Session
Ensuring a safe digital space: How should governments, Internet businesses and other stakeholders protect citizens, including vulnerable citizens, against online exploitation and abuse?
International standards: How should international standards address the different requirements and preferences of governments and citizens in different countries?
Break-out Group Discussions - Flexible Seating - 60 Min
The starting point of this Open Forum is that women’s full right to public participation cannot be guaranteed without international frameworks that support global and national level action by governments, platform companies, and civil society to build a digital public sphere free from sexism, misogyny and gender-based cyberviolence. Through break-out group discussions, the Open Forum will address the following questions: 1. How are content governance standards to be set by platform companies so that they adhere to a universal baseline of women's human rights while being sensitive to contextual gender cultural norms? 2. How can states design intermediary liability frameworks to achieve the fine balance between platform responsibility for providing prompt redress against sexist hate online and preventing unaccountable private censorship of online speech? 3. What do we need to do to promote synergies between national policies governing platform obligations, platform self-governance and community standards and new regulatory approaches to preserve freedoms and address harms? What is the role of the multilateral system in working towards this synergy? Session Format Part 1. 0-15 minutes Trigger inputs on the questions (5 minutes each) Alicia Buenrostro – Deputy Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations Judit Arenas - Senior Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Miranda Sissons – Director, Human Rights, Facebook Part 2. 15-40 minutes Four self-organised break-out groups discuss the three questions and arrive at the broad contours of a roadmap for action on addressing sexism and misogyny and building safe digital spaces that promote women’s public participation – jotting down bulletised insights with the help of a rapportuer volunteer from the group. Part 3. 40-60 minutes Session moderator Mariana goes over the key insights from the reports/notes submitted by the four breakout groups and obtains comments and closing remarks from Anita Gurumurthy – Executive Director, IT for Change Cécile Gréboval, Programme Manager Gender Mainstreaming / Gender Equality Advisor, Council of Europe Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression
The session will begin with three trigger presentations as described above, post which the self-organising of the participants into break-out groups will enable meaningful and focused interaction, leveraging the experience and insights of all those in the room. If there are sufficient number of online participants, we will also have an online breakout group. Our experienced moderator will be able to succinctly collate the insights from the breakout group report-backs and steer the discussion into a logic closure, by ensuring the speakers who are on the closing panel are addressing or responding to critical concerns/issues in the participant-identified roadmap for combating sexism, hate speech and misogyny online.
UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression
Co-Host: Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression Moderator: Mariana Valente, Director, InternetLab, Civil Society, Latin America Rapporteur: Nandini Chami, Deputy Director, IT for Change, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific
Mariana Valente - InternetLab, Latin America Nandini Chami – IT for Change, Asia-Pacific Anita Gurumurthy – Executive Director, IT for Change, Asia-Pacific Cécile Gréboval, Programme Manager Gender Mainstreaming / Gender Equality Advisor, Council of Europe, Europe Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Asia-Pacific Alicia Buenrostro – Deputy Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations, Latin America Judit Arenas - Senior Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Latin America Miranda Sissons – Director, Human Rights, Facebook, North America
SPEAKERS ARE CONFIRMED
Mariana Valente - InternetLab
Mariana Valente - InternetLab
Nandini Chami – IT for Change
Targets: Goal 5.5 that focuses on women’s full and effective participation in public life and Goal 5 b that aims at enhancing empowering uses of information and communication technologies are interlinked, and neither can be achieve without effective action at the national and global level against the chilling effects of sexist hate online. In the past couple of years, while we have seen a range of developments -- legal frameworks on intermediary liability for gender-based hate speech, platform initiatives for strengthening content moderation and proactive filtering of content that violates women's human rights, and increasing recognition within the UN system that a gender-inclusive digital public sphere is an integral component of the Generation Equality Agenda – it is clear that more needs to be done. Through a break-out discussion format that is informed by perspectives from the UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Government of Mexico, Council of Europe, NGOs from the global South IT for Change and InternetLab, and the human rights division of Facebook, this Open Forum attempts to achieve new ground in the ongoing debate on new directions for platform governance, content moderation benchmarking, and institutional mechanisms to combat sexist hate speech at the global and national level.