IGF 2025 Open Forum #22 Networks' Power: Strengthening Collaborative Governance

In an increasingly digital world, ensuring a safe, inclusive, and trustworthy online environment requires collaboration across sectors and borders. This session will explore the critical role of multistakeholder cooperation in upholding information integrity and digital governance, as outlined in the Global Digital Compact. It will highlight the importance of regular collaboration between national online safety institutions and international regulatory bodies with other stakeholder groups, as exemplified by the Global Forum of Networks, to exchange good practices and protect human rights such as privacy, freedom of expression, and access to information. Media and information literacy will be showcased as a powerful example of how this approach can be operationalized to foster peace and resilience and user capacity-building in the digital sphere. Digital platforms have democratized access to knowledge and culture, provided a platform for meaningful political engagement, and fostered global connectivity. However, they can also fuel disinformation, ideological polarization, and hate speech, thereby undermining the enjoyment of human rights in the digital environment. To address these challenges, UNESCO's “Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms: safeguarding freedom of expression and access to information through a multi-stakeholder approach” provide a roadmap for various stakeholders, including national regulators, digital platforms, international organizations, civil society, media, and academia, to ensure that digital governance processes are inclusive, transparent, and grounded in human rights. To uphold international human rights standards, fulfil the commitments of the UN Global Digital Compact and reinforce the principles set out in the Guidelines, UNESCO has supported the establishment of two key networks: The Global Forum of Networks, established in 2024 with the support of UNESCO, provides a structured mechanism for policy dialogue and coordination among national and regional regulators. It also aims to enhance the capacity of regulators to meet future challenges related to technological developments and to help anchor their approaches to online safety in human rights. In the same vein, the I4T Global Knowledge Network—a coalition of over 50 international think tanks and research institutions—helps strengthen digital governance with robust research and independent expertise. The panel will explore these and other mechanisms for operationalising a multi-stakeholder approach to digital governance in a way that invites meaningful participation from regulators, private companies, academia and civil society, as well as platform users. In line with the latter, the session will share lessons learned from UNESCO's SocialMedia4Peace project, which emphasises a whole-of-society approach to digital platform governance. It underscores the importance of long-term and systemic user empowerment to help societies build resilience to harmful content, critically evaluate information, and assert digital rights. The session will focus on: • The challenges and opportunities for regulators to implement digital governance frameworks that are grounded in human rights and keep pace with technological advances, including frontier AI. • Challenges posed by fragmented regulatory landscapes for digital platforms and strategies to improve interoperability and coordination between national and regional regulators. • The responsibility of private companies for human rights due diligence and risk assessment, transparency and accountability, and their role in shaping global digital governance. • The role of independent research and civil society in strengthening governance frameworks and generating evidence for improved practices. • User empowerment through inclusive, multistakeholder, and human rights-based approach: steps to integrate media and information literacy into platform policies and initiatives, regulatory frameworks, and national education systems to foster digital resilience and informed online participation.

This session is being organized by the Global Forum of Networks and will have the support of the UNESCO for the moderation and facilitation onsite, also for the online moderation. The session aim to have 15min max of questions and answers and the online and in site team will ensure to address the questions from the audience. The organizers will create QR code that will displayed in the projection during the session, as well as its link in the chat for the online participants. Thus, the online moderator can select the most pertinent questions for the onsite moderator. The tool for these forms will be Microsoft Forms.