on political freedoms are increasingly viewed as part of this wider pattern of repression that has intensified during the pandemic and there has been talk globally of course about pandemic backsliding. So Singapore had its parliamentary elections on the 10th of July and it banned in-person rallies, it embraced online rallies and it introduced innovations like special polling times for the elderly and so on but the pandemic and the electoral period, the campaign period was accompanied by a clamp down on criticism. So you see the government using this existing law for dealing with fake news, the protection from online falsehoods and manipulation act to remove critical views about the countries, the government's COVID response and you have similar reports in Indonesia with media organizations saying that news websites have been tagged with a digital graffiti, you have critical articles being removed and this really raises concerns about the context in which Indonesia's local elections in December are going to be held, which is amplified by concerns about widespread vote buying by incumbents through social assistance funds for the pandemic. And I'll end with a hopeful note from Zhu Chang and my home state. One of the things that I really was worried about for Victoria's local elections was and we had actually commissioned a policy brief at the School of Government from the CEO of the civil society organization supporting local government about the threats to the local elections due to COVID and there were serious concerns about the constraints placed on candidates due to lockdown, that the conditions would favor incumbents, that we would end up having fewer female and minority candidates and that diversity would actually go down in the coming council elections. But actually to the surprise of many people, we've seen an unprecedented according to some diversity of candidates and this includes candidates from younger demographics, minorities and women and some of course, straddling across multiple categories. And there seems to be a number of candidates that are really spurred on by the challenges faced during COVID, but also once again similar to Mongolia using social media as a way of flattening or leveling that playing ground with incumbents and establishment politicians in a very sort of positive way from the viewpoint of diversity and inclusion. So I'll leave it there, a note of hope and I'm really looking forward to the Q&A. Thank you so much Tom, that's really superb and really quite an insightful sort of concise presentation of the issues at stake. Before I put some questions to Tom, can I just remind the various participants to send their questions and I made a mistake this with this using the chat function but addressing it to everyone. I think I made a mistake saying to address it to attendees. You send it to everyone, that'd be really fantastic. There are just quick reminders that there will be that those snap polling questions appearing, one minute polling questions and again strongly encourage you to answer them. We've had some interesting questions, Tom and I suppose the first one I put to you actually picks up on the last point you made about how that in fact this development in terms of decent online campaigning could actually have a leveling effect. I suppose the flip side is to whether it could have the opposite effect. So we've had a question from Gopal Krishna, Siwa Koti from Nepal and really referencing the Sri Lankan elections but I think we can broaden it out is really whether this particular development could be a vector for an abuse of incumbency power. And if I could specify that question with two prongs I suppose for me thinking whether there could be abuse of incumbency power in the sense that the incumbent party or government has greater access to avenues of communication in the pandemic and secondly whether if there's a greater shift to online campaigning whether the government has a greater capacity to interfere with communications engaging by other candidates or and parties. Yeah, absolutely really important questions and it really comes back to that issue of what is the broader context in which the elections are being held because you can't simply transplant experience from South Korea and say, we're gonna do online rallies we're going to make greater use of smartphone apps and so on. I mean, you can do your best on that side but if the surrounding political context is focused on giving incumbents an unfair advantage on closing down free speech online whether that's removing critical articles on opposition websites or on open access blogs for example those are real, real concerns. And of course the more online the more governments are going to engage in this type of behavior. It's interesting from a comparative point of view we've seen this being done in countries that do seem to be traveling a very negative democratic path. So in Hungary for example, the government set up the public broadcasters set up a fake news fact checker website and what it's actually being used for is to attack opposition politicians and you can see how those kinds that type of mechanism could be easily used during an election period in a context where there is an ongoing concentration of power in the government for example and we see that happening in Sri Lanka of course. So I think that is a very real concern. I think that the real concern as well about the closing down of temporary closure of apps for example we've seen this happening in various countries where Twitter gets taken down for a short time or Facebook is unavailable and you can see how targeted closures at particular junctures and might not even be for a very long period but could really hammer opposition politicians potential to get their message out and to have a level playing field. Yeah. It really prompts in my mind I suppose when we're thinking about the pandemic and the impact on democracy or elections more generally I suppose and I'm being crude and caricatured and thinking about this is that we can think about the pandemic and its impact as disruption. All right. So it takes the protocol system and crisis into a different path or we can think about it in terms of path dependence and I know the jury is so still out and it's all we need much more research and thinking about particular context but I suppose it's getting your thoughts about your sense impressionistic which one seems to be more credible are we looking at path dependence so that authoritarian states will result in more authoritarian outcomes as of a different variant or are we looking at more in terms of disruption? For me, I think there is a very strong narrative of disruption but for me I think it's a path dependence issue I think the really serious issues we're seeing arising during the pandemic are an intensification of existing trends. The pandemic hasn't caused them the pandemic has simply accelerated them and so if you have for example, you know a trend towards closing down or suppressing opposition voices even if it's subtle we've seen that harden we've seen that sort of take a stronger shape during the pandemic partly because there is less international censure because everybody is so consumed with just suppressing the virus dealing with this whole issue but also because I call them in a recent piece I wrote I say some states are autocratic opportunists and some governments have really pounced on the opening that the pandemic has produced to do what they couldn't get away with during normal times and I think path dependence is sectoral as well if you have for example a strong resistance in the political culture or among political classes to embracing online technology then it's going to be very hard to make a shift quickly you know it's going to be very hard in South Korea there is much stronger acceptance much more widespread acceptance of this sort of open source open government since Taiwan is the same and they have that path dependence has sort of aided them benefited them in heading into the pandemic era so it's intensified some good trends for them so it's a yeah I think it's a path dependence issue yeah thanks for that Tom a different kind of question and from sorry I'm trying to find out who asked question but I'll ask you to put a question in any event it's really whether you see any value in some kind of code of conduct regarding campaigning by political parties and candidates given this pandemic context and what role the electoral management body might have in brokering or bringing about a code of conduct of this kind yeah I think there is value in this so when you look at the South Korean context I think when you're facing the potentials for chaos and when you're facing such uncertainty both on the side of campaigners and among the public you know what am I allowed to do? How am I not allowed to do? How am I going to vote? Am I going to be safe? One of the first things you want to do is to achieve some level of clarity and anything that pushes in that direction of greater clarity I think is going to really is going to just add to you know the potential for well-run elections and I think an election commission is the sort of ideal body to produce that kind of code of conduct because it is designed to do this sort of thing of course not every country has an election commission and that's where sort of you know we've had issues like depends on the COVID context as well how the commission is running whether they're able to meet easily and so on to produce these kinds of materials that comes into it as well COVID reaches into every area of what you're trying to do but I think as well if you have a well-considered code of conduct it can be a useful tool potentially for opposition politicians to call out you know malpractice by incumbents and it could be a useful way of trying to tilt or the power back towards something that is closer to level even though it can't just do it on its own but anything that helps is useful in my book No thanks for that So just a reminder to all participants that we've got a quick poll question there and you will see that on your panel and in fact I'll put the not the question specifically but the general issue about internet coverage and how do you think that and I think you mentioned Mongolia as well as South Korea sort of slightly different countries but how does it play out I suppose when you're thinking about this and how we should be thinking about this in terms of the impact of this pandemic and the change in campaigning and its impact on political freedoms Yeah Can you summarize the question again? Just Yeah, so I suppose it's really I suppose actually there are a few parts of this question I suppose if in fact we've got a country where there's low internet coverage what are we tending to see in terms of the shift in campaigning as opposed to a country where there's high high high levels of internet coverage and the other prong that aspect to it is that well what is then the varying impact on political freedoms Yeah, I think I suppose one of the big question marks that hangs over the Mongolian case study for me is how accurate are the reports of social media making much of difference in the Mongolian elections so you know it can look really good you can look at Twitter and see a whole load of activity going on but statistically it might make very little difference so I wonder how much of the the reports about the impact of social media in Mongolia are anecdotal, impressionistic and how much there is actually data there to support the claims that social media has been sort of useful because it's a very interesting case study it's understudied but I think we would need answers to those questions to sort of fill in the gaps because I always worry and we were talking about this just recently Juchang I always worry that there can be a very excessively positive view given of any use of technology and sometimes it is based more on a sort of faith in technology than the actual facts so I'm just really interested I just simply don't know and I would be really interested to know whether whether it really is just sort of limited to the city areas and or even that but in terms of political freedoms I think there's an extra issue here and this is one of the things I picked up but didn't elaborate on when I was giving my list of challenges faced during elections organised under pandemic conditions and that is if you have a situation where some people have good internet access among the population and others don't at all is there a political equality issue going on there if campaigning shifts very wholesale to online part of some people simply don't have access to that public forum, that public sphere which has been effectively digitised I think that's a big issue and I think that's a big issue that really becomes more and more important the lower the number of the percentage of internet access in a country is and I think that's something I would like to tease out and discuss a little bit more as well Yeah, no I agree and I think unpacking is really important and I mean your comments connect to a question that Michael Yusinko has put is where the highest strong presence in social media can translate to electro and I'll get your response to that but it just occurred to me I mean just reflecting on your answer is that depends what we mean by the use of social media right, I mean there's the use of social media that's affordable you know you set up a Facebook account you set up some sub-recorded video or there's a use of social media the way that Cambridge Analytica engage in which was basically compile a big database targeted people with personalized messages and so on and so forth and we're talking about big money there on the second hand but we're talking about you know much more leveling in terms of on the first hand and I'll be keen to know from because we've got a welfare expertise of course among the participants and a lot of you will know about your country context much more and so I said there's no no no poor reflection you talk about much more in terms of this particular question than Tom and I would that please make your contributions what do you see in terms of the use of social media you know I think that is a question that would be key for us answering what the impact of online campaigning is yeah yeah absolutely I mean it's I think that's that's really important as well as you said it's about unpacking some of these questions and I think we need to disaggregate exactly what we mean by social media absolutely because different channels are used in different ways in different countries I mean WhatsApp has been the primary sort of channel for misinformation in India as I as I understand it in Brazil it's Facebook different apps have different coverage you know some far-right groups are making much more use now of Telegram than than other other channels so it depends and it depends on sort of how the social media are being used in some cases you know it's not clear where a message originated in others you can actually see the change some are private like WhatsApp or more closed others are more public like Facebook so it really depends but one of the things that I sort of would return to again and again is we have a tendency to sort of mistake techno-sophisticates for Democrats you know what we actually see around the world today is some of the most sophisticated users of technology to distort the democratic public sphere or the public discussions are anti-democratic so that is a serious issue yeah I think your answer in a way corresponds to the the answers the participants are given to the first polling question and the first polling question was really about the impact on this change in campaigning techniques on the financing of campaigns and whether this shift has increased significance sort of in terms of the problems of the financing of campaigns and what you all see and the participants can see this in terms of the the polling results is that we've got a mixed outcome right and a mixed outcome and I can't read beyond that mixed outcome but I would speculate that it's really about contextual factors that matter in trying to understand these questions yeah any comments you want to make about these polling results Tom anything to strike you I mean I think it just it tallies with my own intuition let's put it this way about I have mixed feelings myself about online campaigning and I think I think one of the useful really useful sort of takeaways from this poll is what we will probably see and what we need to guard against is that for example the South Korea example becomes totemic and there is an expectation that you can simply replicate it and the online campaigning is seen as as inevitably a good and I think we just need to be very balanced and to really sort of be very clear about what are the potential disadvantages as well as the advantages as we're building our knowledge base and building our sort of regional sort of knowledge base for the future because this issue isn't going to go away even outside of pandemic times online campaigning is here to stay and it's just going to be a question of degree yeah yeah thanks Tom I've just been advised that the Facebook listeners and thanks all for coming through Facebook can't see the polling results so my apologies for assuming that's the case but what we have in terms of the question which was really about the impact on this shift in campaigning in the pandemic on finance whether that's resulted in greater difficulties in terms of financing of campaigns and political parties and we've got yes 9 out of 41 no 8 out of 41 and another 8 out of 41 somewhat so really quite mixed really quite mixed really sorry I lost my train of thought kind thing yes the question I had was this actually and it goes to I suppose the point you made about sort of trying to fantasize or trying to valorize this online official media space because when we think about distant campaigning of course it's something that's been in existence for decades now and in fact I still use to quite effective use so think about television ads radio ads newspapers you know Bola posters and so on so forth do you get any sense from the the research you've done in fact the shift is and maybe and again maybe it depends on the of course the context of whether it is wide internet coverage or low internet coverage whether it has been more of a shift in terms of those other forms of campaigning distant campaigning rather than you know social media and internet and so on yeah I think I think so I don't have a lot of data on that from the research but I think one of the things that's actually contained in your question is I think it does come back to that issue of what is the internet access in a given country I think it also once again thinking about disaggregating this question I think it depends on who a given party has as their base you know who's your audience who are you really trying to target and that might really change shift the dial on how much you're going to embrace online campaigning because if you are speaking or if you're targeting if your base is a much older demographic perhaps you don't see the need whereas you know I think it's just going to be very different from from state to state I mean we see the the push in Malaysia at the moment for example towards a new youth party now that kind of party is probably going to be very eager to embrace online campaigning but it would be very different to the parent party that perhaps it broke away from so I think it really depends on what's the party and who's the audience yeah yeah so we have another question really whether you know the shift to distance and online campaigning its impact on election related physical violence yeah and whether that is really a positive upside in terms of this change yeah I mean once again I haven't seen any sort of clear data on this in the in the information we've been gathering but you would expect that the the less people are in physical contact or proximity that the less capacity or or potential there is for for violence but at the same time sort of returning to the WHO's warning back in April we have this infodemic and the infodemic is not only about the intensification of fake news and rumors about the about the pandemic itself it's about scapegoating particular communities so you know minority communities have been sort of criticized as not not complying with physical distancing for example in some states you know the muslim community in India for example it hasn't been in an election context but you can really see how that intensification of sort of hate speech essentially could really make things quite difficult during an election period when you do have this febrile context you have this highly charged political atmosphere and when you have that sort of you know that scapegoating so I think once again it's sort of it's an issue with two sides and I can see how I would just be waiting on more data to see to see what's actually happening on the ground and I'd be interested to hear anything even anecdotal from our audience about that issue can I follow up on that I mean this is of course I've got a vexed question about how do you regulate hate speech I mean it clearly has an adverse impact in terms of integrity elections in terms of accurate which depends on accurate information it clearly has an adverse impact when directed at particular groups on equality on the other hand there's you know free speech considerations and also the fear that you know that the incumbent party would actually abuse whatever powers are given to regulate speech to advance this competitive advantage so I suppose or during all those thoughts together I suppose just getting your sense or what I mean what would you think would be good mechanisms that kind of balance this complex set of considerations which might issue might be growing significance given this shift to online campaigning yeah it's an extraordinarily difficult one I mean we all know that for example social media platforms have been very resistant to the very idea of regulating speech on their platforms the general tendency is to sort of cleave to a view of freedom as the absence of regulation and we saw that in Mark Zuckerberg's Georgetown University address some time ago a very simplistic sort of view of freedom but clearly a view of freedom that aligns with their their economic interests let's say the issue of regulation itself is extraordinarily problematic especially when you think about it in the context of a government that might seek to suppress free speech so by way of example outside of the region of Asia and the Pacific in Brazil right now there's a fake news bill that was passed by the Senate in July and it seeks to make social platforms responsible for anything contained on their platforms and and to they're required to record chains of communication and so on and there's been real concerns raised about how this will have a chilling effect where social platforms will be so worried about falling foul of this law that they'll actually engage in very widespread excessive censorship themselves at source so you have this strange situation where between government and citizen you have this intermediary the tech giants and they are very reluctant to regulate when there is some sort of regulation needed but also there is clearly the capacity for them to over-regulate if law is overly broad if law is not not carefully designed so I don't think anybody has the right answer to this question yet and I think it's one of the sort of million dollar questions for for the coming years yeah yeah thanks for that Tom just to draw attention to the outcomes of the second question which really connected to the issue that we discussed a few moments ago whether a high or strong presence in social media can translate into electoral victory and again we've got a mixed outcome right I mean we've got the people have answered a third have said yes another third have said no and another third have said maybe so I don't know whether you want to add any further comments on that Tom or it's just interesting I mean it's I think it just shows how much this issue that we're discussing is a moving target you know not only are we all trying to sort of keep up with the facts of what's actually happened on the ground in multiple contexts multiple countries and we've limited information because of things like language barriers but we're also it's a moving target because we haven't made our own minds up about the principal position from which we would assess these questions so it's sort of it is it's a it's a it's really difficult to pin down but I suppose this is what this lecture series is doing right it's a it's helping to start pinning it down yeah yeah can I ask you again I suppose coming back to this question about path dependence and disruption right so I mean we're in the middle of pandemic and really until a vaccine is found it's hard you know that we can see things can continue but say optimistically you know we're told that perhaps maybe a vaccine will be found by the end of the year and there might be widespread takeout and I'm asking you to gaze in your crystal ball Tom I mean reflecting on your expertise thinking about democratic decay over a longer period of time it's like let's say we're having this seminar in two years time how will we reflect upon this experience now in the middle of pandemic will we see this as a again just a bump and then we went on doing things that we did before the pandemic or do you perhaps seeing some kind of more fundamental reconfiguration and again I know this is crystal ball gazing but I think that's you know yeah I think I think now is the time that we need to do some considered crystal ball gazing because really to a certain extent known for some time for example that technology is not going to be our savior in fact it might be the opposite and that has been slowly dawning on us it's really easy to forget that you know Twitter only appeared in 2006 Facebook 2004 you know social media and smartphones only in 2007 so they've only been with us for a decade decade and a half and but they've completely transformed how we live how we work and now how we campaign and run elections increasingly but I think what the pandemic has done is it's sort of crystallized that we're facing two potential futures one is a future where we have sort of normalised surveillance where we have sort of we have the broad use of technology to sort of track individuals to to to just mind them for everything both commercially and politically that you can we have micro targeting we have the echo chambers being sort of developed through social media we have misinformation so prevalent that the idea of a shared public forum has just completely fragmented you know we're in different realities and that's one of the futures that we're looking at where that becomes the sort of the norm it becomes normalized we start to forget what it was like before but what we're also seeing and this is one of the reasons why we set up the COVIDDEM project which was to was to not just sort of collate information on all of these threats and this really unappealing vista but also to put together information on the signs of hope and what we're seeing as well and this is why I sort of wanted to give some you know decent attention to the South Korean story and is that technology is value neutral like online campaigning is to a certain extent value neutral it's a tool and it depends on how we use it so that brings us back to you know the very useful question of agency we still have agency here we're not just victims of tectonic trends it seems like that very often and when we're really struggling to crack the knot of how to regulate social media and so on both in terms of hate speech specifically but misinformation more widely it seems sometimes I put very far away from an answer but I think as long as we sort of focus on the future we don't want even that is a is a good place to start because then we can start constructing from there and we're starting to see you know that there are there are many different ways of making technology work I mean Taiwan has shown that you can have a crowdsourced open sourced diffuse decentralized democratic response to the pandemic it's not in the context of elections but I can completely see how it could really work during an election campaign you know the use of online bulletin boards the sharing of information it's really just a world away from the the concentration of executive power that we've seen in many states during the election and that has distorted the election campaigns in a number of states as well so so I always hold to hope and I think we can still we can still sort of see a different way forward yeah I'll wrap up on this question Tom and but before I do that just so there's a last polling snap polling question that encouraged participants to sort of answer on whether they think internet access is too low in your country for online campaigns to be effective I suppose even before the pandemic people were talking about post-democracy they're talking about planning trust in government low levels of engagement in terms of a political process so really a broad because and why that's clearly relevant to the topic at hand is of course political freedoms are not just formal freedoms I mean I always think democracy is a context sport you need to be engaged in it right so again just sort of be a broad views about whether you know this pandemic the changes in the campaigning what impact do you think would have on the levels and intensity or political engagement and another big question and again feel free to ignore it is whether what do you think that might do in terms of trust in government yeah it's a really important question once again and it's one of these difficult questions because we have to ask ourselves once again what do we want engagement to look like because we're still very wedded to the types of indicators that we traditionally would look to for engagement party membership voting numbers turnout you know sort of those kinds of indicators but if you start looking elsewhere you start seeing that there is engagement but engagement itself is changing so for example the change.org have released this poll this global this global survey which shows that there's been an 81% increase in people actually filling out online petitions signing online petitions during the pandemic and one of the hot spots for a huge increase a very significant increase in online campaigning is South Africa where you know for the last few years the narrative has been there's decline decline decline people are turning away and they're being turned off by politics so I think you know we're going to have to broaden our indicators of what we think political engagement looks like but I think we also have to return to the real traditional because if anything the pandemic has shown us is that we're social animals it is a contact sport it's a physical sport you know we need to be physically in spaces together to be able to have what is a public sphere that feels like a human community it cannot simply be displaced and it can't be digitized it can't be put into the digital sphere so I think you know online campaigning is very useful but we have to think of it as a useful additional tool I don't think it's ever going to displace you know in-person sort of contact no worries okay any other final comments Tom before we wrap up the event and I'll begin the formalities and ending it well I mean all I'll say is the information on COVID dem was provided at the start and I'm happy to provide it again maybe as a comment on the Facebook page or maybe can be sent out to the audience afterwards but we really welcome you know any information that people have on how the pandemic is affecting democracy quite broadly construed so do feel free to email us it's coviddem at gmail.com and and you know it would be great to sort of feed your information into our database because then it's available to everyone fantastic Tom that was really excellent and I really enjoyed the presentation in exchange and I'm I'm pretty sure I speak on behalf of participants who actually did so before I end by saying thank you just a reminder that in two weeks time we'll have Therese Pierce and Nella speaking about special voting arrangements and I'm going to engage in a bit of self-promotion in four weeks time I'll be giving a lecture that pairs up in a way with Tom's lecture and but this time looking about it in the shift in campaigning and its impact on the funding election campaigns and protocol parties and I think that was a particular issue that we touched upon a little bit and it was raised an issue but then we'll be taking up in much more systematically after this event has been completed there will be an evaluation survey that please you know it'd be great if you could actually complete it because your feedback is actually quite important in terms of us organizing the series of events and particularly its qualities so let me thank by end the lecture by thanking Tom for a presentation and the paper the various participants through Webex as well as Facebook the various international idea the primary organizer and the prime mover of this of this event and the various friends that supported the event we've got an evaluation service sorry this is my oversight we also have a post lecture survey yeah the questions of which are now on the bottom right of your corner so I encourage you to fill them up and thank you very much thank you everyone yeah thank you thank you