Tech Global Institute

Last week, I attended #TrustCon & was invited to join Abigail Adu-Daako & Diane Chang by the Tech Global Institute to speak about Platform Accountability during Elections in the Global Majority. For those unaware, TrustCon is the largest conference of Trust & Safety practitioners attended by <1200 professionals. Given how popular our session was & the great feedback we received, I wanted to share a few highlights - - Global Majority is a collective term for people of indigenous, African, Asian or Latin America descent who currently constitute 85% of the world. It aims to replace terms like Global South or developing world or people of colour. It is an imperfect term that is aimed at addressing an existing systemic issue but it is a preferable term for me. For me, the term is comforting because it includes the diaspora experience. While I live in the UK, I am hardly reflective of its 87% white population. Despite that, I vote in local elections & also engage with news around elections from back home. While I do not sit in the borders of a country in the ‘global south’, I reflect a common experience that local public policy teams at platforms do not always consider or engage with. - A fascinating question was raised: what do platforms do when elections are indeed not free or fair? We had a great discussion about working with civil society & carrying out what success means for the platform. Is the aim to stay out of the New York Times or is it a long term commitment to upholding election integrity in that community? If the latter then there is a real case for long-term capacity building for grass-roots organisations while acknowledging it is not the role of the platform to uphold election integrity in the sovereign state in the long term. - Another great question was how to engage when the community you aim to serve also requires managing internal divisions. I pointed out that defining the community a platform serves is a political decision that needs to be made honestly by the platform. - Measuring success could possibly be done by considering user surveys to understand if voters felt that platforms had done enough to limit election disinformation. Alex Leavitt, PhD & Yoel Roth led a great panel about user experience/safety measurement at TrustCon! There is a lot of research in the co-participatory design space that may be helpful. It was fascinating to hear about Wikimedia & whether safety by design may be a regulatory method to encourage this behaviour though we didn’t get a chance to get into this! Overall the conversation was hopeful! We need to grapple with how diverse the users we are building for are. What that means is building processes that create a large enough net that capture and protect everyone in the long run. Please join Trust & Safety Foundation Global Majority Research Committee to follow our work as we shine a light on learnings, research & expertise in this area. So excited for future conversations.

For over 100 hours, mobile and broadband Internet has been shut down in #Bangladesh amid violent student protests. CBS News reports that the death toll nears 180 with more than 2,500 people arrested, however, it is increasingly difficult to get accurate information from the ground with the communication blackout. This is a violation of the people's constitutional and fundamental rights to expression and access to information. Read the joint civil society statement condemning the violence, and urging authorities to restore connectivity immediately. The statement further calls on different stakeholders to act on the situation in Bangladesh and uphold human rights. More details here: https://lnkd.in/gV-GuTRy Access Now ARTICLE 19 Association for Progressive Communications PEN America PEN International Committee to Protect Journalists Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Internet Freedom Foundation Aapti Institute Software Freedom Law Centre, India (SFLC.in) Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network - SAFEnet Bolo Bhi Damar Juniarto EngageMedia Dovan Rai Foundation for Media Alternatives

Authorities in Bangladesh must stop toying with people’s access to the internet! After throttling internet speed and blocking platforms in specific areas over the last week, authorities in Bangladesh have now resorted to a country-wide shutdown to stifle ongoing student protests. Cutting off people’s access to the internet violates freedoms guaranteed in Bangladesh’s constitution, does not abide by the country’s law, and is never acceptable. Read more from us and the #KeepItOn coalition. ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/eC3_gj2q

How has platforms responded to the mega year of elections, especially in the majority world? In a data-scarce environment, how can experts, regulators, and civil society measure how effective these platform interventions have been? What are the unique and critical product design and policy considerations for civic events and elections in the majority world? Join us at #TrustCon this year for a deep dive on these questions with a stellar lineup of our senior fellows and affiliate members: Diane Chang, Fadzai Madzingira, Abigail Adu-Daako, and Sabhanaz Rashid Diya. They bring deep expertise at the intersection of trust & safety and policy internationally, and will share both from their experience and research on tackling some of the thorniest issues in the majority world. If you are thinking about how to "scale" integrity levers globally and responsibly, then don't forget to mark this session on your calendars! More information on the agenda is available here: https://lnkd.in/gf7uMApg

We’re thrilled to join the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) Advisory Network, represented by our executive director Sabhanaz Rashid Diya. The 39 Member States forming the FOC have a critical role in ensuring human rights are upheld on the Internet. We are excited to contribute to its mission and bring #GlobalSouth communities and voices to the table in shaping a more inclusive, open and trustworthy Internet.

We welcome Meta’s decision to adopt the Oversight Board’s recommendation. We submitted our comments, in addition to participating in civil society deliberations that highlighted how the long-standing blanket ban has undermined critical speech in many #GlobalSouth countries.

Our latest research on gendered disinformation online and their impact on women’s political participation was covered by Prothom Alo. We find traditional disinformation research methods do not translate the same way in #GlobalSouth contexts, and that gendered attacks are, in fact, highly relational and situational. In our research, we shift from a slurs-based to reputation-based apprach, resulting in finding multiple coordinated campaigns that deliberately undermine the participation of women and gender-diverse communities in democratic processes. You can read the full research here: https://lnkd.in/gRg2wy78 #genderbasedviolence #TFGBV

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is not a new research area, however, off-the-shelf methodologies to study TFGBV and gendered disinformation does not often produce reliable, situation-responsive findings in #GlobalMajority contexts. In our latest research, we explain why #GlobalMajority countries like #Bangladesh needs to adopt a different approach in analyzing disinformation networks, and how mis- and disinformation affected women's political participation, especially during the country's latest general election. 📌 Gendered disinformation against female public figures, especially politicians, are typically coordinated, emerging out of a handful of accounts to establish a malign narrative about the legitimacy of their candidacy. 📌 Women politicians face a much higher volume and frequency of gendered attacks, targeting their "salacious" behaviors in the context of gendered societal expectations in Bangladesh, relative to their peers in other professions, such as journalists and activists. 📌 Studying gendered abuse and disinformation required the researchers to adopt a reputation-based harm analysis, deviating from the usual keywords or slurs-based approach, when studying targeted malign narratives. READ THE FULL RESEARCH HERE: https://lnkd.in/gRg2wy78 #ContentModeration #InformationIntegrity #Elections

Have you applied for our annual tech policy fellowship yet? The 6-month, fully remote program is aimed at addressing the most pressing tech policy issues in Global Majority regions. APPLY NOW: https://lnkd.in/gPdDkXB4 Submission deadline: June 20, 2024

In the lead-up to this week's AI for Good Summit, I write for Council on Foreign Relations as a CIGI senior fellow on how Global South policymakers should rightly be pressing for more resource equity to close the economic opportunity gap with AI advancements. However, their urgency to incorporate AI in various industries, such as health, agriculture and education, needs to be underpinned by robust human rights impact assessments, otherwise they risk marginalizing the very communities they're meant to serve. Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) https://lnkd.in/g2_imqY8