The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, France, from 12 to 14 November 2018. 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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>> SASHA HAVLICEK: Apologies for the delay. Like with every good high-tech conference on technology, we have a technology hitch. We're waiting for the videos to get fixed. One more minute of your patience, forgive us before we get started.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: Right. With or without the technology, we're going ahead. Are you okay? Very, very warm welcome to everybody. This morning at this very English morning in Paris, my name is Sasha Havlicek and I run the institute for strategic dialogue in London. I'm delighted to be presiding over a wonderful panel of international speakers.
I very much hope we can make this despite the format of the room an interactive and informal conversation. To start with, I'd be grateful if we could have a show of hands, how many of you in this room are representing the NGO sector? The nongovernmental sector? Fantastic. Anybody from government? Yes, thank you so much. Anybody from the private sector? Fantastic. So, we've got quite a mix.
Just to put this in to context a little bit. I think it's extremely poignant that this event is taking place against the backdrop of armistice centennial celebrations and, of course, the Paris Peace Forum which is taking up so much international attention quite rightly. And the grand theme of this year's Peace Forum is global governance. As we see a number of international leaders fight to try to keep alive the institutional underpinning of our world order, it seems here in this event we're on the outset of a journey, a journey for the governance of a new frontier, of a new wild west, that's the internet.
So, as we start this conversation, just to tell you that we at the institute of strategic dialogue have been working since 2006 on our inception on addressing this global set of challenges posed to us by extremist groups, by terrorist groups, by hate mongers around the world. And as we watched the networks mobilize and watch them migrate to the on-line space, so we, too, started to do our own listening exercises, understanding how we mobilize them. Understanding how we were very effectively very strong early adopters of new communications technologies. And they were organizing themselves, not just nationally, but transnationally in effective ways, ways that the new global infrastructure of communication was particularly well suited to.
And the impact of that mobilization is, of course, very clear to all of us. The impact that we often look at in terms of the rise in terrorism, now, of course just recently, this attempt on Matt Hall's life seems to be thwarted, we're reminded of the full spectrum I'd logically of the challenges, from Islamist to far right
We're reminded of the challenges of hate mongering because of the enormous rise of hate crime statistics across every market we know of the world. And we just saw in the United Kingdom in 2017, a rise in hate crime of 29% this last year now arrives in 19%. So, year on and year out, we see these problems on the march.
But I think the impact is something more dire than that. And while the manifestations of violence is a clear problem, it's the main streaming of hateful ideologies and ideas that I find most worrying. We see that happening in a number of different ways. The global peace index has an indicator which talks about the acceptance of the rights of others. And that indicator has plummeted across every western market over the recent period.
It's an indicator of attitudinal change, an indicator of how far the extreme ideas have entered into the main stream -- the main stream of politics, the main stream of civil action. And these are the challenges I believe no one sector, no government alone, no private company alone can manage. It requires an absolutely holistic approach. So, I'm delighted that we have in the room with us a very, very strong cross section of the actors needed in order to solve these problems. At the institute, we said there has to be a strong strategy to address these in the on-line world. Moderation of content. Regulation, is absolute focus for many governments and has been to date.
It's important to note, the content notice, the focus of removal of content that's been Alt the heart of government initiatives in the counterterrorism space as well as to some extent more recently in the hate speech space is interesting and important. But it raises a whole range of important challenges and questions that we believe need to be taken onboard. Not least the fact that content removal and the governance of content removal can never quite be the full answer to the story which everyone in this room would know. The largest focus are the four big companies, three, four major companies. It hasn't taken into account the wider ecosystem challenges that we face in terms of hate speech. As we see moderation and controls imposed more and more, we have seen an out migration of these problems on to smaller platforms, an entire ecosystem of companies that are now being monopolized by some of the hate groups, but also an entire section, a sector being developed in order to respond to those limitations. What we call the Alt-tech space. So, technology set up in order to obviate.
There's an evolving landscape of these extremist groups. Difficult to keep up to date. Here comes the need for expertise and for information that, again, we require a space for. But, again, the gray area of content, that problem represents two other important approaches. Those are the two we'll be focusing on here today. That is essentially how we compete. How a civil society mobilized to compete, how do we create a better playing field for the civil society to compete with the bad actors on the on-line space.
So, we'll look at the first place at the sorts of collaborations that are needed in order to make that competition effective. Then we look at education and the wider, longer term challenge of inoculation. How do we get young people to understand what it is to operate in and be resilient to these challenges.
So, we have two parts of today's conversation -- the first on this notion of civic collaboration with other sectors for effect. The structure of the conversation will be the following. Two projects will tell us a little bit about their experiences, work in that space. And then we'll have a panel, a wonderful very illustrious panel speak to those projects and to the approaches presented by those projects. I hope we can open up the conversation to the floor.
So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce a wonderful person, a very, very close friend of our organization, Guillaume Buffet, Vice President of renaissance -- a fantastic organization in France. When we found them, we felt we sort of found our professional twin in France. Doing extremely important work. Over to you. We look forward to hearing about your work.
>> GUILLAUME BUFFET: Good morning, everybody. As you may hear, there's French people on stage. I come to hide mine -- (indiscernible) sorry. I want you to thank Jennifer the two people from renaissance numeric who have organized, it took four or five months to organize that. Congratulations to you. Fantastic job. Okay? So, I'm here to talk about seriously yesterday afternoon, the leaders of the 85 countries attending the Paris Peace Forum would fail in writing the Universal declaration of human rights in 2018. I've been quite impressed by this fact. A few minutes before, spotted the comeback of racism, anti-Semitism, during his welcome speech.
But -- there is always a but. But McCann and Gutierrez both tried yesterday to uphold hope. First of all, they asked for for a continuous flow of communication between us, civil society, and policy makers they're not the one and only able to find solutions.
Secondly, Mr. Gutierrez said that technologies are a major line to build tomorrow's walls. And third, this is always an option. Assume and only assume as one is courageous enough to take the first steps toward the order. This was last two years. We all face hate speech in our everyday lives. Generally, but from professional haters, I would say.
I imagine all of you in your social network, private pages, you have faced issues linked to haters. You know what I mean? Post from our friend oh for instance the fact -- and this is not my proposal. I'll explain that afterwards, that all of the Uber drivers come from the same suburbs. How can they afford such cars? You see what I mean? You see what I mean. That's a horrible situation.
With a very, very close friend from my wife. I could have -- (indiscernible) from my internet or insulted him on-line. I did not. Instead, I used seriously. Seriously is a digital platform to help people learn how to -- but it is not dedicated to that purpose. Of course, as soon as you identify the purpose, it's important to notify them. It's not our purpose. We're just educated to -- (indiscernible) the everyday on-line hate. Response sometimes like major fires. There's seven steps before the dead end of an on-line normal possible dialogue.
So, we've created seriously to offer an alternative to hate speech on the internet and social network. Seriously is both a method and a complete speech too.
Normally, I would like to show you a demo but the video doesn't work. Is that right? The video doesn't work? It's working? Oh, it doesn't work. So if you've got a smartphone, you can use your smartphone and go on the internet and you can type seriously.ong.
As soon as you are on that platform, you should see how to use it. The -- the demo should show that -- one more time, your proper social network, what you faced was hate speech. You go to seriously, and you have access to a fact checking session with very precise formation with the approachable sources organize ed -- I was supposed to show you contents on the platform. But if you want to have a look, you can type on -- see the information. It's in French for now. We'll talk about that until later on.
As soon as you identify the facts, that are -- (indiscernible) you can go to the second side, the second part, and discover advice from negotiation experts. We have selected all around the world that helps you create -- restore dialogue. We discuss with negotiators what they find against all takers, sorry. The idea is not to see if he's stupid or not. It is to create a dialogue and this is a key point for us.
The third part of seriously with thanks to our partners, different kinds of media resources from very serious partners, others using humor, etc.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: So over to you, Tonei.
>> Hi, so my presentation was all videos. Thanks, UNESCO. We might have had that. It's a huge amount of hope from UNESCO in our digital culture. We can open up as a platitude with the conference. As much as the world is a very complicated place and becoming increasingly complicated. And I think the question that we're grappling with today is how do we respond to that complexity if you want to live a real scalable and sustainable social change in complexity comes out in two areas, a lot of central forces, seeing a huge amount of convergence in centralization, and huge amount of fragmentation. And that leaves us few ways of responding either from the bottom up or the top up. That's the conversation that we could be having in this room here. We can work all around the world. A huge convergence of life styles but we have amassed fragmentation of the more fiercely and we have a few platforms that give us the access to the entirety of the world's information and the ability to communicate, no longer have a single public discourse, we have many polarizing arguments and discourses. So, in this sort of space, we haven't gotten a model on how to work together, but the civil society brands together to achieve social change and that's because we have a stark model of how people interact, a model where we see things in terms of simple cause and effect.
For example, in a country in space, we get stuck talking about narratives and counter-narratives. Conceptualize the human beings on the table. One could be a little to the right or to the left and change the way they think. The way people think, the way they feel, the way they behave is determined by the relationships and determine the social networks they find themselves in and they don't bring the insights to bear. So I think you've got some videos now. We can help bring together civil societies in government to bring together the complicated issues.
A couple of examples of how that's affected. So, some examples of the brands and companies and governments coming together. Next slide.
The model for this. The first is in this complicated environment, the first it's meant to do is help people to capitalize change in the grassroots level to talk about collaborations and what civil society could and should do. It's really about finding people who are closest to the issues and who can actually start to make some movements there, so we spend a huge amount of time using a digital and offline tools to understand who's going to impact an issue and how they might think, feel, and act the way they do. The second step is to give the people the tools they need to make the change in the grassroots level. Massive change, could be small. It could be changing something in a small community group. You might be changing the relationships in the family. People need every tool at their disposal. They need resources, technology, content because they're often facing hostile actors be it states, extremist groups, hate speech who are well equipped. It's not a level playing field. It's people fighting a struggle out there against sophisticated adversaries.
The last we're talking about is how can we take these people making small change and connect it to ecosystems, the governments, the NGOs, looking at the private sector, the big brands, so we can take the small pieces of change and allow policy makers, regulators, security forces, whatever it may be to take advantage of the memory once to achieve change of scale. So next slide.
So, one little example. Hate speech, a lot happening in the occupied territories in Ukraine. What are some of the big issues that are driving the debates, everything from on-line polling and focus groups to social media analytics to what are the dividing issues.
Next slide, we're trying to look at who are the people who are responding to those issues? How do they segment. Define them by their attitudes and behaviors? Then try to understand who the people are. What do they care about? What are they interested in. So, this situation you might be looking at the interest on Facebook or the kind of platform where you're public. That's your publicly promoted face. That's the next slide. Be uh then you may look at their key words and search terms and understand who their private interior lives are.
So, once you start to look at those groups of people, you can start to see who's been influential. The young people who are engaged in far right discourses and very anti-European discourses in the Ukraine, the only way to reach them is through on-line influences. So, people working on social media platforms not really popular. So, here's the way we're starting to equip some of the actors to take the challenge of hate speech in the region. There's no sound. I'll give you a 30-second rundown. They occupy eastern Ukraine and they're having a comedy video of the western side of Ukraine trying to guess each other's slang. Simple piece of content, taking words from their childhood and put it together later on.
What's great about this content is it quickly generated 400,000 views from the eastern Ukraine, but we helped to hook up the western Ukraine influences with audiences in the occupied territories, instead of someone thinking about it, did see this content, could we start to construct a new relationship in the area?
Next slide, please? Oh, there we go. Some stats. Let's carry on through that. Next slide. The interesting part then is how do we scale that. We'll build together a network of around 100 influences stretching from central Asia to western Europe. You can push back against disinformation, hate speech, but we'll do it to the authenticity and the closeness to their audiences. One small example where you build up, identify the people who are close to the issue, the skills, the production capabilities to do something on a smaller level and scale it up to what we need on the networks. We connect them up with a range of universities, new sites and TV stations so they can start to push their message in to a much broader public discourse. One small example from a different part of the world. Can you press play on this? Cheers? I don't think you can see the subtitles. So, we'll skip over this video. We'll just leave it blank.
So, this guy is a guy from Mosul. And he's talking about his experience when the -- when the liberation was happening. He said he was in Mosul and other people were in his house. He was talking about a soldier who brought some medicine with his family and he came with a bag of oranges and that moment of transformation where they met each other with the bag of oranges and medicine and what it did for his life. We found this guy, he had a huge amount of connections and within Mosul and he paid for the funerals of around 20 Shia Muslims from the south who were part of the Shia mobilizing militias, he paid for the funerals as part of the effort there. A very powerful and personal connection.
He was transforming his community at a local level. We want to put that in the national reconciliation discourse. So, he ended up with ten of the biggest on-line sites in Iraq to produce content. His story went viral across the country and managed to get the prime minister and the minister of defense to come and talk about this story and now he's been cited as a champion in the reconciliation process and the Sunni men who have been held in detention camps over a large period there.
Another example of the process of looking to the grassroots, equipping them with skills, resource, and power and to have persistence of change is one way we can start to respond to an ever more complex world, thanks.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: Thank you. A tangible process of what it could look like out of the process of doing this work, which is critical. I'm sure there'll be questions. They'll come to that later. I think it's quite useful for people, especially with a big NGO contingent to walk through maybe the tools you use in each of those stages, especially with some of the research that you do around audience segmentation if I'm understanding your targets.
We have an amazing panel. We're going to speak to the content and bring to the table your own experiences on the question of collaborations in order to address hate speech. He's been doing important work around safety and dignity in a rising, dangerous hate speech in Kenya. Just a few minutes to speak to what you've heard and needed in this space.
>> Thank you very much. So, I want to start with the internet is used by people. And what is mentioned is when you connect people, you're able to have a lot more power. So just to give it context, work for Amnesty International. And we're looking at as young people you vent your frustrations on-line and social media. And therefore we go into that space to try to discuss human rights with this, it became toxic for them to discuss anything for you if you're going to do it on-line. So, part of the collaborative aspect of the walk is to focused on the internet space but on human rights identification and there's over context with it. Even though we're not in the human rights access, we still engage and make sure we have assisted this for people to interact. Just to speak to -- the question I had was on collaborative operatives, I think the internet has to have a collaborative form of solutions because the internet is on one side, very good, but also has some of the issues like we're discussing today, hate speech, and needs a collaborative solution. It would be multi-disciplinary, culture, most of the people happen to go through the hate speech online hand not necessarily the same context. What we've been able to do is get other actors and key players. For example, in Kenya, we have the Kenyan school of internet governance which I'm going through. Which gives me a good idea of how digital rights means for people and how they can get -- on-line and also offline. Thank you.
>> You started to carve out in a way a framework for internet governance within the context of looking at the ways you create Federate workings of different sectors, disciplines to come to the table. Different logistic things, communities to come to the table. Is there a frame work that works in Kenya to address some of the problems of hate speech is that such a semi on formalized structure in place?
>> Not informalized structure at the moment. The community networks where they call themselves the community justice centers. So, what you have as justice centers, a group of young people to come together to discuss issues about their community. The only way we're able to manage to get to the community and discus issues on hate speech is build the justice centers and build the capacity on what hate speech means and develop a theory in terms of what the lord provides in terms of the constitutional device and what the internet space could be for you.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: Really interesting. Thank you so much, I'm going to ask Tonei. He's the collaborator of the dangerous speech in the U.S. Tell us, at what point do you think hate speech becomes dangerous and what do you think is missing concerning that pivotal point?
>> TONEI GLAVINIC: Sure. At the dangerous speech down fashion, we discussed dangerous speech. We looked at five elements of a speech act in context. The message itself, what's being communicated. Who's the speaker? Who is the audience whether it's the audience that the speaker intended to reach or the one intended to be reached by the message. What is the local and historical con sense that the speech has happened in the internet is a very important part of that. We drive the distinction and use the term dangerous speech instead of hate speeches -- speech is a broad term it's oh a broad category and there's little consensus of what is hate speech. One person or government's hate speech could be another person's legally protected opinions. And often the idea of hate speech is misused in ways that are harmful to democracy. Because of that, we talked about how regulation is not enough to address the problems. We need to find ive solutions. Part of that is regulation typically involves taking down speech inform it's been posted or publicized. There's only so much you can do. Often, the hard move of speech has been done. It likely has already reached hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. And taking down speech doesn't do much to change the behavior of the person or the organization that's putting it out. In some cases, it also takes that content away from researchers and law enforcement for better understanding what's happening in a certain situation.
For the last couple of year, we've looked at strategies responding to hate red and dangerous speeds that individuals and organizations are using projects like the ones we heard from today that scale much better than take-down because anyone can do it. Projects that can be proactive and we hope are better at creating behavioral change. We're not sure yet, but that's something we're studying.
>> SASHA HAVILECK: Do you have any examples of the types of -- that was really interesting to have.
>> Some of the papers we've been studying and hope to publish hopefully before the end of the year, counter-speech is a significant category of approaches which falls to some type of counter-speech. They're looking to indicate or dangerous conduct. Why it's problematic so we're trying to shame the speaker to apologizing or taking down content making it clear that what they're saying is not the norms of the community they're speaking into. Another approach is amplification. Delivered to a specific community and blowing it up sometimes literally on billboards, for example, as one project in Brazil did to make the community face what is a larger community face what's being said, what's happening, and creating an opportunity to have a conversation about that in a bigger context.
And another one that's been really interesting to us is projects that seek to support the targets and victims of on-line harassment or hatred, heart mob which allow third parties to step in and stand between a harasser and their targets. By responding to speech on-line, cataloging it, reporting it to platforms, formal processes to help individuals targeted by harmful be speech on-line respond to it in ways that don't rely on them having the energy to respond to a deluge of harmful speech.
>> SASHA HAVILCEK: Thank you so much. It's really helpful. I'm going to pass it now to Denis. Sorry. The communication specialist working in Sri Lanka but also covering some of the regional challenges of hate speech. And I know that you were talking -- I know you were talking to me about the potential negative side effects in the more repressed environments of the removal of content, an interesting approach. What can work?
>> Thank you, I think just as the Greek elaboration is important, the local context is equally important. That's the point that I wanted to make. Particularly my own country of Sri Lanka, 21 million people, a third now on-line, a post-conflict society, a civil war nearly a decade ago. So, we are very polarized society -- polarized along political, ethnic, and religious lines. So, there has always been hate speech in our society but the proliferation of social media has turbo charged the dissemination of the hate speech. So, we know that the parades are intensely and repeatedly. Civil society responds. How do they respond? They're doing various things to promote harmony on line, responsible social media use, and also exploring strategies for counter-speech. We draw inspiration from the campaign like social media users rallied together and had a counter-speech program using managing AI. We're doing similar efforts and campaigns.
What is also happening is that civil society is engaging platforms of global -- the large platforms like Facebook. Because one of the failures particularly for local languages like mine and many languages that the platforms do not have the capacity to adequately monitor and ensure Clines with their own community standards. Because they lack the language capability, they lack the local context. And so civil society, several of us, both NGOs the civic minded tech companies have come together. And engaged platform because in my country, trying to step up the content both locally as realized on the part of Facebook. We realize they simply don't understand and will err on the side of caution and take down legitimate Exon tent. Or they let explosive hate speech let it continue because they don't realize that it's actually violating their own standard. So, things like that.
And the legal side we are also trying to ask the government not to introduce anymore regulations. We have enough laws and regulation. The problem has been enforcement. So, we don't want criminalization of hate speech. And in that -- in the guise of doing that, cracking down on legitimate political criticism and that is a real danger in democracies like ours.
>> SASHA HAVILCEK: Thank you so much. It's really important. You raised one of the roles that civil society organizations can play. Not with just the education but also the government and 10% of kids as well. Providing contests and advocating for the moderation of content in a way that's contextual to the content.
You were at the heart of dealing with requests from government, requests from civil society. It's quite interesting to hear from you, Alexandra Walden is public policy and government relations advisor at Google based out of the U.S. and at the heart of some of the challenges facing the megacompanies in addressing hate. Terrorism, all of the threats on-line. How do you see the relationship between the companies and these other stakeholders? What kind of collaboration do you need in order to address these Bobs. What would you see more of, how much do you think you need to see less of? How do you think it should work? Upscale?
>> Thank you. I want to pick up a few of the threats that he mentioned. At YouTube, we're troubled with the world and that's why we have policies in place to make sure we're removing content that violates the global policies.
That's one of the core ways that we deal with the issues on the platform. Sasha talked about this at the beginning. It's an important piece. But it's not a solution to the problem. So there is speech that's dangerous. We have a process to eliminate that speech across the platform.
For those policies, we have flagging systems so members of the community can flag those that violate our policy and we move under local law. That means we're making sure that in a local context, we're working with local partners to understand what hate speech looks like in that jurisdiction and making sure we're expecting local law. And globally removing across the family where things violate our policies.
That's one piece of it. We recognize we need government and civil society at the table with us as we're dealing with the issues so we can be part of the solution. And that we're dealing with experts as part of that process. Some of the ways we're doing that are things like the EU hate speech code of conduct where we've engaged with the government and civil society through the process that includes transparency so all of the actors can understand what our processes look like. And I think it's been eye opening for everyone who's been engaged in it. That's one example, one model that we looked at.
>> But we also have things like our five-year program where with work with experts around the world who help to educate us as a company what it looks like in a particular local context. We make sure we're working with folks on the ground because we realize we might not have the specific context in each case. So, we do that and with all sorts of organizations. Lastly, I wanted to hit on creators for change that relates back to some of the programs that were highlighted later on. Craters for change is the proactive way we're dealing across the platform with narrative.
So, we can move content that's bad, but ultimately, that content represents ideas that exist in the world. And so how do we change the narratives around hate and extremism and xenophobia? We do that through partnering with creators on our platform, really harnessing the strength and value of what our platform is and resources the creators to make sure they can use their voice on our platform to distribute positive messages. To share information. It's about story telling. To make sure people with share their stories directly and authentically across the platform. Partnership with government and with the whole society to make sure we're doing everything we can in the private sector to create a safe space on their platform.
>> Creators for change, in a way, is what you where are talking about, Louis, in terms of creating networks these are young, very cool, influential individuals who reached many different demographics. And I think if they are empowered in the right way, potentially, disproportionately impactful on the challenges. We had the challenge of working with the creators for change program to deliver educational content. Digital educational content to kids in UK and across Europe. They're more than likely to be interested in their peers than me or you at this stage. So really interesting ways in which to mobilize both content creativity, but also influence networks.
So, some of these ideas, now, and I think we've covered a number of issues. I want to spark public debate. I would like to hear from you any questions or comments we might have. If we think about collaboration, is there something we need to think about creating a framework for? Does every country need the multi- stake holder, internet, governance forum. Do we need a space where civil society comes together with the companies, with government? How -- what would that look like without it becoming unified, too stodgy to make a difference. How would that work? Just a challenge, I suppose, to the audience. How do we do collaboration that can be impactful? Any questions?
there's a gentleman in the back, one here. If I can ask you to stay your name and organization before you speak?
>> I work on a website with fact checks. Answer prejudices.com. It's in French. So, this project is to me, I think behind hate speech and dangerous speech, there are prejudices and misconceptions. And ignorance. So, I think this is at the root. So, I think we would need -- I would like to ask your opinion about that. I think we'll also need to work on prejudices, on various subjects. And also -- subjects. And to kind of push people to go on-line, go on public spaces, go on comments and websites. New sites and go on social network and counter-speech. So, for me, what I would like to ask is do you think we could start a campaign to push people to take back the internet and counter hate speech together? So that's -- yeah. In a's my question.
>> A great question. How do we mobilize that? After all, we just need to mobilize a smile proportion of the majority and we'd have them, we'd outdo them, I'm going to bring it back to the panel. If I can take one second first yes, sir, over here.
>> My name is -- I'm the project coordinator. I'm blessed to be in your midst today. But I would like to share a point with you concerning hate speech.
When we look at speech in general, I've been working now for decades on the issue of hate speech. I discover so many things. Firstly, every sector are victims of hate speech. Every sector is a victim. I now discovered one thing we can work on in general. Most especially on the internet. Hate speech can come in various ways. It depends on how. It depends on how we work on the information we receive.
In my operation, I see a bleaker trend. I'm sorry to look at the bleaker trend today, it can enlighten us a little bit. I'm sorry. It says, let your word always be gracious. Seasoned with salt, so that you will know to -- your answer is present. That's what the Bible says in Colossians 4:6.
Many things are happening in the world of today. This much of our reasoning or false information. A lot of things that are not real. But because -- that are not real. A lot of information are not real. But then instead of working on the information we had, the speech would come on the internet. So, in order to solve the problem, we need to work on how we receive the information? How do we react to the information. So that the word can be at peace in general. I'm tired to take much of your time, but most important things we need to work on is the way we react to the speech we've had in the public in general. Thank you.
>> SASHA KAVLICEK: Thank you so much for these questions. I'm going to pass them to the floor now. Perhaps we can get responses from two or three of their panels. Anyone like though take up the first question, campaign to take back the internet?
>> I mean, I can only agree. In my own society is how very ordinary reasonable housewives, school children, grandmas and grandpas have been radicalized when they go on-line, especially social media. I can contend they critically consume because it panders to existing prejudices. You're very, very right. And it invokes the idea of an enemy, a perceived enemy or perceived threats. So I think it appears deep inside of us to our brain that many of us have suppressed with culture and civilization. So that we don't underrate the challenge we face.
It's as fundamental of appealing to the reptile brain within us. How do we do that? By identifying and understanding the prejudices and systematically through education, through culture, through discussion and debate, trying to deal with the prejudices. Unpack them and not dismiss but to engage in difficult conversations. I this this is, I think, a book on-line, the prejudices are turning normal human being us of bundles of prejudice and suspicion. We have a lot of work to do.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: Louis, please?
>> The opportunities to do public campaigning around hate speech. I suppose the risk is you entrench views. So, what we know is if you tell someone that they believe something deeply, they're wrong. They believe it more. We have 40 years, 50 years of psychological evidence in every single sector of life. When it comes to extremism or hate speech, we're happy to put that aside and say we just need to help someone understand the reality. That's not how human beings work.
Having said that, we cannot enter into a he said-she said culture war. But there are things that people can do so there are ways to create the norms within communities on-line. So, all of the social sanctions that you can incentivize feel more shame into doing something. So perhaps you're not trying to convince them they're wrong. Not trying to change the prejudice or misconception. You're trying to limit the behavior by saying it's socially unacceptable in the certain she is the of people. Then you have a they'll start to shift in a longer period. For that, we have to work much, much closer to the people in designing those. We need to worry about xenophobia or racism or hate peach on line, are you going to work with the rights in America? Are you going to be working with a solution or work with people they already trust? And I think the danger is we set up an argumentative discourse again. Yes, but we've got to be prepared to be more agnostic about the people we work with and the objectives of the campaign.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: I think important points here. Fact checking is important. But we see that myth busting tends to fall on deaf ears, it's a very difficult thing to do well. And I think that we're beyond information warfare, I think we are in narrative warfare. Ultimately that's sort of focused on the other dynamic which is I think where we see the strength of hate on-line as in creating the dynamics of a very polarized us and them in and out group which I agree with you, appeals to something very fundamental in the human being and our psyche and it is in confusing that binary notion, the black and white notion of us and them that the challenge resides and the complexity as you said earlier, Louis, is everything. How do we bring back complexity into the picture. Because otherwise, I think our counter-speech, our counter-narrative at work can, in fact, be deeply counterproductive and we've done a lot of work to evaluate the impact of counter-speech. And I think it's important to note that while it always feels like it's a positive thing, it can, in fact, be extremely pernicious and negative and we need to be careful and clear about what it is that works and what doesn't work in counterspeech and be systematic in our evaluation and in sharing that with the wider sector something that I hope we can do more. But I think this brings us nicely into the next part of our session which is on education. Sort of us and them dynamic. How do we inoculate that, next in ratio from those prejudices and falling in to us and them narratives, from falling in to that in the on-line world in particular where that tends to be hypercharged as you said earlier. We have two speakers who are going to talk to us quickly about project s and going to ask Christina to come and join us. The Vice President of the youth for change in Romania and has been leading on a project called the on-line initiative. We have the privilege of working together on a digital citizenship education program.
>> Thank you, Sasha, for introducing me. Hello. I'm Cristiana and I'm representing the group of European change NBO. Back in 2010 in Bucharest, Romania and acting at the local, national, and international level. The main aim is to promote human rights in our communities. And today I would like to present you two of the approaches that our NGO will promote. One of them is the digitalization education that we will do by joining the young leaders, an initiative for strategic dialogue this is the education project to allow young people through citizenship, critical thinking, and maybe interest to become tomorrow's digital leaders.
The project was creating for young people for the skills they need to be safe, powerful, and efficient in the on-line sector. The final phase implemented in three-countries, Romania, Italy, and Sweden. Today I would like to share with you some of the results of the initiative in Romania when we implemented the -- in the high school in the Romanian cities.
In Romania, it's to be great success, not only for the participants, but also for the organizers. And I would like to share these results based on some approaches that we use from different perspectives from a student's perspective, from teachers, and also from the parents' point of view.
First, from a student's perspective, bringing the education in a formal context was very appreciated by them. Participants were enthusiastic and show their interest in having this kind of formal workshops on digital and organized at least one time per semester so they can keep in touch with the latest digital a trends and also to learn how to protect themselves to the on-line -- (indiscernible)
Also, the overall results showed 95% increase in confidence. That they understand what the problems are. Next slide, please? Parents also had a very good level in this initiative. Stating that before this event, they were not fully aware of the danger that their children can be exposed to when being on-line. The overall results show a 56% increase in parent confidence they know how and why to flag social media content. Next slide, please. Teachers tend to be very open in an approach and in the workshop format and those who show the interest in more views so they can improve their skills and delivering content for students so they can offer assistance for high schoolers. At the conclusion, we think that increasing digital education would really improve the level of understanding of what the on-line sector means. And also, it can help and have a huge impact in the high school development. Meanwhile, empowering our teachers with this so they can deliver content to the student could be one of the best approaches to the results we have in -- (indiscernible) in the second part of my speech, I would also like to present another initiative of an organization, if you can change the slide, please? It's about the on-line project, strategic partnership that is organized to give seven other organizations from the European union. The project is aiming to empower the digitization NGO human rights. And in this method, we ran a survey. Next slide. We ran a survey in the participating countries as we wanted to see what challenges do youth workers face in their -- in their various activities.
As you can see in the graphic on the screen that there are still many needs that have to be tackled in the on-line sector when talking about the nongovernmental organization.
From our point of view, in the changing environment might discourage your people to become digital. Next slide. Important to mention is a survey that ran world-wide that showed an important set regarding the encryption of data that is used by younger governmental organizations and as you can see, half of the responding organizations are using encryption technologies to protect their data in the on-line field and this would definitely spread the needle creating awareness in the protection in the NGO sector. I would like to have open questions to the audience, protecting our identity is something we should forget. But should we? Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Definitely say no. Let's not forget that. I'm totally paranoid. Comes with the job.
Now, if I may, we are going to invite now our second speaker. From the association here in France. Really interesting work. She's going to talk to us about an interesting project, the real identity of cats, which is a fantastic title. But it's really looking at methods used by conspiracy theorists. It's a huge challenge in the mobilization of hate. And, of course, mounting every day on line.
>> Thank you for inviting me today. Just to give you a bit of a context of how the project has been developed. I work for a nonprofit organization based in Paris and dedicated to contemporary images. We are an exhibition place, a publication, and reflective place, and an educational place. And it's within our educational programs that we have to work with students to create this.
So, for ten years now, we are conducting visual literacy programs working with 2,000 young people every year, mainly from priority education areas, and the goal is to make them understand the words through images and develop the critical thinking.
So, in our programs, we obey three main lines. This is our educational approach. Which is first? The images to make students understand that there are different types of images. Artistic images, archived images that obey different usages. Second, to make them experience the chain of production of these images, the way the image is produced. The way it's broadcasted, then, the way it's received can influence the way you read it. Third is the creation of a collective project. So, we work with 50 artists per year with the students to create a film and a newspaper or a book. So, I would like to show -- (indiscernible) that the film. So unfortunately, I don't have the time to present it to you. But I invite you to see it on the internet. The film made, the real identity of guest, buzz made by students from the suburbs of Paris, and it happened in a specific time because it was in 2015, after -- and a lot of teachers with whom we were working with told us that their speech, their voice was called into question by the students who -- resources are available -- of information and mainly, especially, fake news.
So, they decided to work on this idea of the concept of fake news. And they made this film. So, what it is about -- well, the cats dominate the world if you didn't know it yet. And the first four minutes of the movie is the theory. And the last four minutes is the methodology they used. We followed the three main lines I presented before. And then for ten hours, they analyzed different articles, different websites, different images, they compare it to the one that was from the conspiracy website, the one that would repress information. They're searching for information. How to search -- and then for ten hours, they created this film. So, what is the methodology?
So, as I said, the first part was the construction of this theory. And the second part was the deconstruction of it. So, you would see on the second part, the 10 ingredients to make a good conspiracy video. That is to say, for example, to choose a good structure with historical events and then go to emotions, to choose -- to carry music. To choose a robotic voice that would read the story. That's one of their own. To choose to put some real facts, some under-refined facts, and so, false facts.
And what happened? What happened then? That's the interesting part. The students decided to broadcast it, the first part only first on the internet to see what kind of website would use it, display it. And then they noticed that mainly conspiracy websites they had to -- they found before would use it. And also, they wanted to see if they could influence their friends because most believed it was a real conspiracy video. It's on the internet, it's used as an educational school within schools in France. I would like to conclude with a spotlight on this platform which is -- which -- (indiscernible) 10 years of experience within our programs. So, it's a -- it's a -- (indiscernible) platform, digital platform. That goal is to make young people understand how the images works, again, and to train them to become active and conscious of the dresses to become better citizens, thank you very much.
>> Fantastic. The process of creating the problem is an interesting way to get people to understand what they're looking at and what might be coming at them. I would be interested in hearing from my panel but also from opening the floor. I'm cognizant of the fact we started late. We'll mix it up. I wanted to put it out there. Digital education takes many forms but I think it's important to have something of a framework to it. I think there's a pyramid of digital education that we need to be aware of. The baseline, general safety. Everything from pass words to sharing and phishing, most is at that level.
The second here is digital resilience. So, it would be something around critical thinking capabilities, social behaviors on-line, peer safeguarding. More on the on-line space. What's allowed, what's not. So really about starting to create safe and active participation on-line and communities on-line.
I think the top tier, and there's some work in that direction, the top tier is what when he would call sort of digital democracy, which is really activists, it's how do we create social media activism, community engagement in digital democracy. Our lives are being lived out on-line. Our social, political, associative lives, it's extraordinary that in this day and age, and I say this mainly because we are now you know in this great house and being hosted here by UNESCO, my plea would be I'd be interested in your thoughts, how do we start to Universalize digital citizenship. Education at a time when our lives are lived out in that space. This doesn't exist. So, while these wonderful projects are happening, they're happening in a very small way still in terms of the reach that they have.
We're being hacked. It'd be so exciting if we were just hacked. The big internet companies have an extremely important role to play here. But in assisting the development of digital education programming which they are doing and we've had the privilege of working with Google on be internet. The broom on young digital leaders, again, reaching numbers of people in the UK, up to 70,000 kids this year. Nonetheless, that's a drop in the ocean. I think here is where collaboration comes into play. How do we advocate for governments to take citizenship education. What is the role for us collaboratively to achieve that goal. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. I'll pass it to my Pam and then out to the floor.
>> Yeah, I can start. I wanted to quickly just highlight the be internet citizens. We have benefitted from working closely with ISD on b that project and it's something that we've launched throughout the UK and it's interesting to us in a broader sort of jurisdictions across Europe and we also piloted something similar in the U.S. where we're similarly doing work in middle schools and high schools. With the set of curriculum that we developed at the university. So, we are sending a lot of resource s trying to contribute to the ecosystem to make sure that when people are going on-line they're going on-line with the skills to evaluate the content they're looking at. That's one piece I wanted to make sure I highlighted quickly.
>> I think -- I think whether it's analog or digital, the core values of citizenship are the same. And as societies become more digital, we have a lot of unfinished work in the analog era. We haven't built enough civic consciousness and citizenship skills whether or not we got digital. Let's begin from the conferences values. Participation, and negotiating and investigating multiple 6 perspectives and respecting when a decision has been reached. And accommodating the majorities and all that. And more. The values I think are fundamental and Universal. We haven't in many of our societies done enough to build that conscience. We have a lot of work to do. And when you go on digital, there are tools, and you can use them to reach and engage more. More individuals or activity. That's the digital dividend we can perhaps tap into. And then the other more utilitarian things like how can an on-line experience be safe and all that comes next.
But the core function is how do we have respectful engagement and participation? And this -- there's no short cut. We have to go back to the first principles, I think.
>> Yes, I couldn't agree more. But, yes, over to you.
>> I would say that we are -- I would say that we're citizens in a digital age, which is nothing -- it's the same. And we are here in this ROM, maybe most of the people who live in this planet consider there are members of the united citizens' organization.
But, they received the tools of democracy but never learned how to use this tool. And the tools become weapons and honestly, we won't be able to face if we are not able, each of us, to teach our children how to use this tool because every minute we present ourselves as if you -- we wanted you to be elected by your peers on social networks. We vote every second when we like something and we use this tool. So, with have to. And there's no solution and as psalm Sid this morning, education for all of the -- of all of the inhabitants is the first time in history that the youngest teach the others. This is a major shift for our human beings. And we have to show that and this is a fantastic example. It's very practical education. It's what we tried to do. And I consider that we have to grow on that path and there's still -- back to you, of course.
>> Yeah, so one project we're excited about is we spent the last couple of years studying on-line responses to hatred and we've just started the process of writing a manual for counter speakers based on ethnic graphic research of people doing counter spate pall over the world. Starting from how do you define what does success look like, what does effectiveness look like like how do you go on-line and intentionally engage with people who are producing harmful content while protecting yourself and keeping yourself safe. How do you tailor your responses? How do you decide when and how to engage with people. How do you recruit others. How can you work with other people and support each other. That's the very early stages, we wrote the outline of the table of contents a week ago. We're hoping to publish that sometime next year.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: That's very exciting.
>> I would like to agree with what was said in terms of starting from the analog bit of it. And basically, what this means that in -- basically the analog setting would be for your elders, when to speak, what to say, be very respectful. The problem is that does not reflect in some of the compositions we have digitally. So you have situations where, in Kenya, for example, since we're very political and we have so many political parties and opinions, people tend to take the bite on social media. In most instances, this led to people, you know, small groups of gangs being credited on-line which reflects in the ability to fight.
The approach we're taking on this is since hate speech touches about six constitutional human rights in our constitution, we're doing human rights education and in the sense of education. Instead of just education, it becomes education that needs you to act.
So, we have special guest dissenters within Nairobi and within the country. So, these are not representative of the communities we work with. We might train or educate about 10 of them and advise them towards becoming ambassadors on-line and being able to do things like spot checking and making sure that the compositions they have on-line are very, you know, credible and different in terms of people relating to each other.
The other aspect of things we also got into interact with is a lot of what people talk about on-line is based on what they see in the environment. Therefore, walking in informal settlements, most of the legislation you have that's being shared on-line doesn't happen in the upper class. It's usually in the lower classes. It takes us, for example, to recite and understand what are some of the issue s they're facing. And if you tackle those issues, it’s easier for them to become constructive on-line.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: I'm cognizant. We have a question over there. Two questions an it the back here. If I could -- the lady over there. Yeah?
>> My name is -- I'm working for the high center for human rights.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: Sorry. Could you speak a little closer to the mic?
>> I would like to know how can we differentiate between the hate speech and the freedom of expression -- or freedom of speech. I'm working on a project on this topic. But when we are talking to the people who are spreading the hate speech over the internet, the -- they are saying that this is like my opinion and I would like to share it. I'm using they don't know they're using this unconsciously, they don't know that their opinion or whatever they are posting is considered as hate speech. Show I need tips to know when to consider this as hate speech when it's like freedom of expression.
>> SASHA HAVLICEK: I'm being told we're evicted from the room. One last question and we're going to have to be done.
>> Hi (indiscernible) from Nigeria. I was about to say. What I was going to say is it's good to collaborate with governments and then bring it together and CSOs -- and one of the things that I believe we should consider is the fact that if government can go overboard in what it defines as -- speech, when collaborated it should be one of the focused issues how do you differentiate between freedom of expression and freedom of opinion. Because I can tell you what's being done in Nigeria is that they pick a journalist -- the security and then putting them behind detention and stating that the particular information is defined as hate speech. And to me, governments have been able to justify such is by the use of the anti-terrorism law which I believe is mostly used around the world today.
So, I think we should always put this as the purpose. Thank you.
>> Thank you so much. Two quick responses. Can I ask you to take that on --
>> Can I answer the first question? It's an interesting question. In fact, earlier on, we alluded to the difficulty of defining hate speech. Freedom of expression includes the right to express unpopular ideas that may shock, that may offend or disturb certain listeners. And we need to safeguard that right. As Salman Rushdie said, without the freedom to offend, the freedom of expression ceases to exist. The challenge is in legal terms to keep the definitions as narrow and tight as possible. So as to allow the broadest range of dissent, passionate debate, without that being criminalized. Legally, the definitions that are favored in seat is more specific insight. So, it's considered hate speech. We can have a conversation about it after this session, thanks.
>> I would just like to say that the question is very, very important. You can -- you can't define -- (indiscernible) as it's a personal feeling. So, the way we worked at seriously is to work on the feeling of people just to say -- you have a conversation on-line. So, our topic is not to define what is legally hate speech or not. It's to -- for individuals.
>> I want to thank everybody. It's been an interesting panel. And just a last note because I think what we've seen here is the range of activity that civil society can and should and must be involved in in responding to the challenge of hate speech. From advocacy, which I think is important, policy advocacy, not just in relation to government, but also in relation to the companies. We talked about the role in terms of providing expertise, deep understanding, contextual political and social understanding this, desperately needed. We talked about the education function, educating not just young people but society at large. Also, educating policy makers and how they go about approaching these problems from a legislative standpoint. We talked about speech, counterspeech, and the need to get that right. We talked about being able to empower counterspeakers with the right sets of tools. Networks and influences responded to amplified engages in line and offline. And it's created a system for reporting. There's a whole range of important activity desperately needed in this space. And I would we desperate ly need to have our spots. We'll invite you we have resources, education resources available for educators, or, in fact, manuals for counterspeech, manuals for evaluating counterspeech that are available for civil society organizations, and all of us up here would be very, very pleased to share those with you. So please approach us so that we can start to work together. You said, that collective campaign definitely needs to happen. So we're open to trying to coordinate that, organize it, facilitate something that makes us more than some of our parts. Thank you.
>> Last word -- hack-athon. There's one being organized. Please tell it where it is now?
>> If you're interested in going on with that conversation, you're invited to go to this that started this afternoon. If you're interesting. You visit mike. Can you get up? You can go and ask Mike to have all of the information. Thank you.