30 October 2019

On October 15th, the European Internet Forum organized a lunch debate titled “Digitization and the defense of democracy”, chaired by MEP Roza Grafin von Thun und Hohenstein.

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#EIFasks - Digitization and the defense of democracy

The debate featured the following speakers: Trevor Davis, CEO of CounterAction and Research Professor at George Washington University, Mikko Salo, Founder of Faktabaari (FactBar) and Media Innovator and EU Advisor at LUT University, Marisa Jimenez Martin, Director and Deputy for EU Affairs, Facebook and Paolo Cesarini, Head of Unit, Media convergence and Social Media, DG CNECT, European Commission. 

Chairing MEP Roza Thun welcomed guests and introduced the topic by stating that “Nowadays, our democracies face a series of challenges: election interference, threats to media freedom, disinformation campaigns etc.’’ Ms. Thun highlighted the fact that societies are being split by fake news and urged: “we need to immediately find concrete policies in order to safeguard our democracy”.

Trevor Davis started by reminding the audience that new technologies (radio or TV) have always presented similar challenges when they emerged in the past. Mr. Davis stressed that “nowadays platforms don’t actually have great capacity to handle fake users and protect platform integrity therefore having an impact on democracy”. He gave the example of the AfD party in Germany which close to the elections would poll somewhere between 10-15% but, on Facebook, 85% of all shares and interactions with all political pages were for AfD. On Twitter, you can pay to get a random sample of data from accounts. “There is a relationship between data transparency, how platforms independently evaluate what occurs on them and how they act”, Trevor Davis concluded.

Marisa Jimenez Martin shared Facebook’s 4 main pillars for safeguarding democracy in the Digital Age: free speech, accurate news, more accountability and more transparency. According to Ms. Jimenez, Facebook “invests in technology and human capital, tries to find and remove bad actors, blocks fake accounts and limits spread of misinformation.” Also, Facebook works with 41 fact checking companies in more than 14 European languages. Ms. Jimenez also shared with the audience some Facebook stats: “There are more than 10 million users that follow an MEP on Facebook and 3 million that share or react to content of MEPs”.

Mikko Salo shared his views on election-related misinformation, something he has worked on since 2014: “We should be careful on what is happening in the US 2020 elections, which will be very dirty and can become a benchmark for new forms of misinformation and election interference, requiring action very soon after. It will be a social media election, so will all the election from this on”. Mr. Salo identified 3 key challenges for saving our democracy: showing tangible results and gaining the trust of the citizens, fixing the internet (enabling privacy and media innovation) and ensuring plurality and awareness. In this sense, he proposes 3 actions: EU needs to regulate the advertising industry, develop the GDPR further and ensure independent base funding for journalism, fact checking and media literacy.

The European Commission’s view on the topic was brought to the table by Paolo Cesarini who started his speech by stressing that “misinformation is a serious threat. Social media is the channel people use most to access news and it is, at the same time, the channel that people trust the least”. Moreover, Mr. Cesarini considers misinformation a multifaceted phenomenon, where vulnerabilities in media enable conducts that are not immediately perceptible to users and can induce them into evaluation errors like click-baiting or use of personal data for micro-targeting. “Amplifying your message in artificial ways is another way in which you can make your audience believe that the message has support”, he added.
In conclusion, Mr. Cesarini proposed 5 measures for safeguarding democracy in the Digital Age: scrutiny of ads, transparency around political advertising, ensuring integrity of services and provide an answer to artificial amplification, empowering consumers and the research community.

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