Session
Organizer 1: Katherine Townsend, Web Foundation
Organizer 2: Gupta Kaushalya, World Wide Web Foundation
Speaker 1: Wondimu Elias, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 2: Moira Whelan, Civil Society, Intergovernmental Organization
Speaker 3: Irene Mwendwa, Civil Society, African Group
Katherine Townsend, Civil Society, Intergovernmental Organization
Gupta Kaushalya, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Kaleigh Schwalbe, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Break-out Group Discussions - Round Tables - 90 Min
1. How do current regulatory legislation in EU, UK, and US affect global internet and what are the gaps in terms of gender protections?
2. As democracies around the world prepare for national elections in 2024 including Indonesia, India, US, UK, France, and others- how can citizens and journalists especially identify and counter targeted spreading of disinformation that derails campaigns and election outcomes.
Connection with previous Messages: This session addresses newer so-called "ai" technologies like deepfakes as a tool of gender violence and broader implications and impact for a trusted web. This session seeks to frame gendered violence online as a safety and security issue, "safety and security should be widened to include the persistent challenge of online misinformation and disinformation... This has made clear the need for accountability criteria for misleading content."
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Targets: In order to advance gender equity online, diverse voices and representation are needed in institutions with decision-making power, and these institutions must be transparent and responsive. This workshop seeks to increase awareness of the scale of the problem, increase participation by diverse actors with improved digital literacy about these issues, and thereby add new voices and pressure for transparent and responsive technology platforms and informed regulators.
Description:
Gender based violence and harassment has increased substantially in recent years, leading to economic loss with businesses pulling their sites offline, loss of leadership and creativity with the silencing of voices, and real-world consequences with trauma and harassment leading to physical harm. Technology platforms recognize this problem but have not been able to adequately prevent or respond and the harms keep growing. Legislation based out of US, UK, and EU that has global reach addresses some of these concerns but is largely inadequate. Harassment methods including doxxing, deepfakes, and disinformation campaigns target women primarily and these tools are perfected and then used for broader targets including attacking democratic elections.
This workshop will introduce participants to the scope and scale of harassment, share tools to identify, prevent, and respond to targeted attacks, and share ways forward for ensuring these approaches are a policy priority for governments and technology platforms especially.
This workshop will directly feed into ongoing work of the Web Foundation on working with technology platforms to counter online gender based violence including diverse input into the UN's Global Digital Compact consultation process and progress on delivering on commitments made at the Generation Equality Forum. The workshop also informs National Democratic Institute’s ongoing work to ensure protections for non-male politicians around the world.
Hybrid Format: The sessions and introductions will be shared in person and broadcast. We will then break into breakout groups for a detailed session. We will have participants join breakout sessions in person and virtually, and share readouts and insights from these sessions back to each other.
We will share materials publicly ahead of time for any to familiarize themselves and will conduct an agenda that is freely available to view and follow along in person and online with simple language and images for accessibility and for language variation. We will have several facilitators including technology leads to ensure a smooth experience and participation for virtual attendees especially.
We will be employing a several survey tools that are lightweight and suitable for low bandwidth and mobile joiners and that give a good indication of the priorities and identities of those in the room including Menti, ReadMe, gDocs, and Miro. These tools have been tested in several conferences that combine hybrid participation both in person and online as well as different languages and strength of internet connectivity.
Usage of IGF Official Tool.