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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.
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. 👏
#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. Have I come to the right place?
Let's see...
This is a small personal instance of Bonfire in the Fediverse.
