Session
Organizer 1: DENNYS ANTONIALLI, INTERNETLAB
Organizer 2: Maria Paz Canales, Derechos Digitales
Speaker 1: DENNYS ANTONIALLI, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 2: Iria Puyosa, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: Angela Pimienta, Private Sector, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Maria Paz Canales
Marianne Diaz
Maria Paz Canales
Round Table - 60 Min
Dennys Antonialli, InternetLab (Brasil)
Edison Lanza, Special Raporteur for Freedom of Expression - OAS
Iria Puyosa, Fundación Huaira (Ecuador)
Twitter/Facebook (business rep-TBD)
Angela Pimenta, ProJor - First Draft (Brasil)
Each speaker will have opportunity to briefly present her experience or research on information disorders in the region and the connection of those with Freedom of Expression exercise in the region. We will ask them to share their view about the challenges confronted to keep a healthy flux of information in the digital space in the region and the policy alternatives that can be developed to that purpose.
The proposed speakers include experts working in the issue in Latin America from civil society organisations, companies, international organizations and academic institutions. Some of them will be for the first time speakers at an IGF session.
In recent times, there is evidence of use of bots, centres of paid troll armies, volunteer work of online disinformation, and tools for targeted marketing (including the hire of specialised agencies), all used to mobilise for or against political ideas and candidates. As a part of this process, previous debates around Freedom of Expression are also connected, such as the data protection, intermediary liability or the right to be forgotten. There is also a compelling need of considering the role of factors like political polarisation, the use of private messaging applications and foreign interference.With the data collected in the ongoing election cycle in Latin America we perceive the need to discuss the most effective strategy to drive public attention on the documented manipulations, fostering critical thinking and lessons for the future. In particular, think through an open debate how to design tools to educate and get involvement of private sector (media and internet platforms), local authorities around coping these challenges, and see how they should be assessed within the local electoral laws and regulatory frameworks in general.
The aim is to share research and experience around the manipulation of information in Latin America. We will achieve so by inviting several experts to present their field experience or research and to share their insight about how to address this issue from a public policy perspective taking into consideration the human rights international framework. A set of questions, tailor-made for each speaker by the moderator, will aim to foster debate and get the valuable experience of the speakers in the topic. Each panelist will have two rounds to present their experiences, and at the end questions will be opened to the public and to online participants.
In Latin America, different types of measures affect the free flow of information. These measures range from infrastructure-level technical blockings to user generated content take down requests and require the adoption of different strategies to fight censorship and information controls. With the coming presidential elections in many countries of the region, 'fake news' debates raised a lot of concerns and prompted new initiatives, but mostly in an reactive agenda dominated by the facts and research arising out of latest presidential campaign in the United States. Nonetheless, misinformation has been one of the biggest challenges in Latin America for a very long time. Deeper and more contextual analyses are key to developing effective tailor made proposals to adequately deal with these challenges in the region. We want to foster an open multistakeholder conversation and thus provide space for sharing anecdotal evidence, compiled across the region, related to the use of different technologies, or organised strategies, to introduce noise or meddling into the information channels available to the public, building shared understandings about them across sectors.
The workshop moderator will have the online participation session open, and will be in close communication with the workshop’s trained online moderator, to make any adaptations necessary as they arise. The online moderator will intermediate the questions and comments provided by the online attendees, by each question in the room, it will be one question selected by the online moderator from the ones formulated by online attendees.