The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 17 to 21 December 2017. 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 to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>>BISHAKHA DATTA: And so we have three really interesting speakers to talk about the issues today, and then we have time for discussion. So it is with great pleasure to introduce our first speaker, Valentina from APC.
>>VALENTINA PELLIZZER: Had group of individuals had to think around something that is not but is not a chart. It's possible that some of you have already heard about them, but I will ‑‑ what I want to say is that the idea and the desire was to have a accomplish, how we can navigate our body, our issues into ‑‑ our issue into a very layered space, like the one and that will be the technology of women's right movement.
And so the principle where the velocity includes iteration in 2014 and again in 2015 and where youth online discuss it onsite ‑‑ I don't want to talk about all of the principle. I want to talk about some of the principle. There are five main principle. One is about access, three dimensions. Not only the connectivity issue. It's information and how we use technology.
Movement which has been around for us, because it's not only movement in society but also where we bring and how we bring. So there is a specific principle on internet governance.
As we know, it's not enough to discuss the issue. Not enough but to look at the problem. It's really important to look at the problem. The level of policy, the level of issue discussed in training, the level were issue on me, because very often issue can be not named or can be completed as an assumption. They can be indicted but no one ‑‑ and this make a big difference in the way we choose. They will be addressed or not addressed.
That's why one of the principle is an internet governance to the specific intention of bringing all women ‑‑ people that have a ‑‑ to make this next set of the contractual link with the rise and one rise of the plays in a virtual reality: The network very often don't see that one and only. And when we talk about digital technology, there is two other ‑‑ there are two other principle. One is the one of that interest.
Because of body, in the internet is that. Had our distance, the very moment in which we created persona with the camera. And those votes ‑‑ matched up or more, a change, can be amplified, demystified, can be the link. And if we to thought to discuss about the appointment and LGBT, IQ people, and when we belong to the discriminated community, when we do not belong to the north.
When we do not belong to the north, and we are not around to the discussion of the north. We need to talk about how ‑‑ what are the individuals that are people that are discriminated against. How are they? Where? How? If we don't look at that as embodied and we don't look at that as the individuals, the ability of the person to give begun person or another. But also the ability to stay.
And this is the next set. If we can, right and human rights, as a movement, we want to be remembered. Because their history, the history of diversity is constantly erased. We fight a battle to be remembered. And to have a memory that we feel ‑‑ but progressive in terms of change not in this very volatile way.
And we need to at least these feelings. Internet governance is a place where we need to exercise our right, name our issue. That the our involvement with the digital space, in the aligned space, which is nothing else that another extension that the same extension is a variation of levels. There is no really difference. I cannot see the differences between me now and speaking and me now tweaking. There is really no physical differences. But I'm not in control of this. It doesn't belong to specific private corporation, and that is all the discussion on economy.
I wanted to say this. There is a lot to reflection about who and what the principles, and really people should ‑‑ it's the ability to control and know where they are. And also the memory to decide and the possibility.
And this is important because also in the conversation around the act to be forgotten which is very particular of that conversation, we know women's body are very often used as an excuse.
But we think also that if a woman because ‑‑ against her, this is not an issue about the right to. It is a consensual rights. That is against her consent. So we have already ‑‑ and I will stop here, just having a necessary extensive talk. They are online so anyone can read, change. It's a conversation because it's a movement. And then we can go from there. Thank you.
>>BISHAKHA DATTA: Thank you very much. Very provocative presentation. Our next speaker is Cecile. She's the grand manager of gender main streaming in the gender equality unit at the council, and she's going to talk about the council forum's work. (Audio fading in and out.)
>>CECILE GREBOVAL: Sporadically to discuss traditions based on the idea of inferiority of women in society. So that's the why the strong article that can be used in context and also some forms of vile against women that take online can be used including sexual harassment and ‑‑ and another article ‑‑ in relation to ‑‑
We also have a series of other standards which ‑‑ and also by the UN rights commissioner ‑‑ the states are doing and in Europe a number of countries have sanctions for ‑‑
Now the actions that are identified to ‑‑ online violence ‑‑ and try to become that notion ‑‑
The second to introduce change to introduce gender and ‑‑ another one is I look at the responsibility of that ‑‑ in some countries and another one initiatives in this area and lastly to research this and gather data because we do have some data but not enough and trying ‑‑ seeing as we are in the world and the violence that women are facing ‑‑ is less important. It has the same reality as what ‑‑ our publication at the back of the room if you're interested and the next ‑‑
>>BISHAKHA DATTA: Thank you so much. I was actually elated when you say ‑‑ clearly something groundbreaking. Yeah, you had a question. Do you want to just wait until the last speak er done or would you like to ‑‑ okay, go ahead.
>>PANELIST: My name is shay. I'm a founder of an organization that trains on hate speech in the UK. And I just wondered the unique about glitch is we're intersectional. We see women as multiple identities. I really welcome what you said and I also want to take part by the workers around for what women. What about ‑‑ I don't perceive sexism. I receive racism too. And as academic is acquainted ‑‑ and so how we account are going to take in those nuances, women who are black or disabled or LGBT or trans, it's very important to speak for all women.
>>PANELIST: Yes, of course, and I couldn't be more ‑‑ with what I was saying, but this is our aim and maybe less in the past that we are working on our new gender ‑‑ such as an aspect of looking more into women diversity, different identities for national ‑‑ and especially on the work of ‑‑ apply to work with our colleagues being in the music department who are to ‑‑ anytime that working a lot. The gender aspect was not only very present, so we're trying to do it more with them but also with the colleagues working more on ‑‑ (Audio fading in and out.)
Because it wasn't very present in our ‑‑ it's a question really of thinking, and that's one of the challenges in a big organization, that you try to blink and have done the main stream approach in the other areas. Otherwise, we be people working specifically on racism that don't take into account gender.
So we're trying to do it both ways, trying to push our colleagues to do more with gender equality and also ‑‑
>>BISHAKHA DATTA: We move on to our final speaker who is professor KS park who teaches at south Korea university law school and also one of the founders of open net Korea. Since 2006, Professor Park has also served as the executive director of the KSPD law center which is a nonprofit entity which has offered several ‑‑ and actually I'd just like to contextualize the talk that KS ‑‑ to give.
So at CIGS, a new dynamic coalition was formed, that's the dynamic coalition on publicness. And Professor Park is one of the conveners of the coalition. It's been the intention of the dynamic coalition on gender and internet governance to actually really try and do collaborative work with other dynamic coalitions which have sort of relevant and are interested in working.
So at the Asia pacific regional idea after a presentation at professor park's name on the right to be forgotten, we had a discussion and we said let's try and evolve a tuition related to the right to be forgotten, bringing in publicness and also a question of gender.
And it was in this context that (Audio fading in and out.)
>>PANELIST: Thank you for a long and kind introduction.
Let me first say something about (Audio fading in and out.)
We believe that real motive for rights that have forgotten is the people's desire not to be unreasonably discriminating for their past conduct. All images for their past conduct is ‑‑ but if that is we are motive, we have forgotten, blinding ourselves from one another's hand out is not an effective or proportionately address and combatting unreasonable explanations.
Those two sentences can be taken to gender discrimination or other forms of discrimination.
NCND can never be an effective policy to combat discrimination ‑‑ forcing people to be silent about their identities, whether racial or sexual or in other regards and then shooting the maple. It's only a pretension of ‑‑
People should control when, how, where they can share. They can disclose their identities. Social, sexual, racial. What allows is it gives people in general, not just the people who need to fight discrimination, but people in general right to force other people to forget by suppressing availability of information.
Final destination. It cannot be done in a binary way. It cannot be done only by law. I majored in physics. I used to do experiments in that. So many times, the results come out wrong. I do the experiments again. And I try that again. There are always some thing that I did wrong, and I always wonder, how come ‑‑ and then they're like different possibilities of using the tour that I used for experiment.
There are different possibilities. How come I don't ever lock out, right? How come I always make a mistake when I could by mistake get it right, right? I think powers can be made that way, making us blind to some of the information out there, making us blind to what we see as destination, what we see as oppression. Trying to suppress information about that. That will only give us power to present for the progress while failing to achieve their progress. Only by opening up the case for ethical discourse, broadly and widely, by confronting what is really going on in the real world, we can achieve progress. So that is the tradition of our dynamite coalition on right to be forgotten.
And in that sense, right to forgotten has entered people’s ability to achieve progress. I saw on Korean governance internet support, I was offered some ‑‑ appointed for the purpose of blocking efforts. Some of the first rights to be forgotten came from coalitions who wanted to erase their sexist and racist comments that they made in the past. They wanted to be forgotten in relation to those comments. There, I saw the potential of rightly forgotten abuse. Abuse against the human rights. The other tradition is an attempt at the policy. Now, when you get services from companies and government agencies, you funnel where your data.
Now, if that data is used beyond the scope that you approve and to the people beyond your consent, that constitutes surveillance. That constitutes a violation of your digital freedom or your freedom of information. Now, there's one way of addressing that.
You can sue the companies and governments for not complying with pictures or not complying with the scopes that you can send it to. But not all of us have resources to negotiate over or in discourse the conditions exposing our information to companies and governments.
There are professions changing as an equalizer, only to equalize power individuals and companies and governments by assuming that you own data about yourself.
So even if you don't negotiate over the consumer, the companies and governments cannot use the information for any ‑‑ that you've been in and agree to. That's the idea behind data protection law. But if data protection law is used, it will work against equality. So that's why we thought that vulnerable people, people fighting for progress, against discrimination should pay attention to the issue of right to forgotten.
Because as data protection law is spreading around the world, make no mistake about it. I'm in full support of a strong data protection law.
But together with the data protection law comes a provision. Provision to choosing right before forgot. I think it's an opinion pill. I think we should support legislation of data protection laws around the world, but make clear warnings that it should not be used to shut down the ethical space where people can confront the realities of oppression and discrimination in the real world.
So I want to make a proposal on behalf of dynamic coalition, right to forgotten, and also on behalf of some members of dynamic coalition in gender and governors who worked with us on this.
The proposal is to issue a joint statement on gender and right to be forgotten, which reads ‑‑ and there's no written statement which will include the following points.
Examples of revenge porno. Examples of forced coming out on sexual orientation and also ‑‑ also revelation about, you know, four more sex workers.
These are usually the examples used by the right to be forgotten as a justification for that principle. However, the first point is that these issues, revenge porno, forced of coming out, and revelation of former sex workers, all these issues can be addressed by pre‑existing laws of privacy, not about the right to be forgotten which allows people to take down, suppress, implement information of any kind, even information that they voluntarily posted or even information that they ‑‑ that they voluntarily attracted attention to. So that's the first point, that there are existing laws that address the concerns about this bigger cases cited by right to forgotten Providence.
The second point is that if you want to address these concerns, there has to be dependent upon sex crimes or sex related crimes. For example, in Korea we have a law that criminalizes posting or distribution of revenge porno. And vigorous prosecution of those laws should gather more resources, more enforcement resources than right to be forgotten. Also, there will be a ‑‑ and also the second point is that women should not be used as vulnerable groups that need right to be forgotten when right to be forgotten can be abused, used in reverse to suppress people's information, suppress what people know about powerful sharing of racist or sexist comments.
The third point is that there can be a very narrow category of information that can be or should be suppressed, like a video of rape that needs to be suppressed for intent ‑‑ that needs to be expressed no matter what in the same line of logic as a tired pornography needs to be suppressed. And those types of ‑‑ the enforcement on those types of data can be strengthened by allowing people to share more information about what they see and what they confront in the real world.
So those are the three points we'll include in the joint statement. So I guess the leaders of your coalition will talk about how you will arrange the process of all of you working together and approving on it. So that is my proposal. Thank you.
>>BISHAKHA DATTA: Thank you. What we would like to do is actually this is a draft proposal, and it need to actually circulate much more before it can be finalized.
So we asked KS to just share the seeds of this proposal for today. Then the dynamic coalition on gender and internet governance has a list. So we would like to put this proposal out on that list as well as circulate it among sort of some of the other gender coalitions gender and technology coalitions that we work with, and then sort of see what are the kinds of comments that come in and how this needs to be revised.
But as a first step towards that, as well as a first step towards some of the things that have been which have also raised really interesting questions raising from sexism to hate speech to sexist hate speech to body as data, memory, et cetera, I would hike to invite you all to share thoughts, feedbacks, comment, and also I want to say that I think it's just best to say what you feel, marl in the context of the right to be forgotten, which I think is a complicated issue which we are not trying to come to a very clear finale at this point, like this is really an opening conversation.
Yes, and please introduce yourself.
>>AUDIENCE: Good afternoon. I'm Betrice. I'm an anthropologist. I work with, research gender and technology basically the internet and sexuality, sometimes violence. I did have a more general opinion to give about what value Tina said and the feminist principles of internet. I applaud these initiatives because when one's talking about women, women's rights, sexuality, LGBT community, whichever terms one uses, one forgets to also ‑‑ we're often thinking about protection, and we forget to think about the right to assert our sexuality in a healthy way, and ever since media has been created, we be used media as a form of sexual pleasure. So the more barriers are created, people find ways to use for pleasure and violence. But one question I have about the right to be forgotten that I've always posed to people who work in the technical part of technology is:
Is it technically possible to remove the content from the internet forever? Every time I've gotten the answer, no. So this is just something to think about. Sometimes we're discussing something, and technically we're not even close to getting there. And that bothers me and scares me.
>>PANELIST: With the right to be forgotten, I think there's a caveat to that. I'm happy for you to be forgotten because we need to live in society where we forgive. I think so long, punishment equals retribution and having to beat yourself and be fired or prison and actually there are different forms of punishment and for me it's about understanding what you did wrong. So as a woman, that campaigns on our racem, I'm forever having to challenge the white racist system and white privilege. I don't need to sentence all white people to pris . I just need white people to be better.
So what you can do for me is to be better. So if you have tweeted something in 2006 and we've seen that quite recently, we have a few famous celebrities who have said something quite controversial, particularly my generation. We grew up on the internet, and we've said really terrible things. We've grown up on the internet and therefore we have grown. So I'm happy to forgive you and therefore it's like your right to be forgotten.
If you're truly a different person and learned not to use those terms, I don't want you to have this right to be forgotten so you can easily have a clean LinkedIn CV and get a job and be in a more powerful position to assert your white bring privilege. So the needs to be a caveat around this freedom of being forgotten.
>>BISHAKHA DATTA: Would you like to respond? Anybody from the panel.
>>PANELIST: I see that you may want to forgive. There may be other people who find that very relevant in their distant making about that person. What right to forget does is it doesn't allow ethical choices to be made by individuals. It prevents other people who may find that very relevant. It forces those people into blindness when they deal with former White House supremacists that you're talking about.
This is really something that should remain in the ethical base that is brought into mandatory legal space. That's why we think right to be forgotten law is a problem, although right to forgive I think is something that we should ethically encourage, ethically research. But if you make a law apply across the board that we are forced ‑‑ forced to forgiving is not forgiving.
To the first question about ‑‑ the ground right now is actually suppressing circuiting of information, not deleting information of ‑‑ or not arguing to quote the information completely.
Now, I can say two things about your question. One is deleting the information, it's solved. People working on hard pornography have had that experience. The only way to do that is I think criminal prosecution. That's why I think that we ‑‑ every country needs law like Korea that has a specific provision for disclosing and distributing revenge porno instead of leaving it up to, you know, civil lawsuit. And the ‑‑ the other thing I can say about is something probably not memory enough because I forgot. So I come back to that later.
>>BISHAKHA DATTA: Okay. Just before we move on, I'm going to ask someone else to moderate the rest of the session and be a speaker simply because we've had two unfortunate convince dens. One is usually we get 90 minutes for the dynamic coalition sessions. This year it's been cut down to 60, which makes it very tricky. But this one is even more tricky because from 3:00 to 4:00 we have the dynamic can coalition on gender and internet governance and right after that in five minutes is the main session on gender in room 17, and I'm one of the mod it's. So I feel like I have to rush this.
I apologize for this. But Valle, if you could sort of conclude the session and have Cecile and Professor Park and yourself contribute, that would be great. Thank you.
>>PANELIST: Okay. So before we all leave the room, if there is any comment that you think is relevant, we might just hear and then if there is something memorable that we want to say, if not we all together move to the gender where we can again address the state and share ours. So I would say just something that you think is really relevant and important to this conversation to be heard.
>>PANELIST: I just want to conclude my presence because I made a specific proposal, I stuck my neck out on the cutting block here. So I just want to, you know, remember my input with the following statement. We can never lock into a progress. We cannot just let progress take its own course while blinding ourselves to what goes on in the real society. We need the full truth to make progress. It is in that sense that we are trying to fight against this right to be forgotten in the form it is now.
>>PANELIST: You want to say just say one line, one sentence, if you think it's important. Okay, thank you very much. There is a mailing list. If you're interested in seeing the proposition commenting, and input, just subscribe to the mailing list. It's at the moment the most democratic way of participation when there is a pressing main session on gender, the first one. And we will bring this to the main stage. Thank you very much for the patience.
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