Description: The organizers believe that strengthening societal resilience and empowering the individual to assess the credibility of information online is necessary to guide regulatory responses to misinformation. The workshop at the IGF will be following a multidisciplinary roundtable hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute and the Vodafone Germany Foundation in Berlin in March 2019. The roundtable generated several preliminary ideas for building resilience towards misinformation with a focus on the European Union. With the workshop at the IGF we would like to continue the discussion with a wider range of stakeholders and with a more international perspective.
Preliminary Workshop Agenda:
Setting the Scene: why focus on societal resilience with regard to misinformation?
Input by Lisa-Maria Neudert, Oxford Internet Institute (20 min.)
Breakout Sessions (40 min)
1. Credibility indicators
- Input by Jennifer 8. Lee, Credibility Coalition (10 min): What are current examples and technological possibilities?
- Discussion: What is needed in addition?
- Discussion: What can Governments, Civil Society, Academia and the private sector do to develop more/better credibility indicators?
2. Transparency
Input by Fabro Steibel, ITS Rio (10 min): Recent developments in platform transparency
- Discussion: What kind of context information should be available on platforms and in what way/format to be accessible for the individual user?
- Discussion: What kind of additional data sources are needed to support the work of fact checkers and to enable individuals to verify claims?
3. Digital and information literacy
Input by Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck, lie-detectors (10 min): What are basic competencies to assess the credibility of online-information?
- Discussion: How can these competencies be developed in the citizenry at scale?
- Discussion: What role is there for governments, civil society, education and the media?
Presenting the results of the breakout sessions (30 min)
Each group will have 5 minutes to present their results and 5 minutes to answer questions.
Each breakout group will be moderated by a member of the organizing team or one of the speakers. The results of the discussion should be visualized (whiteboard, sticky notes etc.). The members of the breakout sessions should choose a rapporteur amongst themselves to present the results of the discussion in the plenary.
Expected Outcomes: The purpose of the workshop is to generate ideas on societal resilience towards misinformation from great variety of stakeholders and geographical representations. These ideas can address the three policy questions addressed by the workshop but are not limited to them. We expect concrete outcomes of the workshop on two levels:
- Building blocks for a strategy to build up societal resilience towards misinformation
- Identifying and connecting Individuals and organizations who are willing to further develop recommendations and policy proposals.
We will summarize the outcomes of the workshop in a working paper and distribute a draft of the paper to the participants for comments before publishing it. Furthermore, the organizers plan to continue the dialogue on societal resilience towards misinformation with civil society organizations and other stakeholders with the aim of publishing concrete recommendations and policy proposals.
We aim to collaborate with other workshop organizers in the same field to ensure that our session is complementary and to drive collaboration in this space beyond the IGF.