 would like to move to the front table, you're welcome. There are some empty seats on the front left table here. Peter, can you unmute for a second and let's test your sound? Ah, there you are. And the sound? Yes. Thank you. Sure, sure. We still have a few people outside. Okay, welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the first session and this second session is we're going to drill down and focus on online campaigning or digital campaigning and its connection with preco-finance because again, as Elena mentioned that we observe this as a link that people don't necessarily think much about, not yet at least. So we try to promote awareness of the importance in linking the act of campaigning, political campaigning in the digital world with preco-finance, how it's regulated, how it is transparent, how it is reported, how it is enforced. And you see on the screen here, this is the cover of our research report in Asia and the Pacific where we connect and the issues. And therefore, today's discussion is meant to be a follow-up to this research. I will introduce the research in a bit. And is it moving? Not yet. Oops, okay. Where is it? Yeah, so why did we do this research? So as we observed, the more and more while campaigning, political campaigning is shifting from conventional means to digital means. While at the same time, countries are always improving the preco-finance regulations and enforcement because it can be a political threat, the use of money in politics, that is. So we feel the need to bring together, make the connection. And as I said, it's generally under-examined. There's not yet, until we've done it, systematic study in the Asia and the Pacific region. My colleagues, Hushbu and Yuki in Stockholm are also taking a look at this from a global lens and also working with other regions. We happen to be in Asia and the Pacific, so that's where we are today. And also, trying to look at how effective regulations or lack of regulations in the region. So I will skip definitions because Peter and Hushbu will be talking about them. And how we did it, we did a desk study basically, literature review. And also we use the political finance database that International Idea has, which is aptly managed by Hushbu and the team in Stockholm. And also we did five country case studies. We picked one for every subregion. And so we get geographic diversity. And also we picked the two most populous countries or democracies rather. Let's be more specific on that. In the Asian Pacific region, which are India and Indonesia. And then also other sorts of diversity where we have developed countries like Australia and Japan to central Asian country like Kyrgyzstan in the case studies. And this will continue to be expanded. The study will go in deeper. Also in collaboration with our team in Stockholm and the headquarters in Stockholm. Yeah. So this is the publication. So you can scan the QR code in order to download it. So now the question is, why are we having this discussion here in Thailand? Well, of course, we have the political finance legal framework assessment that just completed. But also Thailand, according to data from We Are Social, based on the Reuters Institute data, survey data, that Thailand has the highest use of social media as a source of news. Second in the world, which is 74 percent, 74 percent of internet users get their information from, I get the news from social media. And also it's the first in Asia and the Pacific. That's because Thailand is second to Nigeria, which is 74 percent and Thailand, Nigeria is 75 percent and Thailand is 74 percent. We're just quite a high amount. And this is why we would like to start the conversation with you all in Thailand. So this panel is supposed to be an introductory panel to the next one. So the meet for you is going to be in this third session. So please do stick around. And as is its introductory, my colleagues Peter Wolf and Hussbu Agrawal, who I will introduce in a minute, will be presenting the global overview of digital campaigning and also campaign finance. That's done online. Yeah. So our first panelist is Peter Wolf. He is senior advisor at the electoral processes team in Stockholm at our headquarters in Stockholm. And he focuses on the application of digital technologies in elections, emerging challenges and sustainable and trusted implementation of ICTs in electoral processes. Yeah. So he's the best person at idea to speak about this. And then on stage, Peter is online with us in joining from Stockholm. So thank you very much, Peter. It's, what time is it over there? It's six, six a.m., six morning, six in the morning. And then I have Hussbu on the stage with me, who has been working with me for a number of years on political finance issues. So Hussbu's research and work focus on political finance and influence of money and politics and achieving inclusive, responsive and accountable institutions and processes. And she worked in Latin America for idea before moving to our headquarters in Stockholm. Yeah. So let's begin with Peter, who will share his screen and talk to us. I give the global overview on digital campaigning. Tonapad, you need to unshare first. Yes, we can. Thank you. Working for you. I think I'm ready to start. So what do we want to do now? I mean, basically, as you heard from Adi, we'll have two panelists here. While Pushpa later on is going to focus more on the financial and the money aspects of digital campaigning, I just like to talk a little bit about the broader aspects of digital campaigning that go a little bit beyond the money. So talk about some of the opportunities, some of the challenges and some of the emerging solutions, including regulatory solutions when it comes to digital campaigning. So first of all, as I said, it could already be useful to start by just defining what digital campaigning even is. So by that, we usually refer to the use of digital technology in the election campaigning. And that can mean many different things. It can start from basic webpages, search engine optimization to make sure that your political message is seen based on search engines you have. But then, of course, a big aspect of it is the use of online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or X, Instagram and so on for campaigning. Then this area of using messages, peer to peer networks, anything from text messages, WhatsApp, Viva and so on for campaigning. And then there's a whole range of campaign tools as well that support political parties in the entire campaigning process from data collection, from fundraising to data analytics and then the role of the community. And then, of course, increasingly we also see those great areas or those new areas, the role of influencers that are playing in political online advertising, but then also the use of apps, of mobile phone apps and some sort of gamification even of campaigning. Now, of course, there's a great opportunity in all of this. All of those digital tools are really, not only new but also very effective methods for partisan candidates to increase their reach, make this link to voters that has been increasingly become difficult for partisan candidates to make, to enable wasted toy discussions between the parties, between the candidates and their voters, their elected. And because of the sufficiency of it, over the past decade, we've certainly seen a lot of shift of advertising to the online sphere and a lot of transformations that happen. So in many countries, what you see now is that the online space is the new go to space for political campaigning. You see, from election to election, more and more money being spent on advertising online and maybe additional advertising going back also because of the big issues. And you also see a whole formalized industry now emerging supporting political parties in using all of those digital tools and offering professional services around it, including all of those data driven. That, of course, has not only opportunities, but also several challenges. And again, later on, Kursk, we've got to discuss all of the issues that this raises for the question of financing and money, or difficulties to trace money online, how difficult it is to keep on track and then keep raising and start out depending. But there's also a lot of issues that go beyond money. Just page campaigns because those technologies can make in increasing your pay, it's becoming very difficult to establish some sort of transparency about who is putting out which kind of campaign messages to which audiences and so on. There are very sophisticated target methodologies available that can actually to quite a lot of maybe unfair manipulation of voters. All of this can contribute to more of the problematic polarization within many countries. It can contribute to the spread of this information that we see in so many countries to layer ready. It can also support possibly poorly intended malign access from abroad to interfere in electric processes. And the additional challenge is that all of this is moving very fast. So as election administrations as regulators try to keep pace with all of those developments, usually technology is already one or two steps ahead. Now, all of this together leads to the risk that with digital campaigning becoming more and more prominent, there is a possibility that all of this is jeopardizing the integrity and fairness of the democratic debate. It can easily tilt a level playing field between the different electoral stakeholders. It can hold to progress to a basic fundamental human and democratic rights like the freedom to hold opinions without interference. And of course, it can also be a very attractive avenue for possible malign foreign actors. Now, of course, those things are not entirely new. Those technologies are not entirely new as well. And I think a big turning point when it came to the discussion of all of those tools was the year 2016, where there was kind of a widespread recognition in many countries, especially after the US elections back then and Brexit referendum and the scandals around Cambridge Analytica, that something has to be done about it. And in all of honesty and with all the criticism that tech companies sometimes are getting, it's probably fair to say that a lot of the action that was initially taken was done by the tech companies themselves. A lot of this action initially focused mostly on the online platforms of the management listed and mentioned before. It had to do with things like trying to restrict political advertising from abroad as much as possible, putting in the appropriate control mechanisms for this, creating those advertising repositories that some of you might be familiar with. For example, what you see on Facebook, those ad libraries that they're offering where you can search for roles, which probably have been placed which relate to that. There was also increasing targeting restrictions and the sophistication of the targeting tools that has been offered by platform has been now reduced a little bit. And then some platforms even went all the way to completely banning advertising at least as far as there are. But a few years have been passed since then already and I think by now there's wide acceptance in many countries that first of all that the rules for political advertising on traditional media are not sufficient to cover the online sphere. There's just a whole new range of issues of tools that are not properly covered by existing traditional media revelation. But we've also seen that the self-regulation is actually taken by platforms. It is not necessarily sufficient. The problem is just that of course every platform is responsible for doing their own terms, their own implementation of those terms. This can be quite uneven starting from even the definition, what is the political ad, what kind of things are they reducing, making more transparent or preventing some cases. The uptake between platforms varies a bit and of course you're always ultimately dependent on the goodwill. So overall there is a trend now towards looking into how can this whole area be regulated, tackling it from platform regulation perspectives, from perspectives of new regulation for online political advertising to some extent. Data protection regulation is also pretty important in the whole year, especially when it comes to targeting the use of personal data to get those messages. But also a problem here is that oftentimes there's a lot of asymmetries in the information and the skills that are available to the platforms that have a lot of, of course the skills, they have all the data, they have all the knowledge about the issues that are out there and also the counter measures that are possible and the regulators that try to. So what we see at the moment are very few countries that have really ventured out into regulating this online political advertising space a lot, but there are some pioneers, some interesting cases from where we can already learn quite, quite noteworthy, maybe the efforts of Canada that already started several years ago with this island that has also quite an interesting number. Then of course also some regulation in several of those areas coming out in Europe right now. The reason why this is such an under-regulated area, according to some of the interviews that we had with election management bodies in many different countries, is that many countries, especially smaller ones but also even larger ones, feel that they don't have the legal and the technical capacity to properly regulate in this area. There is also concern about a lack of leverage with the platforms, so there's always a risk if regulations introduce that platforms find cumbersome to adhere to, especially if the market is very small, that they just withdraw from the market or, for example, ban political advertising. So this was one of the first reactions that Canada experienced at the time when political advertising was still allowed on Twitter, as soon as the regulation in Canada came out. We actually decided this is too risky and complicated for them, so they ended up with banning political advertising and banning political advertising. So there are some of those technical issues, but then there's also concerns about the freedom of expressions, of course regulating into the online political advertising, that there's always a risk that this goes too close into all the kind of messages political parties are sending the content of messages, and there is a very fine line as this regulation is being developed, preventing the harms that are possible on one hand, but on the other hand also damaging freedom of expression, freedom of expression. And then overall, I guess as always, maybe even with financial regulations that is in some countries also lack of political regulation at this point. But nevertheless, from some of the emerging cases of regulation of online ad forms and online political advertising, we can already draw some conclusions about common provision that such regulation entails. And I'd be very brief about this, I think. I mean, people into this take a lot more time, but basically what I see in a lot of this regulation is that it focuses on, first of all, defining what is a political ad, defining the scope of what political advertising is online, and that is quite difficult to rate. So there is always this tension there between having a broad definition which can have killing effects even on civil society, on, you know, access beyond political parties, especially when it comes to this question of issue ads, ads that are not directly about parties or by parties, if they are just the issues that are maybe relevant for a campaign, should they become about this regulation? Also that can be quite, quite tricky to define. And so that whole area of definition is actually not really easy to solve. But then another question is how do you identify political ads and advertisers online? Who should be responsible responsible for this? Sometimes there's also not a straightforward process. Should it be the platforms that are responsible? Should it be the parties that have to declare everything, the thing that they're posting online to say this is a political ad? Who's responsible in case this protection of political ads or this declaration doesn't happen? Then provisions often focus a lot on the transparency of political advertising. That's transparency both towards the voters. So voters see what they're seeing on screen, understand that this is a political ad, understand who's sending these ads to them, understand to whom this ad is being targeted, so transparency towards the voters. But then also transparency towards observers, regulators, election administrations, researchers giving access to the data about the campaign, the campaigning online to all of those for more deeper analysis. And those advertising libraries I mentioned before are just a starting point that's probably more that's going to come with some of this regulation. Another area is then what kind of responsibilities do platforms have? Do they, for example, have to establish a legal representative in a given country so that they can also be held accountable or ultimately will a lot of the relations with the platform still depend on MOUs and kind of good relations, which also is needed in some countries. Do they have to do some sort of a risk assessment? What kind of data do they have to provide into MOUs? And then finally, of course, a big area of concern is then always also the question of content and to what extent should content be regulated. Here, current regulation is very careful, so a lot focuses on transparency, very little focuses on content. And with content there's usually this rule of thumb that what should be illegal offline should also be illegal online, but it shouldn't go a lot further than this. So of course here that's a big danger always and risks to political freedoms, political rights, and so here it's always this important way in process and then a very careful approach is going on. So this is our first overview of what's happening in the online space beyond political findings, what kind of regulations coming. Again, this is only a starting point. We will have a publication coming out in third quarter of this year still where we looked into the more detailed provision of some of the existing regulation already, there are some more detailed conclusions. So we can certainly provide you with more information as this publication is going to be out and I think if they try to leave it here and hand over to back to Adio to put you know. Thank you very much. The broader challenges are the same and the broader solutions are the same and what I'm going to talk about actually is not going to be fundamentally different from what Peter already mentioned, but I'm going to focus a little bit more on the financial side of it and just explore. In all honesty, online campaign finance is so rapidly evolving, is relatively new. We all know that it is important. The forms of campaigning has completely shifted in the last 10 years and it will continue to shift more and more parties all over the world are going to use this methodology method of communication with their voters, but what we don't know is what is going to work, what is supposed to be done and our effort is to collect this information on how are we navigating this. Nobody has cracked the code as of now. There is not one country we can say that of course Peter mentioned Canada has tried Ireland, Latvia and mostly these are in the global north, but we are trying to bring those lessons learned and from the headquarters as well like Adi was mentioning there is Asia-Pacific study. The study Peter mentioned is focused on Europe. We are also trying to collect information more globally on what our oversight agency is doing, what are platforms doing to navigate the challenges associated with online campaigning, particularly the financial side of it. Over the course of last two years we have collected case studies on Belgium, on Mexico, Latvia. We are currently engaging in case studies on India, Brazil, Chile and our overall objective is to understand what are the lessons learned in the process of as these countries are trying to bring some semblance of normality to the disruption that online campaigning has caused and I'm going to talk about some of the lessons learned or some of the best practices that we have figured out in this process. Adi mentioned some very interesting information data on Thailand and this is a global picture and this data has been gathered from data report from July 2023 report and every single month they have or is it quarter but every quarter they have a report on the internet use social media use and we keep tracking that and it's so surprising that every single quarter the number increases by two to three percent in all of these parameters whether it is a number of internet users which currently stands at 64.5 percent of world population or is it about use of social media users which is 4.88 billion 60 percent of the world population. How much do we use internet six hours 40 minutes on average per day also good reflection for us how much are we on our phones and computers and within internet social media spend time spending is two hours 26 minutes which means basically all kinds of social media channels tiktok facebook instagram linkedin etc etc two hours 26 minutes and it is highest among 16 to 24 years old not surprising. So obviously when the ways we are getting information is changing the ways that information will be shared is obviously going to change and anybody who does not capitalize on this is going to lose in this journey. So obviously as a result political parties, candidates, campaigners are adopting online technologies and they will continue to do so. It started from perhaps the United States which was one of the four runners in the use of digital campaigning particularly the first campaign of Obama was massive in terms of the use of online campaign methodologies but it has grown in the last elections of course US elections are the most expensive and Paul will know that are the most expensive in the world and their social media spending in the last elections were 14 billion dollars which is quite substantial but it was still a small portion of the overall spending but it is increased it was very small portion and now it is a lot more so it is going to continue to increase and it won't be surprising for anybody but it does bring a lot of opportunities Peter talked about it I mean the natural thought when we talk about money in politics is that it is bad but honestly money is given a bad name without its fault of its own money is necessary for political campaigning and without money political parties won't be able to reach out to voters and talk about their agenda so it is needed to run offices to pay their campaigners pay their staff run offices etc but what is problematic is the unbridled use of money in politics and same goes to use of social media it is important social media reach is much cheaper for political parties especially for smaller parties who do not have massive funding large private donors new parties who are still trying to find their base it is quite democratic it's a public space with a very minimum budget they can reach out to a large population at a smaller cost they can relay their messages so it is absolutely important and essential and fundamental but it does bring a lot of challenges and some of these actually Peter has already highlighted first of all regulatory loopholes our political finance regulations were designed in the 1990s or even earlier in many countries and they are not fit for purpose for current day campaigning there is always a debate when you talk about talk to political finance experts they get very shocked when we say that political finance reform should be made to adjust to online campaigning and it is a very big endeavor but it is not a case in every single scenario and I will share a table where we can see how regulations are working but oftentimes honestly the regulations are not sufficient to talk about because they don't define advertise they don't include online campaigning as advertising as a result it's a big loophole which can be circumvented and abused by political actors and at the same time online campaigning when you when somebody engages in online campaigning anybody can pay for it it does not necessarily have to be political party or a candidate so if a country does not allow for third party campaigning the platform regulation should also talk about not allowing anybody but political actors to engage in online campaigning but oftentimes these regulations are absent as a result third party campaigning is done although it may be illegal in a country or foreign funding may come in so a foreign actor can hire a troll army outside of the country of election pay them and the regulators will never know here because that money never circulated the economy so these are the some some loopholes that can be used and that finally is organic campaigning it cannot be considered as a loophole because organic campaigning is no different than volunteers going door to door and canvassing for political parties or candidates but at the same time oftentimes and we were doing a study on as part of our case studies approach we worked on a case study on Canada and in Canada one of the third party campaigner went on record saying that we invested no money on organic campaigning but our reach through the organic campaigning was 10 tenfold more than our reach through paid advertising so what is the thin line do we let it go just because it is organic and it is freedom of expression or should there be a limitation when they were engaging in organic campaigning did they hire volunteers did they pay them anything how much money was involved so all of these regulatory loopholes need to be addressed somehow and obviously we don't have all the answers but this is an opportunity for us to have a fruitful discussion second Peter already mentioned so I won't go very much into depth is the speed of innovation versus legislative reform process the ways we campaign the technologies they are just going at a speed that our legislative frameworks are just not apt to catch up by the time we have caught up with problem A problem A is no more the problem problem B is the problem so it is very very difficult to catch up and play this game of catch up with the new forms of political campaigning so what is the solution to this there is no point in fighting this lack of responsiveness because legislative processes are time consuming it needs political consensus it's a legal process and I will talk about some solutions to this in my next part of the presentation but the idea is to make legislation broad enough to not be specific to a certain form of campaigning or certain ways money is being spent but make it all in compassing that even though if new technology in the future AI comes into elections or political parties start using artificial intelligence for campaigning or for which they are already using but maybe in a bigger larger scope so make legislation broader and compass for bigger issues then the information disclosure by platforms I was listening to a presentation by somebody from meta and a lot has changed in the last five years on how meta or Facebook ad library as we popularly know has evolved its processes on how it is making ads transparent and making sure that they are following the legislation of the country but again what Peter mentioned we can't hold legislation as a responsibility of platforms because platforms platforms are not responsible for regulating self-regulating themselves it should be uniform for all kinds of platforms because currently I'll give example of just meta and Google they're very different in their approach to political advertising they're also very different in their approach to how they are making the financial aspect transparent on who is paying for the advertisement how much was spent just the definition is very different Facebook has a broader definition of political ads for example it includes includes social ads and issue ads as political ads whereas Google does not and there are some platforms that don't define political ads at all and this is important because this has implication for how much money was spent on political advertising then capacity of oversight agencies the scale is massive so our oversight agencies were already struggling in the analog world and now with the new technologies and the amount of money that is being spent or just even not the amount with the scale of campaigning that is happening online it is just very difficult for many of our oversight agencies to be able to conduct that investigative reporting and making sure that what the political parties are actually reporting is what they actually spent it is again related to the information disclosed by platforms because ad libraries are not available in all countries and they're also not available in the same format in every country so oversight capacity is the human resources lack the training or the capacity or the time often oversight agencies focusing on political finance have very small teams and very small budgets and there are exceptions like Mexico is a massive exception they have a very very big team and they are one of actually countries that are doing a little better in compared to others but such kind of funding is not available to every oversight agency and it's very difficult to keep that monitoring and finally is interagency coordination so when we talk about online campaign finance it's not just one body that is responsible or one body that is engaged there's a lot of parties involved in this there is of course the oversight agency there's the advertising council there is the issue of the courts probably and also PR agencies there are private companies and social media platforms so there's host of different agencies that are involved and oftentimes they don't have interconnectivity and they don't talk among each other and it's very difficult to have those kind of coordination mechanisms put in place when all their life they have worked in silos so these are some of the challenges so in each of this challenge I will go very quickly on these five challenges what are possible solutions or best practices and what we have noticed in our case studies that we have conducted so far there are four contexts of regulation and when I was talking that people get shocked when we say our oversight agencies or policymakers are like but it's not possible to change our entire regulation just because one aspect of campaigning is not involved so we kind of put in a continuum of what kind of there are four contexts of regulations it could be context one is political advertisements in general is largely unregulated and I have to give example of Sweden because I come from there in Sweden actually political finance is very very loosely regulated they believe in self-transparency and trust in the system so the regulation is actually quite lax it was good in the past but recently we have same scandals appearing political finance scandals in Sweden so does it work does it not work is a question that I'm not qualified to answer at the moment but these are the countries in which generally there is no regulation of no proper regulation of political finance in general but also online campaigning in particular then there is context too in which political advertising regulation is limited to selected media online advertising is not covered like I mentioned the definition itself if it does not include online campaigning as one of the campaigning methodology then obviously there is a need to refine the process and make it more explicit so that it becomes important for political parties or paramount for them to report on money spent on online campaigning the context three is generic political advertising regulation applied to online political advertising pretty much similar rules applied to both online and offline but traditional media rules translate poorly to speed scale and nature of online advertising as I mentioned because the nature is very different the reach is very different the scope is very different so although the generic rules may apply but they will be poorly translated and finally there is online advertising is explicitly regulated so in case of Canada in case of Latvia they specifically mentioned now with their new changes new reforms that online advertising is actually a very specific form of advertising and this other regulation that applied to them this is how political parties should be reporting on them so this is a continuum but like I mentioned it's not always very easy to regulate and change regulations so what can be done there are soft law options which we have noticed which are being done in many countries they are of course they are soft law that very difficult to impose or enforce but they can come in the form of codes of conduct practices and or ethics so it is basically a commitment to different levels of behavioral standards for example political parties may sign a code of conduct to promising or committing not to use inauthentic behavior or not to spread this information or committing to make their spending transparent so it is not enforceable but it is a not a very right word to use gentlemen's agreement and there is an open dialogue involved and although it is not enforceable it does create a common ground and if one person breaks the promise it just is going to crumble the system so there is a little bit of pressure peer pressure to follow then second is memorandums of understanding between oversight agencies and platforms this is also popularly being used in our case studies we have in almost all countries that are trying to regulate this is one of the first steps that is being taken to start having these conversations with social media platforms having meetings and asking them to adapt their ad libraries or their transparency procedures in line with the regulations of the country and this can be done through memorandum of understanding between these agencies and finally is guidance on best practices and standards released by oversight bodies so even if there is no regulation a specific regulation oversight agencies could develop these kind of guidelines for political actors that they can follow because oftentimes parties, candidates, third parties are not very sure on what is expected of them when they are using these kind of platforms for advertising finally I am not going to go into very detail about improving transparency because Peter did talk about it but there is conversations about having uniform rules for platforms for example labeling ads and what kind of information to include when you are labeling ad who is advertising who paid for the advertisement how long was the advertisement run and what was the targeting criteria used how what was the audience reach and what was the total spending so this kind of information should be required by all platforms to be included in their ads when they release an ad on political advertising and then requirements to disapprove advertisement from any unauthorized sources and again when I mentioned some are doing better than the other but it's not uniform because of course there is no proper legislation on them so there has to be through this memorandum of understandings or conversations oversight agencies are talking with social media platforms to have these kind of requirements that if elections are happening in Thailand only people based in Thailand should be able to pay for an advertisement it should not come from any foreign sources there should not be no cross-border transaction for example or if a third party is not allowed to campaign in the country then nobody other than the political party representative or candidate should be able to pay for the advertisement so stuff like that and reporting a political party as well ensuring that they are doing itemized reporting rather than just saying that 100 million were spent on advertisement but where did the 100 million go what kind of advertising happened a bookkeeping of online activities and these are just best practices that can be done not necessarily always enforced by regulations but following transparency standards and online reporting we talked about Thailand and how it would be nice if we have an online reporting and disclosure of donations and spending and it of course translates to online campaigning as well it is no different it allows for voters to see where the money is going where the money is coming from how much was spent on the online ads and then capacity needs to be developed of oversight agencies investment need to be made in human resource capacity development people who are responsible for financial audit of political parties need to be trained and this training should also happen within the political parties not just the oversight agencies because they are the ones who are actually going to report so this kind of capacity building activity should be done and resources and oversight body is only good enough if it has the right mandate it has the human resources the technical capacity but also the financial resources like I mentioned some agencies are much more resourced than others but without proper human resources capacity it's very difficult for them to now you know go into this wild west of online campaigning and making sure that everything is being done by rules and finally when I talked about the challenges of interagency coordination there has to be a whole of society approach and honestly all of these solutions are not a magic one just for online campaigning this can also apply to overall political finance you know improvements but also whole of society approach but if you want to address the issue of transparency in online campaigning it is very very important that everybody work together including civil society a lot was talked about the role civil society can play in our morning session and how in Thailand we do not have that culture yet of involving civil society but without the engagement of civil society independent media and private sector it's very difficult to achieve what we aim to achieve in terms of transparency because if civil society is able to track what is being done by parties they can make them accountable they can raise the issues they can lobby for better transparency mechanisms and so it's so can an independent media an example just I I said when also governments are talking to social media companies they should collaborate with them to make sure that their ad libraries are more you know comprehensive downloadable and has a proper breakdown and shows the sources of all the information so it requires a lot of coordination it just it is not going to be solved by one or two group of people so this is from me very generic our case studies are all available on our website of international idea we curate all our digitalization work and money and politics on this website so you can go through it you can read and we'll we continuously keep updating our overall objective eventually is to take these case studies and develop a report not going to be coming anytime soon like Peters but maybe over the next years to to collect these evidence and lessons learned and best practices from different countries and come up with with something that can be useful for other jurisdictions who are trying to work and navigate this this phenomenon thank you very much who's blue let's give a run of applause and and there you have it the two aspects that we would like we're trying to connect here digital campaigning political finance I'd like to acknowledge HD center actually where we have cartoon among us today they have done a lot of work in this in this space so so we're not alone it's it's us it's between us and lunch now anyone have any questions yes sir please two questions going beyond digital campaigning what do you think the impact of the new generation of AI tools will have on electoral processes and perhaps electoral outcomes and as a follow up how does it impact voter anonymity thank you Peter are there Peter I guess obviously you know the creation you know thoughts is for example the issue that we've not explicitly mentioned here yet but all of those mechanisms that are used for amplifying messages online that all of those tools are going to be a lot more powerful if powered by artificial intelligence on the other hand there is going to be some sort of an arms race between you know creating artificial content artificial amplification of content through AI but at the same time also those trying to keep case with this and trying to use artificial intelligence tools for detecting fakes for detecting those kind of amplified messages but it's going to be harder at the moment it looks like maybe the risks are higher than the solutions so the sophistication in which inauthentic behavior for example can created online seems to be progressing faster than the detection mechanism so detection always being one step and so certainly there's going to be a whole new range of accelerated problems coming out of AI maybe it's a similar nature but just with a lot more sophisticated tools there was a second part of this as well anonymity of voters I think or of data protection and so on yeah anonymity of voters so that so would you directly be worried about like voter data collected as part of the electoral process that that somehow would be analyzable and like the secrets of the both would be threatened though that more kind of voted that data would even be or citizen data would be more and more it can preach and then kind of data protection would become more and more and more because yeah I guess if it's about about the secrecy of the vote and so on it really depends obviously about the kind of data that's being collected by the election administration and that might actually be mostly an issue with online electronic voting of course if and how those tools are protecting the identity and you know separating the identity of the vote and the vote so I think that's almost a separate discussion otherwise I think for the data protection will have to rely a lot on data protection regulation that does exist in many countries already I'm not sure if AI is going to change that a lot so so ultimately that's going to be a responsibility for all at least legal campaigners to adhere to data protection rules I'm not sure about the tie context but oftentimes there is actually a major set of priorities now already how do we comply with existing data protection regulation how do we not reach this as part of our campaign sometimes especially European Union and the risks are very high the fines are very high if you read data protection regulation I guess that's at least one of the approaches that you can expect for limiting this but you're not not sure otherwise how anonymity would be directly affected by all right any any other questions yeah yeah it is it is lunch time now so let's let's go on a break and we will of course go through these concepts in more closer to home after this session on the Thailand story session so we will lunch be yeah so lunch will be at the yeah yeah so we'll break for one hour until 1.45 yes so we'll be back here 1.45 thank you and thank you very much Peter for joining us so early in the morning on your side thanks everybody have a great lunch and have a good breakfast now yeah have a good breakfast