The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for being so kind to be here so early in the morning. After a long trip to be for this session of, will be about as you have seen from the title, time to understand who are the friends and who are the foes in this very complicated situation for the Internet Governance and especially for the fight of disinformation.
It's a session that we'll have some participants with me here, from Nordic countries. One from Finland, one from Norway, but also we will have other participants from remote that will be from Brussels. We'll have some from the European Commission and we'll have somebody from the -- based in Berlin at the moment but is one of the most active person in the fact checking and information in the U.S. And we'll have Paula Gori that will open from the EDMO, this is the Secretary General of EDMO. It's both the European Union has asked for fighting disinformation.
So, I think that we don't have too much time, I would prefer that we start immediately.
If Paula is ready, I will give the floor to her.
>> PAULA GORI: Hello. Good morning.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Are you ready? Yes, she's with us. Welcome, Paula.
You look frozen.
>> PAULA GORI: I guess you're hearing me and sharing also a quick presentation. Can you hear me?
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Yes, we can hear you.
>> PAULA GORI: Can you hear me well?
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Yes, well, but we don't see the presentation yet. She's coming.
>> PAULA GORI: I see it on my screen. Let me know when you see it.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: It's okay.
>> PAULA GORI: Okay, great. Thank you very much, Giacomo. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to start day actually this Day 0 with this -- with this session.
As Giacomo was saying, the IGF focus is on Internet Governance and within this topic of course disinformation is creating quite a lot of, if you want, emotional reactions around -- also in past additions of the IGF.
What I was just wanting to bring up here again is this situation which we are on one side we have the spread of disinformation narratives being from internal or external actors. Different policies, migration, climate change, elections, health, they're often very linked.
For example, (video froze), the same goals, for example, which are disinformation and so on. It can be spread internally and externally and by external actors. It can be state backed, also not state backed. There can be use of proxies and the use of artificial intelligence also to spread it. These are the things that we know. Also the fact that this information is there in a broader admission of creating doubt in our society put us in a situation which at the certain moment we don't actually, I in a position to really be sure about stuff because we've got so many information with so different facts or non-facts, actually. And this puts us in a very difficult situation overall. And this erodes, of course, the information integrity.
So if the basis is not based on facts, then we're in a situation in which we may make a decision which is not in our interest in the end.
On the other side, what we are seeing more and more is a huge rhetoric against any policy framework that tries to tackle this information. One of the main arguments at the basis of this is the fact that it may violate freedom of expression, which if you look at it from a neutral point of view, it's a very fair concern because it is very important that whichever policy that has this information, respects fundamental rights and also freedom of expression.
But the result that we are seeing there is actually more if you want an emotional one rather than one that looks at the real framework and then actually does a real assessment of whether it's violated or not. Many often it is not. And the two reinforce each other.
This is something we're seeing globally. I'm just setting the scene in a very global way.
What we are seeing as approaches and of course EDMO and I will say a few words about EDMO, though those who are familiar with the IGF are familiar with EDMO because it's not the first session we're having here, is that whichever response to get back to information integrity starts with digital literacy, strengthening quality of journalism and so on.
If you look at the global frameworks that we have around, the Global Digital Compact and guidelines by UNESCO and the governance of digital platforms, the recent communication by the representative and communication on international digital strategy for the EU and also the digital service which is the regulation, there are a few elements which are common there. Which are affecting the response, as we were saying before, has to be grounded on fundamental values and human rights.
It has to happen. The focus on functioning and relative transparency. There should be a multi-stakeholder approach. The IGF is one of the responses to that, right? It's really a multi-stakeholder level.
It's based on risk mitigation. Which means to looks at the way that the platforms, for example, or some online actors work could have on certain elements, for example, public health. Miners, civic discourse, so forth and so on. The focus is not that we delete content, we look at the content, but whether we look at the way the platforms work and be abused for maligned purposes.
Just wanted to set the scene in highlighting these differences. And the instruments that I was mentioning earlier I think show that we are all going into that direction. So that the global principles are those.
And then of course the regional specificity state rightly so, also have differences. And this is normal. I don't think we will ever, ever get to something which is global in this sense. But this is fine. As long as the principles are shared and the principles are agreed, then I think that it is important to keep regional specificities, because especially when it comes to disinformation, it's a global phenomenon, but the local characteristics are playing quite a strong role.
Now I will not go into this slide, but I just wanted to show these two slides. This is climate change disinformation and the next one economic change disinformation just to show how complicated it is. It's not one problem easy to understand and easy solution. This makes it very complicated and recovery also very interesting for everybody involved to try to address it.
And I will not go through it because I was saying, but just I wanted to just (frozen video).
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: You broke up, can you repeat the last phrase?
>> PAULA GORI: Sorry?
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Can you repeat last phrase? You break up.
>> PAULA GORI: I wanted to say I was showing these slides not go through them because we don't have time, but just to show how complex the disinformation phenomenon is and by consequence how complicated to find a solution.
It's not by chance that it's years and years that we're all together sitting, also sometimes disagreeing in trying to find a solution. Because the problem itself is complex and we cannot always simplify complex situations, like in case of disinformation.
And you cannot simplify it precisely because human rights are at stake.
So before giving the floor to our next panelist, I wanted to recap for those who are not familiar with EDMO, what are we doing and why are we showing all this complexity.
Because the complexity brings us to the situation in which we have to understand properly the phenomenon in order to come up with solutions. Solutions can't be one solution, it's a mix of different solution. What EDMO is doing, EDMO is funded by the European Commission and is one of the pillars of the responsibility of information is precisely that.
We're a sort of a platform that brings together the different stakeholders. Sort of like what the IGF is doing more generally on Internet Governance. We are bringing them all together, when possible we're trying to provide tools like trainings or like repositories of fact checking articles and so on.
And by putting the community together, we are also in a position to find common trends, to do investigations, to do joint initiatives, policy analysis.
So what -- how are we doing it? Just so say that we have an EDMO platform if you want which goes worldwide. And then we have 14 hubs that are national or multinational and cover all Member States. These are key because remember what I was saying at the beginning, we cannot avoid looking at the local specificities when it comes to this information.
Very easily said, the culture, the policy, the politics, the history, the language of [?] of a country are actually having an impact of whether this information is impactful or not. If it is entering a country, if not. So on.
So we need the local element to be there, otherwise we would miss part of the picture. And this perhaps working all together under our coordination also allow us, as you can imagine, do pan European analysis, pan European so on.
I hope I set the scene, started with the global element and focus more on the EU. And our next speakers will continue in this sense. And I think I can give it over to Benjamin Shultz.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much, Paula. From Europe, you make a comprehensive panorama. Now we go to the U.S.
Benjamin, can you introduce yourself?
>> BENJAMIN SHULTZ: Yes, am I coming through clear?
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: You can go now if you want.
>> BENJAMIN SHULTZ: Is the audio okay?
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Yes, please.
>> BENJAMIN SHULTZ: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Giacomo, Paula, I saw Mikko and Morten on the screen. It's great to be back here with you on the IGF. It's a great place for dialogue and understanding and discussing the issues of the day and really remembering just how global and borderless and connected the Internet makes us all.
And of course, that leaves ample opportunity for bad actors to misuse the Internet and all of its wonderful technologies to spread disinformation.
My name is Ben, I work for the American Sunlight project nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., all they I'm based in Berlin at the moment. And we analyse and fight back against information campaigns that undermine democracy and pollute information environment.
It's no secret that in the U.S. a lot has changed in the last six months. Things have shifted.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: We noticed.
>> BENJAMIN SHULTZ: Things have shifted greatly. And we've seen just putting it frankly, democracy begin to backslide in the United States. We've seen bad actors become more active than ever in spreading information campaigns and using information operations to tear at the social fabric of the U.S.
And we've also seen the platforms move closer and closer to the administration, really in a total sea change from the last four years and even the four years before that.
We've seen people be denied entry to the U.S. based on having critical text messages at the administration. Something that really as an American I thought I would never see happen to my country.
And so in this day and age in which content moderation, the removal of harmful or illegal content online is being equated falsely to censorship, to eye violation of the right to free speech, free expression, in order to really make progress on making our Internet safer and continuing the work that we all do, we have to really start to reframe how we approach this.
We have to start to think about new ways, new creative ways to maintain the alliance, the Transatlantic Alliance in these rough times.
And so in the preparatory call that we all hopped on to this panel, I was told not to be so negative, so I'm going to cut myself off there on the bad and we're going to shift to the good and I'm going to tell you all kind of how I'm approaching this reframing.
You know, as someone working in this space, someone whose organization has been called evil by a certain person that runs X and so forth, you know, there's some work we can do, I think, to maintain the progress that we've made in making the Internet a safer, better place.
Recently in the U.S., nonconsensual, explicit deep fakes colloquially known as deep fake porn, have actually been made illegal. And this is a really groundbreaking achievement, advancement in our country. It's something that we've done a lot of advocacy work for for a really long time. And finally, just in the last -- in the last months, we had enough votes in Congress to make this happen. And this achieved wide bipartisan support.
And the way that we framed this is we actually showed Congress just how affected by this problem they were too. A lot of times our elected officials, you know, putting it frankly, maybe aren't keeping up as in the weeds as we are with all of the things happening online.
You know, they're busy people, fair enough. And one action that we took was we wrote a report in which we laid out just in very plain terms how Congress is being affected by this problem, how people online of all ages, particularly young women, were being affected by this problem of being depicted in deep fakes.
And we were able to push a bill over the finish line and it was signed recently. And now platforms have to take down deep fake videos after receiving requests from a victim within 48 hours.
You know, there's been plenty of criticism of this bill. It's not perfect. But it was a really -- it's been a big step forward. I think we're going to get into a little bit more of this later on in this panel about the varying degrees of regulation in different European countries. Europe is a big continent, the EU is big, 26, 7, you know, plus a few more in the EA Member States. And there's a lot of conflicting values and arguments around regulating content online.
But my hope amidst all of the not so nice things happening in the U.S. right now and the unfortunate degradation of the Transatlantic relationship, my hope is that with small steps like these that have been taken in the states that do have broad support such as banning explicit deep fakes that are made nonconsensual, my hope is collaborating on these issues that Europe, U.S. and countries around the world can continue the dialogue and make progress on keeping the Internet safe and making it safer.
So with that, I will stop myself and pass it back you to, Giacomo and the panel can continue and I'm sure we will have good discussion coming up.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much, Benjamin. Just one question. You moved to Berlin before November or after November?
>> BENJAMIN SHULTZ: I moved in January. The timing just sort of worked out, but you know.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Very timely.
>> BENJAMIN SHULTZ: Yeah.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: I can understand. Okay. Thank you.
I hope that we will have time for questions. I remember there's a mic over there as soon as we finish with the presentation, we will discuss with the audience because I think there are questions that are coming.
So who's next? Mikko, please. Introduce yourself. One of the members of the network that EDMO just presented us.
>> MIKKO SALO: Yeah. So my name is Mikko Salo, I'm representing NGO-run fact checking and digital information through service Faktabaari. We are part of Nordic EDMO hub and we're working with Morten on that one.
I probably kind of open it up a little bit, my angle, Civil Society point of view whereas I understood Morten is more like the journalistic side we are working on.
But yeah, indeed, very, very challenging times. So we started 11 years ago. It was still like accuracy. I think now it's more about the integrity of the information and when you are coming from a country with a -- with a Finland that is now praised for its preparedness culture, so I try to phrase it like we need prepare now. And I think it's very much today the information integrity and kind of AI literacy that is very, very urgently needed.
And our small NGO has been working with actually government officials pushing them to get the kind of retrain the teachers and then providing -- providing guidance to teachers that are very lost, of course, with the AI at the moment.
And why am I so worried as an organization starting from fact checking is that what is happening to our information, what is happening to our sources? Do people really anymore know where the information stems from and what kind of consequences it has, especially in trust-based societies like the Nordic societies.
So these are bigger -- big challenges.
But what gives me some, like, hope is that I can say that we are happy to be part of the EU context, that there's some sort of rule for the Internet that badly broke on.
There is like raising awareness that we need to kind of know something. I think as we are speaking there are currently in Haag actually framing what is security at the moment and I would talk about the cognitive security at the moment.
And we're talk about the famous investment to security, but now what I'm referring is the 1.5, the whole of society security and the information integrity. And I think that's the frame that we should be talking.
In general, the media, education investments are all over the world really nonexisting at the moment. So there's a lot to improve at least at the moment.
Finland is apparently performing the best as we are doing it.
If I would invest something now, and what we are trying to do in Finland is exactly going back to the basics, is still the children, the next generation. I think that's where we have to find some sort of protection and ensure that before they -- we first need -- I mean, this sounds kind of crazy, but they need to -- need to be able to think before they use AI.
And I was just framing and I was actually asking the ChatGPT how does it look like, an AI-native person. If we're not able to think ourselves, we're not able to use the AI as it's meant at the moment.
So I would perhaps leave you with these thoughts about the importance of the education and the possibilities that we have in empowering the teachers and different societies to at least address them. Address the youngsters for the information integrity.
Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much, Mikko.
Are you more afraid of your neighbors or your supposed friends?
>> MIKKO SALO: We are not afraid of our neighbors. We are prepared and that's 50 years story of that one. But we are -- I mean, everybody has a lot do in this information side. And it's very mental, so to say.
And I think nobody's too prepared for that one. And it is -- it is a new battlefield and we just need to take it calm and try to progress and that's why the IGF is doing very important work to keep a kind of Internet -- Internet somehow in place.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much.
So before to give the floor to Morten as the next speaker, I want to remember that we have with us also [?] who will make the report of this. And he's an essential figure, he's not with us, but he's behind the scenes. In the Morten, your organization is partially also owned by the national public service broadcast.
>> MORTEN LANGFELDT DAHLBACK: Yes. We're owned by all the broadcast companies, the commercial broadcast. I'm going to raise three things that I think are important in this context. I'm part of the fact checker, but I'm part of the EDMO that Paula and Mikko is part of.
The first point I want to raise is that we talk about disinformation and misinformation here. I think one of the core challenges we face in responding to this problem is that we don't know enough about the scope of the problem and we don't know enough about its impact either at least in a lot of domains.
I think the conditions for gaining more knowledge about this problem have become worse over the past few months. So the reason why it's becoming worse is because of regulatory divergence between Europe and the U.S.
A couple years ago we had major tech platforms, forcing them to provide more information to fact checkers but also to research.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Except one.
>> MORTEN LANGFELDT DAHLBACK: Except one. They refused to be part of the legislation, that is correct.
So we see last year -- or this year there were some signs that things were deteriorating when META closed down the fact checking program in the U.S. We were expecting them to do so Europe as well. That hasn't happened. But we think these programs that allow to us gain more knowledge about the disinformation is going to make our life more difficult.
But there's a different problem as well. It's very hard to, because of the wealth of information that is online in the first place, it's very difficult to estimate the scope of disinformation there. So you can see when Paula, for example, shows you a model of the disinformation phenomenon, it's very complex and has a lot of variables and it's very difficult to disentangle just the overall composition of platforms, algorithms from misinformation, disinformation specifically.
It's been harder to obtain information about this phenomenon and that hampers the size and scope of our response. I think we have a fundamental problem there. It's probably solvable, but it's something that worries me.
The second thing I want to address is the relationship between policymakers and political bodies and independent actors like Faktabaari now that disinformation and misinformation is, to a great extent, on the political agenda.
I think overall it's a good thing that both governments and the European Union and others are attempting to limit the impact and the spread of disinformation. But it also places independent actors in a difficult position because we need to be and maintain our independence from governments and from regulatory bodies in order to do our job and to maintain the interest of our audience.
Once our objectives are aligned with the objectives of the governments and of other regulatory and official bodies, I think it's easy for others to throw our independence into doubt because the alignment is too close.
This is, I think, something that both we as fact checkers and as hubs of EDMO, but also the political bodies need to work out over the next couple years to figure out what would be the right kind of cooperative, quick, coexistence between journalistic organizations that have been at the forefront of the battle against disinformation for years and governmental bodies as well.
I think this is a difficult challenge, but it's one that we are in the process of addressing. The final point I want to address has to do with something that Mikko just mentioned, he asked ChatGPT to give him information that would be relevant and pertinent to this session.
I think this to me raises the challenge that we may when we talk about disinformation may be fighting yesterday's battles. Because up until now, the way we have related to mis and disinformation both as accidental consumers may but organizations that try to address it as a problem is that we know that the disinformation and misinformation that's out there is usually observable from the outside.
That means that we can see posts on Facebook, we can see videos on Tiktok, they might be algorithmically delivered to people on the feed, but the content is open.
However, when you use ChatGPT or Claude, whichever you want, the information that you receive is not in the public sphere at all. It's a response generated on a response that you give to the language model. Which means we as fact checkers, we can't see what responses you're getting.
The more information consumption is driven into chatbots, the less we will be able to observe the misinformation out there and the less able we will be able to respond to it as well. So I don't have a solution to this, I think what's going to happen, if this development accelerates, is that literacy and information with literacy will be much more important than it is today. Because it will be up to the individual consumers and users of chatbots and LLMs to actually assess the information that they're being provided.
I think we might see transition from more debunking and fact checking work like what we've been engaged in so far to more literacy work and thinking about the chatbots for example.
I'm going close there.
I think we will see big changes in the battle against misinformation in the coming years, but it really depends on the regulatory divergence between the U.S. and Europe, but also the AI development and usage of AI in the general public.
Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much. I think that this last thing that you said food for thought, we need to reflect on that. But who has to reflect more is probably the European Commission that is with us, the form of Alberto Rabbachin. This shift from the fact checking to media literacy and empowerment of users, you agree with that?
>> ALBERTO RABBACHIN: Thank you, Giacomo for this question.
Indeed, this is -- we are -- I hope you all can hear me well.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Yes, we can hear you well.
>> ALBERTO RABBACHIN: This is certainly a shift that's happening and we are acknowledging that. And I would like to make -- show you a few slides that I have prepared to -- to accompany my presentation. Just give me a second that I make this happen.
You should be able to see --
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Yes, it's coming. To black, but we hope that we'll see in a second. Yes, now we can see.
>> ALBERTO RABBACHIN: Okay. Yes, indeed. From the European Commission point of view, what we have in place, you know, is a framework which is quite rich framework.
Trying to, you know, preserve the integrity of the information sphere is not necessarily -- it's a problem of content, but it's also a problem of functioning of the information ecosystem, of the digital ecosystem.
First of all, I think we have to make sure that also the citizen that, the European citizen are also themselves considering disinformation and misinformation, and information integrity as an issue, you know, as a problem, as a challenge.
And in fact, the latest Eurobarometer survey from 2023 and 2024 had made ahead of the European [?] had shown that 38% of the European consider, you know, disinformation, misinformation one of the biggest threats to democracy.
There is recently 82% of the Europeans consider that disinformation is a problem for democracy and they are aware, most of them are aware of this problem.
So we are doing something that is perceived as useful by the citizen.
And also where we have to look at when we try to address the disinformation phenomenon certainly also from the citizen point of view, social media, online social network are the sources of -- of the problem, the biggest source of the problem.
And this also reflects the technological development that we have witnessed in the last ten years where, you know, the digital online information ecosystem became the main source of information.
Of course, you mentioned also some of you mentioned also the role of AI. And certainly, you know, AI -- the use of AI, of course AI opens a lot of opportunities in all sectors. But can also use for malicious activity and also thanks to EDMO, we are currently monitoring the amount of disinformation that is linked to content being generated by AI. And we see that this is -- this content is ticking up. This kind of content is ticking up.
And we have witnessed this in particular in the latest national election in Europe.
But what is EU doing?
First of all, we're working with partners, among EU countries, with other countries outside the European border and with international organization and we're very happy to be here talking about this important subject.
Of course, there is also a very important mission, which is raising awareness in communicating about this phenomenon. I think EDMO is doing a great job with this network to also inform the citizen on different forms that this phenomenon can take.
Of course we are also promoting access to independent media to fact check content. We support media literacy activity. And we enforce this around the [?] we force this cooperation between social media platform and Civil Society organization.
Last but not least, of course, there is a pioneering regulation which is the Digital Services Act. The Digital Services Act is the first legal global standard for protecting this information. While protecting freedom of information and expression.
This regulation does not look at content, but looks how the content is distributed. Looks at the functioning of the algorithm. Looks at avoiding the malicious actor abuse this algorithm to spread disinformation to manipulate public discourse, to create different systemic risk.
It gives to the Commission strong investigatory powers, which is also helping increasing transparency on the functioning of social media.
Then we have mentioned the Code of Conduct on disinformation, most recent development is that the code of practice on this information is now being brought within the co-regulatory framework of the DSA. So it becomes a meaningful benchmark for very large online platform to fulfill the DSA requirement from, of course, the disinformation point of view.
It's a big commitment and measure.
Then there's the third pillar which is societal resilience. I will put EDMO in this basket, which is a great tool that we support to, you know, increase awareness about the phenomenon of disinformation through the detection and analysis of it.
We have supported also the creation of the highest ethical and professional tech standard in the fact checking -- for fact checking in Europe, and we finance a lot of media literacy activity.
We started back in 2016 with 16 signatories and 35. Now we have 43 signatories with a granular code with 42 commitments and 128 measures. As of the first of July, the code as I mentioned before, we fully enter the DSA framework and will be auditable. This is the transformation that we're doing with moving the code under the DSA.
The code will be need to be audited on the information of the code. This will be done in DSA.
I'm not spending a lot of words on the code because maybe people are familiar, but the code wants to take up seven areas that are relevant for the disinformation phenomenon.
Demonetization, we also have new regulation come into place. Reducing manipulative behavior, empower user, empower fact checkers and so on here.
And then concluding, you have seen and it's really a pleasure to see that in this panel there are a lot of EDMO representatives. It was a huge effort from -- from our side to create this network of 14 apps, soon to be 15. We will have a new hub coming up which align to the new strategy for international cooperation of European Union. We will have a new hub covering Ukraine and Moldova which are critical, regional spot if we want to have -- fight disinformation.
And let me also remind that maybe it's not clear to everyone how big is this network. EDMO includes more than 120 organizations across the whole EU, including Norway and soon also Ukraine and Moldova.
And last but not least, you mentioned it at the beginning, Giacomo, media literacy. Media literacy is an aspect that appears in different part of our strategy. It's part of our policy and regulatory framework brought into the USA and European Media Freedom Act. We have a literacy group. EDMO is doing great activities, in particular, on local level with the initiatives that are tailored to the needs of the different Member States.
And in particular to Europe and through pilot project action, we support a lot of cross-border media literacy activities.
I will stop here and give you back the floor.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much, Alberto. We are quite late, but I don't want to spoil the audience's possibility to raise question. I see that already there is somebody there.
Could you introduce yourself, please.
>> LOU: Yes, my name is Lou, I'm a retired American librarian over here from my younger Norwegian American children.
On LinkedIn, I have a White paper about the Ukraine war titled Biden war beginning holocaust objective facts footnoted.
Two big lies are being pushed by the European Union by Europeans. First of all, Kyiv 2014 was an outside agitated coup for objectives reasons which I put in my paper. Secondly, the attack in 2022 was provoked by Saturday Len ski himself pumped up by the Europeans in Munich threatening Ukraine getting nuclear weapons.
And finally, which really concerns me, Europe is voting against the annual United Nations anti-Nazi resolution, which sort of is self-defining, self-incriminating that we are quisling collaborators.
Now my question is if the EU is sold by pro-war bias, shouldn't the United Nations keep it as far arm's length as far as judging what's disinformation and misinformation?
Thank you for letting me ask the question.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you. Other question from the room? Okay. In the meantime, Alberto, do you want to answer to this first question while -- oh, yes, please, go ahead. There's a second question.
>> THORA: Hi, I'm Thora, I'm a PhD researcher in Iceland examining how very large platforms are undermining democracy.
I'm asking about academic access, because this is a big problem and I've been a Research Fellow at the Humboldt Institute where they have a group of academics trying to gain this access, but the large platforms are dragging their feet and claiming that EU has to make a few definitions in order for this to start.
And I'm wondering, what is the status of academic access and what should we start with?
Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much. Okay. You want to answer to this and then Alberto will give the other question?
>> MORTEN LANGFELDT DAHLBACK: We recently tried to run a project where we're supposed to work with [?] to extract information from one of the major platforms and we noticed very quickly that the research APIs where you can extract information is more restrictive than we expected. So this is a problem that people have experienced and definitely has not been fixed yet.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Okay.
So Alberto, do you have some elemental answer to the first question or you have complement who has been said about access to the data from the platforms? It's the understanding of what happened.
>> ALBERTO RABBACHIN: Yes, Giacomo. On the first question, this is an important element that I want to stress. We are -- when we talk about, you know, detection of disinformation, analysis of disinformation, we don't want to be the one calling the shots.
We are supporting an independent, multidisciplinary community, which is represented by EDMO here. 120 organizations which are selected by independent experts. And the work that they do in fact checking and analysing disinformation is completely independent from -- from not only from the European Commission, but also from other EU governments.
And this is really something that we really are taking care of and we want to be preserved.
On the second question, I think, you know, there is the digital services act that oblige platform to provide data for research activity. There is an upcoming delegated act that should also move the bar up or down, let's say, in order -- in terms of providing, you know, more access to research through Europe for doing their work.
I think this is fundamental to have better understanding of the phenomenon and, therefore, to design proper policy responses.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Okay. Thank you very much. I think that we've run out of time. There's one more question? Yes, please.
>> MOHAMAD: Thank you very much. My name is Mohamad, I'm from Somalia.
Recognising propaganda in terms of information integrity violation, and find when acknowledge [?] misuse it to deceive to misinform individual or group, this violation is [?]. So my question is, how can you recognise this in terms of Internet?
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: In terms of the Internet?
>> MOHAMAD: Based on your rules.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Okay. I think that we can give generic answer that is the information integrity becomes now more and more, as Mikko said before, the relevant point. Because especially we will have to phase thanks to the artificial intelligence a flood of disinformation automatically made.
And so becomes more and more important to identify which are the reliable sources. And if the information has been manipulated and this, according to what Morten was saying before, will become more and more difficult.
So a mix of rules, as European Union is trying to do, and work on the media integrity made by the media and the journalist is essential to try to face this unpredictable future.
Thank you very much. Sorry that we didn't give you too much answers, but we share with you a lot of questions. But this is the times we are living and we hope that in the next days we can find some other answers from other partners.
I just remember you that in a few minutes we'll start in Workshop Room Number 2, by BBC that is about how public service could remediate part of the problems that we have faced this morning.
Thank you very much, everybody, for participating and I wish you a nice IGF and thank you for coming again.
(Applause)
>> PAULA GORI: Thank you. Thank you, all.
>> BENJAMIN SHULTZ: Thanks.
