Today and tomorrow I'm at @DisinfoEU's #Disinfo2025 conference in #Ljubljana. Really excited to follow this community more closely through a #DigtialRights lens.
If I find time, I'll use this thread 🧵 to share some insights and thoughts, so please bear with me throughout the day.
Fascinating to hear @N_Henin speak at length about #propaganda, #hatespeech, and #cyberbullying after his release from #ISIS captivity almost entirely without mentioning the role of #socialmedia #platforms.
NB: he did advise folks to leave #X in favour of other platforms after a specific question from the audience.
Thank you Nicolas for the intervention and insights. 🙏
#Disinfo2025 is a very new environment for me despite having worked on online platform regulation for over 6 years.
The conference is sponsored by #Tiktok among others, an important spreader of #disinformation, and panel speakers include people from #defence tech firms and #AI companies... Let's see what this does to the conference content.
So for now I'm listening to what sounds like a sales pitch from a #defence tech firm called #gerulata that claims they have developed an #AI model that can "predict" if certain pieces of online content will be used for a #disinformation campaign plus do all kinds of awesome magic. 🧐
OK on the upside, the #AI sales pitch is followed by an excellent presentation by German investigative news outlet @correctiv_org showing the data they found on coordinated disinformation targeting the German federal election 2024.
If you're in #Germany and haven't donated to #CORRECTIV yet, go here: https://correctiv.org/unterstuetzen/
This #Disinfo2025 afternoon was brightened by a brilliant talk by #ExxonMobil #whistleblower Lindsay Gulden about how the #fossilfuel lobby has lied to the public for decades about the #ClimateCrisis and which techniques the industry uses today to spread #disinformation and actively mislead our thinking about it.
If you haven't heard Lindsay speak yet, there are talks online.
Aaah finally a #Disinfo2025 panel that focuses on #FreeExpression and other human rights in the context of the work against #disinformation.
The brilliant @epirkova pushes back against the instrumentalisation of #FreeSpeech and the EU's #DSA to fuel far-right anti-democratic narratives. And she rightly calls out the incredible amount of #securitisation of the #disinfo debate. 👏
Day 1 of the #Disinfo2025 conference is over, so let me share some takeaways. As a #DigitalRights advocate I'm surprised about how large the gap between the #disinformation and digital rights communities seems to be:
1. The framing of conversations that I witnessed here were highly militarised, lots of talk about "the battlefield", the enemy, and various forms of (hybrid) #warfare.
2. There's was a strong "Us V Them" narrative across the conference, mostly as in the West V #Russia and #China.
3. There was a strong focus at #Disinfo2025 on foreign actors / #FIMI from #Russia, not so much on #disinfo attacks from internal actors, the far right, #Trump, or #BigTech billionaires.
4. There was hardly any discussion of the role of #BigTech social media's business models, algorithmic #amplification, and lack of due diligence in the spread of #disinformation. One ex-US #Army guy claimed "platforms are not the problem," information "is moving on its own." Does it though, does it? 🤦
@ilumium When the government does it, that means that it is not disinformation.. (to paraphrase a famous quote by Nixon).
With the "right" definitions, they can address the evidence to the contrary, that misinformation often comes from the top https://rasmuskleisnielsen.net/2024/01/03/misinformation-often-comes-from-the-top-aka-its-the-elite-stupid/
Jan Penfrat
Jesper Lund