The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF virtual intervention. 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, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> DANIEL O'MALEY: Hello, and welcome to the Dynamic Coalition on the Sustainability and News Media session here at IGF 2021.
We are pleased to have you join us whether you are in Poland or joining us here online. My name is Daniel O'Maley. I am the senior digital governance specialist at the Center for International Media Assistance and joining you here from Washington, DC.
And I'm one of the co-chairs along with my colleague Courtney Radsch. I want to tell you about the Dynamic Coalition. It was formed about two years ago.
It is a multi-stakeholder group that convenes to discuss how we can make sure that the digital transformation leads also to a healthy and financially viable news system. I think as we all experienced the past year, we understand it that the business model for news has changed. This has been a catalyst for the change to our digital ecosystem.
And if we want to fix this challenge, it's going to require all types of stakeholders, civil society and government and the private sector to work together to envision what the digital news ecosystem looks like and how we can make sure that it is financially supported.
I think the global pandemic has reiterated the belief we have in the power of information to help people but also that our digital systems are not necessarily prepared for the type of news ecosystem that we ideally want to have.
Those are the topics that we discussed in the Dynamic Coalition both during the IGF as well as during our intersessional work. I would like to give a brief overview. First, a short presentation by Guilherme Canela De Souza Godoi, and then Courtney will be moderating a panel on trust and the digital news ecosystem and what needs to be done to make sure that quality news and information surfaces online.
And then we'll have a brief Q&A. And we are really hoping that the session will be interactive. I will monitor the chat here on Zoom. Courtney, of course, will be on location in Poland and she will make sure to incorporate the participation of those who are with her there, but we want to hear from everyone in the audience.
Make sure as you are listening you are thinking about questions or comments you may have. I would now like to pass the baton to my esteemed co-chair, Courtney Radsch.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you so much. We are delighted to have everyone here. Before we hand it over to Guilherme, I wanted to do scene setting so we understand how we are coming into the conversation about news media sustainability and journalism sustainability in the internet digitally mediated environment that we are in today.
We have talked a lot about disinformation, about the challenges that algorithmic intermediation has for journalism which depends on visibility in order to be seen and have impact in its role as part of the public infrastructure of democratic accountability.
We have also heard a lot over the past year and much longer but certainly over the past year of the pandemic of protest movements around the world. Of overthrows of democratic governments and the takeover and coups by various organizations around the world and the role that social media has played in this.
We know that journalism plays a fundamental role in holding people accountable whether those people are in government, in business, the business sector, or other powerful economic and social actors.
So the fact that internet governance and how we govern this digital sphere has such an impact on journalism is a central concern we believe for internet governance. But we are not here to talk about the problems today.
We actually want to think about some of the solutions. Because we have heard about how YouTube's algorithm exacerbates extremism. We have heard about Amazon's recommendation system fueling recommendations around books that string together conspiracy theories. And we heard about the Facebook algorithm delving people into extremism and drowning out legitimate news about the super spreaders of misinformation.
How do we combat that? We think we have ideas on the people joining us on the panel today are at the forefront of implementing those ideas. It is around scaling content moderation and news integrity and trust and building it into the infrastructure of our ecosystem.
We will talk about how we can really embed self-regulatory approaches that are driven by the journalism and news industry and what we can learn from initiatives like the forum on information and democracy, the journalism trust initiative, news guard, Ads for News.
How can the idea of Trust.txt which we will hear about in a little bit be reimagined to create the technical infrastructure for promoting quality news information while not excluding marginalized voices?
Can we think about how to scale these beyond just the context of western more highly developed media ecosystems to fill even the small under resourced media ecosystems and particularly in the global south where market imperatives might not be there for companies like Google and Facebook to fund news initiatives or journalism support initiatives.
We will hear from Claire Wardel who is the director, First Draft News, and from Jason Lambert who is the program lead for Ads for News. It was a conversation that I had with him that got me super excited about bringing this conversation to this venue and working with the Dynamic Coalition to delve into this.
And we will hear from Olaf Steenfadt who is the head of Media Ownership. But before we get to the panel, I would like to introduce Guilherme Canela De Souza Godoi, the chief freedom of safety, the journalist section at UNESCO.
And you worked with Free Press Unlimited based in the Netherlands on the report that had interesting findings about what media are facing in the digital ecosystem. And we want to hone in on the key findings that you guys found that are relevant to this discussion today, please.
>> GUILHERME CANELA DE SOUZA GODOI: Hello. Thank you, Courtney and Daniel. Always fantastic to be with you two.
Before I go into that, let me just say how impressive is this week, right? We had the first meeting with CIMA two days ago and trying to go further on the issues and then yesterday on the margins of the U.S. democracy summit there was another meeting called by the U.S. and Netherlands also trying to focus on the issues.
And today and tomorrow not only here in IGF but also in the democracy summit there is the discussion. As all of you know, today is the International Day to Fight Corruption. And media viability and sustainability is fundamental for that.
As you said earlier today in IGF, Courtney, tomorrow is the International Human Rights Day. And I think we also should take advantage of this momentum. I mean we have the momentum where we can actually make the case that media viability, independent media is central to our key questions as humanity, not only media in itself or media independency but democracy and other things. This is very appropriate, my first comment.
The second thing is that the work that we are doing at UNESCO and the joint work with FPU is part of -- is an element of a broader strategy that obviously UNESCO started under the IPDC.
But during this world press freedom day, UNESCO insisted as a main topic that information is a public good. And we started the declaration that just two weeks ago was endorsed by all of the 193 Member States of UNESCO. The issue of media viability was and is in the very center of this idea that information is a public good.
But connected with another element that is very much related to the main topic of this session, that is the idea of we can't move forward without more transparency of the internet companies and particularly the social media companies because the algorithmic discussion that was also reported in this work that FPU did for us, is obviously related to the transparency of the company.
So as you know, UNESCO is leading a global debate around the transparency of the internet companies. We launched it this year, this is let the sunshine in. And it debate where the FPU research is connected just to give you a glance is broader.
We launched earlier this month with the presence of Joseph Stiglitz because we want to connect with the ideas of asymmetries of information. The first highlight UNESCO. And with the economist’s intelligence unit, now the economist impact report we are launching earlier next year a lot of different research also related to this issue.
We are going to launch also an IPDC handbook with good practices in January from different countries related to those topics.
And finally, we are going to launch a policy brief that is being coauthored with the international center for journalism and researchers from Emory University on those issues.
UNESCO is really betting a lot on the horses of media viability. But specifically I'm concluding today with two highlights. Specifically this report that we prepared with Free Press unlimited. It is interesting because they did field research in ten countries -- Brazil, El Salvador, Indonesia, Jamaica, Lebanon, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, and Tunisia.
As you can imagine, there are several specific context and differences in the challenges of media viability in the countries. But there are also some common trends. And in all of these countries we heard the specific discussion of this session that the way the algorithms of the major social media platforms are calibrated, they not contribute for people to actually find the news they want to find in local independent media.
Because their feed of news for the news field received is specific indications that the algorithms wants them to see, and we don't know exactly how those decisions are taken.
So in all of the different countries we heard these concrete suggestions, and I have FPU colleagues connected here and later in the Q&A that can offer more elements. These small or medium sized independent media outlets are claiming for a solution here, but they also realize it is very difficult for them to interact directly with the social media Giants.
So one of the things they are precisely asking is for more media alliances around those issues. That is why, for instance, this many actions I described as UNESCO doing the media viability, we are doing in partnership with the World Association of News Publishers and we have been also discussing this with the Inter American Press Association precisely because this big media owner’s associations can be analyzing the discussions with the big tech companies.
So this in a nutshell, this is the first -- a first, let's say, key finding of this report prepared by FPU regarding the key discussions of this. And just a second one and then I finish.
Obviously the algorithmic element of this discussion is just one part of the problem. As Courtney was earlier describing, this is related to unfortunately a downsizing of the overall situation of freedom of expression and press freedom in those countries as well.
And this is related with empowering some governments to take bad decisions related to media viability which can impact in the phenomena that we call media capture. And one of the things and I will just say, quote this example that was underlined in this report is how governments are misusing political and governmental advertisement to fund the media outlets that they like but not the others that they don't like.
Which obviously is in the very center of idea of media capture. So anyways, we do think that having the concrete elements from ten concrete countries from all regions is a very important contribution to this debate. A side of the global and more let's say overarching data that UNESCO have already released in November. And we will have more when we release this study with the economist impact unit earlier next year.
Thank you so much for having me today. Over to you.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you very much, Guilherme.
I think this is a very important place to start the discussion. You raised several issues and what we want to get into now is a discussion around some of the solutions here.
And we have really an expert panel that is working -- they are working on solutions. And so unlike a lot of the sessions at IGF and a lot of the sessions where you talk about media and journalism, we will not talk about the problems, we will talk about how do we address this, especially in the platform dominated algorithmic inflected situation that we live in today.
So I want to turn now to our panel. And we will start with Dr. Claire Wardel who I'm delighted to be a co-visiting scholar with at the Center for Media at Risk at Annenberg.
You have several different affiliations including the co-founder and leader of First Draft, the world's foremost nonprofit focused on research and practice to address mis- and disinformation. And you are one of the leading experts on social media and user generated content and verification. And that is integral to today's world.
Can you describe what do those look like, how do those work? What solutions do those offer? Claire?
>> CLAIRE WARDEL: It is wonderful to be here and to see people on the screen in the same room and that seems novel. I'm sorry I can't be in that room with you.
I spend every day thinking about these challenges and the kind of twin challenge of how do we make sure that the bad information is less easy to find and how do we make sure that the good information is easier to find. Whilst also recognizing the human aspects of this.
We have to think about the technical and social elements of this. We have to make changes but also think about how people consume information and why.
I haven't been directly involved in building the initiatives, but I'm a full board member of Trust.txt and thinking about how we understand which news outlets are credible or not.
And I worked with Sally Lemmon on the trust project and all of the initiatives are trying to do exactly this, how can consumers recognize what is trustworthy or not.
I'm sure Olaf will talk about the specific challenges working at an article level or organization level. We can all think about news organizations that generally are okay but might have one particular part of the news organization that can be much more opinion led and isn't clearer.
The real challenge that everybody is trying to solve here is the idea of heuristics. When we are scrolling, everything online looks similar. There are questions of the trust project or the work that Olaf is doing is enabling people to understand it through a visual cue this is a trustworthy organization.
But then there are other elements to this which is it is not about the consumers, it is about the platforms. If I'm Google or Facebook or Instagram, how can I tell the difference between a news organization with a corrections policy and editorial guidelines and policies around anonymous sources versus a blogger that has a slick looking website, so my brain thinks that looks professional.
Something like trust.txt is a text file that as a consumer I do not see but on the back end the platforms can read that and make a distinction what is a quality outlet or not and a lot of these kind of projects work in that.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Can you explain that? I never heard of this until I interviewed Jason the other day.
Tell us what is that? How does that work? And why is it scalable, this idea that it is machine readable?
>> CLAIRE WARDEL: To imagine you are a member of a news association and you know it and if I went digging on your website I might learn that you are a member of that association. But it is very difficult to find.
But the idea behind Trust.txt is that we have these kind of trust relationships, you are a member of this and syndicate to the Associated Press, but you either go digging for it and most people don't.
If I'm a machine how do I go digging. You know, you can see it if you dig in the file. Most people aren't doing that. If I'm Google and trying to understand the same text that I can read that file and understand that text file says this news outlet is connected to that one, that one, that one, that one and that one. And this news organization is connected to that Twitter account and that Facebook account.
So we know when we are trying to verify an account is that the official account? I don't know. Difficult to tell. Does the blue check mean anything? The Trust.txt bot allows you as a consumer but mostly designed for algorithms to say that is connected to this and it is more trustworthy. It is relying on existing relationships of trust.
The work that Olaf is doing, for example, is going to the news organization and saying are you trustworthy. And this is saying what are the existing relationships of trust and how can we make sense to the machine so that it can privilege that in the algorithm.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you for going to that level of detail. I think really understanding the mechanism is important here. You also mentioned, you know, that some of this is about human cognition.
And some of this is also about the sustainability and the ability of news media to monetize, the ability to be seen by advertisers.
I want to go to Jason who joined after News Gain was acquired by Internews and with more than 20 years of experience in advertising, digital media, technology, you worked with media in development contexts around the world since 2008.
And you have a track record of working to actually help the financial sustainability of news media. Because that is the other side of this, right? You got to have the economic support to actually create the news.
So Jason, tell us what is Ads for News and how do we think about the issues Claire raised?
>> JASON LAMBERT: Thanks for the great chats we had a few weeks ago that led to the discussion. And Claire, I'm happy that you brought up Trust.txt. It is a framework that I love because it is elegant and simple and has broader applications than the ones that are targeted right now. I will explain about Ads for News and where it came from.
Back in 2017, many of the largest pulled the advertising from the big firms after finding the ads were placed next to extremist content and the industry had a big wakeup call driven by brands and consumers. And they said something had to be done to stop this.
The major agencies were quick to act and created exclusion lists of websites that public material that contains unsafe content. The industry was already scared by that point so many brands felt, and they still do that hot news is just too hot to handle.
Many brands blocked ads on any pages containing hard news and felt that the brands were a risk by being seen amidst the topics. The shift to digital exacerbated and the legacy business models couldn't keep up and support the news to digital.
We formed the United for News coalition which is with the World Economic Forum two of the largest media buying agencies in the world. The World Association of News Publishers and some private sector media players and we worked with partners to quickly to create an inclusion list of 8,000 trusted news media in 30 countries and that is available for free to media buyers.
And it is our way of helping them to advertise on trusted media. Some of the largest organizations have the list and they are using it to set the spending priorities. It is not easy work.
We are all swimming upstream in the mission to stop bad media. The first is what is trusted local news? And our view, my view is that it is not our job to index the world. It is too big a job for us to do alone.
We have an indexing methodology, but we are automating as much as we can and requiring media outlets to self-certify the compliance with the standards. We are not trying to force our standards on the world. Wherever we can detect a reliable signal, we will take it and weight it accordingly.
There are great standards out there and Claire mentioned a few. We have the Global Alliance for Social Media which specifies what's acceptable. JTI is fantastic in my view.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Sorry, no acronyms here.
>> JASON LAMBERT: Journalism Trust Initiative. And Trust.txt which is beautiful and easy to implement.
And second is how can we make brands feel safe in use. And we had a lot of conditions, and it is quite revealing. Brands are fiercely protective of where they are seen, and they have concerns in some markets about aligning with independent news.
It is a concern that such public alignment or even being seen on an independent news site in some markets can risk their ability to operate and sell products. While many will not advertise in news, they will advertise on a news website but just not on news pages, so they can go on things like sports pages. Is that where we want to be? My view is no. It is not far enough yet.
Thirdly ensure that the news lists are kept up to date. It is a big task to index the world and scan new sites and determine if they are provided trusted information and trusted organizations. We have a pilot in the Philippines and Indonesia.
We want the local media partners to receive a small percentage of ad revenues just from the media outlets that wants us, the buyers, and to fund the work and maintain the outreach to buyers. And we are trying to make sustainability and local initiative into this model from the get-go.
I want to say how we can make this scalable. We can all do our small things and have small successes, but to have a big impact we have to create scalable solutions. And how could we reach small media in the global south. Some very small media outlets will make negligible revenue being with hats for news. It doesn't take much to make a difference. All revenue is important.
The things that a small media outlet should have in place to be successful are things they should be doing to win and sustain audiences and subscribers anyway.
Most of our wider work in media development that we do especially within my immediate business team is focused on small and medium sized media from the global south. This is what the core programs are for.
With initiatives like Ads for News and the accelerator that was announced yesterday, we have the chance to actually punch out beyond our programs to have these new conversations to make bridges with each other and with the private sector and to learn more. That's really where we are at. Thanks.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you, Jason. Just a reminder, because we have so many different languages and Levels of familiarity, I ask everyone to avoid acronyms. JTI is the Journalism Trust Initiative.
I want to go ahead to Olaf Steenfadt. He has been involved in media development for a long time and RSF is the lead organization that created the Forum for Information and Democracy.
So Olaf, RSF has a finger in a lot of the initiative. What is the JTI, Journal Trust Initiative? We heard about the different types of approaches and where does the Journalism Trust Initiative fit in here and how are you thinking about in? One of the things that you said is you are thinking about the idea of middleware. And tell us, what is that? Go ahead, Olaf.
>> OLAF STEENFADT: Thank you for having me and to continue this conversation which we have been having for some time now.
And I cannot agree more to what was said earlier, there is definitely a momentum. Some even say there is a disinformation industry already out there and lots and lots of projects which is also has a downside a little bit.
Because if you take our main stakeholders, media outlets, definitely the bandwidth to engage is pretty limited and usually some of the responses we get is like oh, no, not another trust project.
Because of this, I wanted to say that this is really not true. So this is one piece of maybe misinformation because there are not hundreds of projects. There are maybe a dozen or so.
And what matters maybe even more is that we are confronted with a complex problem, or it is good and an advantage to have many, many different actors and just trials to basically test and explore the best solution. And we are also still very early on from the process to find the best solution, and this is very important to mention.
And secondly, I think all of us agree that there won't be a silver bullet. So we all of us are building different building blocks which solve different parts of the problem in the puzzle. And I think the biggest challenge we face is interoperability to really put the different pieces of the puzzle together and obviously then solve the problem or at least parts of it.
Which brings me to the term you mentioned earlier, middleware which comes from Francis Kuyama where he basically if I understood correctly in a nutshell said something like let's imagine we won't succeed in breaking up the monopolies of big tech and search and social media but even then we can create a middle layer of different tools and instruments and plug-ins between big tech and consumer which offer choice and empower the user in many different ways and create pluralism. Even if it's the very end, we still have monopolies in certain areas.
And I think following this train of thought what we are trying to build most of us are pieces of middleware, not only business to consumer but also business to business when it comes to the relationship, for example, of media outlets and advertisers, for example.
And when it comes to journalism, I think it is really fair to say we are kind of facing a yogurt moment where consumers more and more look at the packaging and are really interested in knowing what's in it, what the ingredients are, who the owner of the factory is.
And this is a little bit ironic because journalism is all about accountability of others. Accountability of politicians, accountability of, you know, businesses. And suddenly this is a deep look into the mirror, and it is our own accountability. And to think when it comes to trust at the end of the day it is all about accountability and compliance.
The big question I think we have to ask ourselves, do we stick to our own professional norms which largely exist and what happens if we don't? This is I think where not only the Journalism Trust Initiative kicks in but many other fields at the moment.
For the Journalism Trust Initiative, I think we believe three different ingredients are needed to make this work, and this relates to what you said earlier.
The first one is scalability. And for that reason we choose early on the protocol of ISO, the International Standardization Organization, as an instrument not only to build up and govern the list of criteria in a non-proprietary way but also to implement it. This is a system which is out there already. It is self-regulatory and the industry getting its act together. It is the opposite of a law, and it is tested and scalable. Base ISO exists in the DNA of almost any corporation in other fields like accounting, like CSR and waste management and technical domains. And we are just applying the instrument, the existing infrastructure for the case of editorial standards.
So this is the question of scalability and implementation. The second ingredient which again was mentioned already is machine readability. You really need to translate whatever the compliance mechanism is. At the end of the day, you need to translate into a real time data channel which feeds into search, social media and problem advertising to provide an advantage to combined sources.
And this is pretty much an IT task in a number of ways. As you can guess, this is not exactly what we usually do, but a very, very steep learning curve there.
And last, not least, it is about obviously an enabling environment of regulation and co-regulation which is also a little bit you might say even weird we find because if you look into digital policies at the moment, be it at national levels, be it transnational, it is all about sanctions.
It is always about deleting harmful content and chasing malicious actors. And I think pretty much all of us know and particularly from parenting if you are parents, sanctions only never work. If you want to impact behavior, you need a mix of sanctions and incentives to really move forward.
And this is exactly why we believe in digital policies sanctioning harmful content is not enough. You need due prominence. You need rules to amplify trustworthy sources and provide discoverability.
And maybe in concluding, there are lots and lots of examples of from legacy where the scarcity was on the supply side spectrum basically and there are lots and lots of laws still existing today to basically oblige, for example, cable operators to carry certain programs. Local media, for example, public media. This was a legal concept.
And I think currently where the scarcity moved from the supply to the demand side, it is no longer what must carry but must be found. It is about regulations that provide discoverability obligations for intermediaries.
If this were to happen where all of the tools and instruments we built together would actually be pretty much needed to make it work. And I will leave it there and happy to take any questions. Thank you.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you, Olaf. You really hit the nail on the head which is that -- I mean you raised many key issues but the idea that a lot of the current frameworks out there are insufficient for the environment in which journalism is attempting to exist today.
And the fact that we want self-regulatory mechanisms and that there are lots of initiatives as we just heard from the panelists.
And I want to thank the panelists for the detail they provided. Because the devil is in the details. I want to invite people in the chat on Zoom as well as in the room, which I'm delighted to see is quite full, to come up to the microphone or raise your hand in the chat so that we can incorporate your questions, your thoughts on this as we continue the conversation.
So you know, if you are interested, please come up to the mic.
I want to first take the moderator's prerogative and raise a couple of questions that I think particularly relevant I think at the Internet Governance Forum which is in countries where there is relatively little connectivity, where there are, you know, very few or limited independent news outlets, and where they are in many different languages, several of which are not well supported by integrity initiatives. We are still figuring out how this works to read languages that are not in western text.
Are the solutions that you are working on scalable to the last mile, to those countries that are less connected that have fewer news sources that can't compete in the engagement algorithms because the audiences are too small and how does this work in other non-western character languages?
And I'm going to go to Claire first to respond and then invite the audience to please raise their hands or come up to the mic if they want to jump in after we go through the panel. Thank you.
>> CLAIRE WARDEL: This to me is the most important question, and we know that platforms themselves are bad at understanding what is happening globally. A lot were built in western Europe and when trying to scale in the different parts of the world like a sudden sense of oh, I didn't understand what was happening there. As we say about platforms, we need more research, more understanding and partnerships with the people on the ground.
We should be doing more of that in terms of the kind of initiatives we are talking about because there isn't an easy way to scale, and I have been in meetings where people go through the credibility indicators and somebody from Nigeria will say we will struggle to apply any of them. Does this mean that you are working with Google? I remember when they labeled the BBC, and the Brits were like it is not State media.
There is complexity and there isn't an easy way. I wish there was more funding to spend more time on the ground in places to say what does credibility look like into Thailand or Malawi. Otherwise we will scale with unintended consequences that we have seen the platforms do. We have to learn to say we can't scale unless we have a true understanding what is happening on the ground
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: I just want to raise that the issue, the idea of unintended consequences, we are seeing it in the Digital Services Act where there is a big debate over whether there should be a journalistic or media exemption and with some people arguing that needs to be embedded. And others saying no, that leads to disinformation.
I feel like the idea how you establish news integrity and trust has many applications.
Jason, I want to go to you with the same questions about scalable, smaller markets, other languages.
>> JASON LAMBERT: It comes back to points that Claire and Olaf made already. One that Olaf made about what is the purpose of the indicator.
And we have all of a you called it the middleware type solutions which are the kinds of things we are working on. I will give you an example.
If you go to the Ads for News website, you will see 30 countries, and many are not the typical targets for the kind of development work we do.
We chose those markets initially because we spoke with the people we were making the product for which is the agencies, and we want to slide in the things we really care about and sell which is the markets in the global south mostly.
So what are the indicators for and what is the work for? In the purest sense, for news we are trying to drive ad revenue, but in some markets that isn't an easy thing or developed thing. The case in point Zimbabwe. Mostly online in English language, but there is no programmatic advertising market to speak of right now but still we will go there as part of the programs because we still believe it is useful to create lists of trusted media in the country.
The other two pilots are in Indonesia and Philippines. The languages in the Philippines is 120. The way we do with that and while we are doing most of the work is to forge the trusted strong relationships with the local partners to help us to do the work to decipher and understand the local context.
We are trying to adapt the framework or our approach actually to the markets that might be less obvious targets for problematic advertising.
It really is we can't claim in any of this that we cracked the code or that we have the solutions yet. But what we have here is a platform to have wider conversations and thing more broad play about and test things as well about how we can solve the issues.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thanks so much, Jason. The labor intensity addresses it. Olaf?
>> OLAF STEENFADT: We try to follow the do not harm principle which sounds nice but in practical terms it is sometimes really difficult because you end up doing nothing.
The only recipe against is thorough testing of whatever instruments you are trying to implement in, you know, just the maximum variety of sizes and markets you can get.
And this is what we did with the JTI, the Journalism Trust Initiative quite intensely and lot and lots of learning. Just one anecdotal not give an evidence just example where a media outlet was overconfident and saying let's do this and get certified and you know shine just to find out that they don't even have editorial guidelines. Zero. They said we have an oral tradition, and we talk to each other. And this was not in Togo or Bolivia but in Canada.
Going through the process no matter where, north, south, east, west is an important inroads for media development. And it is a diagnostic process to actually detect flaws and deficiencies and address them and upscale your staff and come out of the process better as an institution but also the journalism that is being produced.
I think a question I would have particularly for the Trust.txt concept, and this maybe also illustrates what I said earlier, we need different building blocks for different markets maybe. And yes if you go through associations as one main known data point of trust, what happens in a country like Egypt where membership often association actually means the exact opposite?
And then somebody has to make a decision which association is worth to be used as, you know, a validation principle or not?
So this kind of treads a little bit of the complexity what we are dealing with is really what matters.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you, Olaf. And sorry, just one. Go ahead, Guilherme, you wanted to jump in as well.
>> GUILHERME CANELA DE SOUZA GODOI: Unfortunately, I need to excuse myself because I have a flight to catch, and I need to leave. I think your question is very important and people already spoke.
I just want to emphasize another side. The linguistic aspect is related to our difficulties to listen to what's going on in the field. We are grasping things in the languages that we can understand and in the networks we are connected.
My impression working for such a global organization like UNESCO is every time we dig a little bit further we find a very interesting example that we were not aware of. Maybe they were not as structured as we would like to be.
But I think we need also to amplify our own capacity of consulting and engaging new ideas and trying to see a little bit further of our own schemes on this area.
And I finish with this. With the pandemic we launched a program for training journalists in reporting on the COVID-19 crisis and the vaccines and we have engaged more than 10,000 people from 150 countries and we offered courses in 13 languages including Olaf, et cetera.
And the journalists that were engaging with us because they wanted to receive the trainings, et cetera, they also started to send in ideas and information and what they are doing.
So I think I -- I'm not sure if I agree with Olaf that they are only those things happening. I think there are much more happening out there, but maybe we don't have the capacity to map all of these and we need to coordinate more and see how we can create synergies.
And your question is relevant on these and both sides in helping these with the proper linguistic elements but also being able to listen to the conversation in ways that we are not necessarily capable of. Thank you, and sorry to have to leave earlier.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you for the intervention. A great point. Our ability to listen fundamentally impacts what believe there is in terms of solutions.
I want to, speaking of engagement, turn to the floor here and then take a question from the chat. Go ahead and introduce yourself.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello, I used to work for a media organization and now I don't work for a media organization.
I have been somewhere around the Dynamic Coalition for about two years, and I notice that two years ago we were discussing basically the same things which is how to deal with the platforms and how to find a way for media organizations to be able to live in this digital environment where platforms are where they need to publish and all of that. And it is two years later, and we are still discussing this.
And my take on this is that we now know that Facebook is an abuser. We kind of suspected this for years but now it is all out. We know that and we read the internal memos and the internal documents.
And I'm going to say that the media, the relationship between media organizations and Facebook is an abusive relationship. That is what it is, and we have to name it this way. And the more we talk about how we can try to change the platforms or build something between us and the platforms or the middleware or anything like that, the more we sound like we are basically saying, oh, we can change him. We cannot. This is not going to happen.
Somebody said in a very nice short way, protocols, not forms. Instead of having the monopolized silos, we need an infrastructure layer where Facebook is just one player and Twitter is one of the players and not the player that you have to engage with. Such protocols exist.
I'm not going to get into the technical, details but I would like us as the media ecosystem to start treating them seriously. Because I'm available on the other wonderful platforms and those other wonderful platforms implement things basically like Trust.txt right on my phone. This is my profile on LinkedIn. My blog has a green checkmark because there is a way to do this.
I don't know how much time, effort, energy, money it will take for Facebook to implement Trust.txt in any meaningful way, but there are platforms throughout that do something similar already. We just choose not to be on them. Maybe that is something we should reconsider. Thank you.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you so much for that input. You know, this idea -- and I would hope that that is part of the consideration we are having today is that this is not about how do we exist in the Facebook ecosystem.
We are talking about protocols, standards and getting outside of the platforms. But I very much hear this, the fact that we are, you know, it is kind of like an abusive spouse in a relationship that they just can't get away because you depend on them monetarily.
They own your house and own your audience. Thank you for your input. I want to bring in two more questions. One from Julius on the chat. This idea about blockchain for trust.
Does blockchain offer, is that a protocol or some part of the solution?
And then also I want to invite Dan who said he has a comment and question to jump in here with your question. But also if you could please mention the example from Somali land, but a very local initiative to Guilherme's point earlier about listening on the ground.
With that, I will start with Dan and then go to the panelists.
>> DANIEL O'MALEY: Thanks, Courtney. I think you question is about the topic of visibility. I see we are interested in what do these kind of conversations mean about news ecosystems in developing countries, some of the countries with the least capacity.
Seems that a lot of what we hear of engaging with the news outlets is that they don't feel like any of the large platforms can see them or they are invisible.
Could be for linguistic purposes or market size isn't big enough. There is a lot of complexity that we are not capturing. There is a lot of work to be done on our side.
And there is a fantastic example of Marcati in Somali. They wanted to enable a trust platform that would enable Somali users browsing news sites to understand the level of trust in each of the news sites in their country.
They developed their own kind of platform, and I think it was a browser add-on but actually an app that you could use in Somali land for the specific context in that country. Actually, a country that is not even fully recognized, right?
It is going down to that granular level. I think it will be a mix of both of those kind of global standards doing protocols at the middleware as well as kind of bottom up efforts that look to then plug into them, and I think there will be a mix there.
The other thing I wanted to say, CMA and LUME funded research looking at digital native news outlets. And there are signs that some of these organizations are flourishing in the digital age. Not all of them. And obviously it is a very hard environment, but I think it does also speak to the idea that yes, some of the platforms that we all know are really important, but it is not necessarily an overall impediment.
There are ways that we can support these types of news outlets that are doing hard-hitting independent journalism. They are often small and often don't have a lot of capacity, but they are wreaking hard-hitting stories, and some are viable.
I will share the research in the chat. Goes to show that I'm not undermining this conversation, this is super important. But there are other aspects that go beyond the platform and the digital age that we need to think about and what does that look like.
One interesting tidbit is that organizations that spend more time with resources on kind of prioritizing and shaping their content for digital spaces were more financially viable. So we are understanding that the news organizations also need to shift and understand how to best place their products in a different type of environment. So there's other components to it So just reiterating there will be two sides that need to come together and figure out how to make that work, and there are some green shoots that are working, and we need to figure out how to strengthen those. I would love to hear the panelist's thoughts on that.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you for that, Dan.
I did want to know that the Dynamic Coalition did try to get Marcati to be part of the conversation. I know there is an outlet in New Zealand that decided not to be on Facebook completely and go their own way.
There are different approaches. Let's hear from the panel, and Olaf I will start with you this time. You know, how should we be thinking about creating an infrastructure that is not platform dependent especially on Facebook? And is blockchain part of the solution?
>> OLAF STEENFADT: A little disappointed I have nothing to say about blockchain really. Sorry.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: That's fine.
>> OLAF STEENFADT: At the time on the list of things to consider for the journalism trust initiative, what we said earlier again, what we are trying to build is not involving every problem here, but I think a few just learnings from our journey.
Very early on we asked ourselves the questions, for example, would we build a different list of criteria and different sets of standards for different types of media on different contexts?
In other words, would we give a discount on ethics and the clear decision was taken to say no, we don't. The baseline standard should fit for everyone and should be built like this and then we need additional features and offers to support media outlets to get there which is a different approach. Maybe even in terms of terminology.
Standards plural is an oxymoron. If you have 10 standards, it is not a standard anymore. We believe in the global internet. For some problems you need a global platform and approach.
This is what I meant earlier by the interoperability. That is the challenge to connect the different elements. And I can only speak about the ISO world which we are kind of using as an instrument. And this is working globally in different industry, particularly in the global south if you think of lumber or food products, et cetera and the respective protocols and certifications remarkably well.
And the question for us was are we producing from scratch ISO or --
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: And ISO is the International Standards Organization, correct?
>> OLAF STEENFADT: Yes.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Let me go to you, Jason.
What is your thoughts in response to the various different questions raised?
>> JASON LAMBERT: Regarding the question from Julius about blockchain for trust. I don't have a great deal of experience with blockchain, but I think of the term of blockchain in terms of decentralizing.
I had a conversation about one particular country where the space has closed rather rapidly and a case of not just identifying which systems journalists in the country are producing good content and could be trusted but also about how to get them paid so they are using things like nonfungible tokens to get money to them.
The problem with blockchain for me it is hard to decipher, and I haven't seen anything that makes it super tangible. But if there are ways to do that, that would be very interesting.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: And we do have someone in the room raising their hand so we can connect you afterwards. Claire, if you want to respond to the questions raised.
>> CLAIRE WARDEL: I will start with the blockchain. Everyone thinks that is the answer.
The thing about journalism is it is messy and complex. My concern about blockchain is there are some things you don't want to be -- there is having work around verifying content from trusted providers that could help in the detection of deep fakes. Kind of like the New York Times and BBC project origin which enables them to use that kind of technology to say this is definitely ours.
And this isn't about adding the watermark. Something like that is interesting. Until the messiness that Olaf is talking about and until we can get this right in a human manual sense, I feel nervous with bringing in blockchain to solve the problems.
More importantly, historians are going to look back at 2012 to 2016 and say we were asleep at the wheel. We were so excited we failed to watch what it meant for basically Mark Zuckerberg through Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram to create the ecosystem with the effect that is literally off the scale.
The point about we need middleware, we need all of these things, I'm somebody who was constantly thinking about the kind of sociology of this.
We saw with the blackout, he has created a network utility that the network effects are so great on the platforms, I really hope from a regulatory perspective on of the things that is the priority is interoperability.
But we have to educate people into moving their data off to other platforms, creating a dynamic marketplace of different platforms. I'm just saying I this is going to be much harder than we think because we allowed this behemoth to grow.
The planet is using particularly these three networks for almost everything. And, as we know, the idea that many people use it as the internet means I share all of the concerns that the person that asked the question has.
But when I think about asking to move people away from the things that their community and network is on, it's going to be a huge uphill battle.
And I hate myself, I hate all of us that we invited the platforms to these kind of conferences. We really thought we could work with them. And we're now we're like ugh, they've created this framework that makes it incredibly hard for us to do.
So yes, yes, yes, we need interoperability. We need different protocols. And I think trying to build protocols on top of the platforms with an idea to where are we in 10 years' time. We're not going to solve any of these in the next two years. We will have this conference panel in two years. We just will.
We need to be okay with that and to say where are we going to be in 10, 20, 30 years' time. And that's the kind of conversations I think we should be having.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you, Claire. You got some laughs and cheers in the room so I think there is a lot of agreement with you on; several of those points including, if I, may, you know, the person who asked the question worked for one of the leading investigative journalism organizations in the world that organized crime and corruption reporting project which has revealed massive malfeasance by leading public figures around the world.
And so it's super important to be thinking about all of the different dimensions of journalism and what, you know, what it means to actually have immutability as you are saying, the platforms.
And you know, if I may just take the opportunity to kind of comment on when we look back at 2012 to 2016, I think you are right, you know. And part this is because these dominant platforms were created in a regulatory environment that doesn't -- that sees government as bad, that sees regulation as bad versus as a way to be in the public service.
But as somebody who, you know, spent time on the ground in Egypt, which was mentioned earlier with the movements that were growing there to bring about change, like these are double-edged swords. They do provide an opportunity to publish in very closed media ecosystems to cover issues like human rights abuses and police violence in countries where otherwise there would be no outlet.
If you have questions, I invite you to go to the microphone, please. And then also as you're going up, I want to bring up a point made by Guy Burger at UNESCO who noted that scale is not just a technical and linguistic issue, but also something that requires building national alliances so that journalism outlets in the country can overcome differences and drive viability solutions.
And this depends in part on what proportions of ads are transnational versus national and local. He is not sure that there can be a global approach and wanted to hear the thoughts from the panelists on that.
We will go to that, but I wanted to invite the person in the room to identify yourself and ask your question.
>> ANNIE ZUMAN: Hi, my names is Annie Zuman. I'm a journalist, and I was in Myanmar recently. And I'm a co-founder of Myanmar Media Support Network.
So I have a question for JTI. I was going through your website, and I was going through and thinking who are the market, you know, who are the media houses who joined and got like carrot and stick rewards from JTI, A. Because it would be really good to know who these media houses are, and it should be on your website. I have tried to look for it, but I couldn't find.
The other thing is coming from Myanmar, and I'm working there, we have learned after the coup that be it Facebook, be it Twitter, be it Instagram, people are so wise. You know, we generally tend to think that citizens are dumb, and we don't focus on digital literacy at times, we keep thinking about policing a lot.
But what we have seen in Myanmar that people don't trust Facebook anymore. They don't trust their own government, A., of course like it is a military, that matter is there. But they also don't use Facebook anymore. So in conflict-ridden societies, what are the solutions when we talk integrity and news integrity and trust. because both sides, be it pro-democracy or be it like the military, there's like propaganda. Who should we trust and how should we build -- I don't know whether policies, who would build that? UNESCO would come in there?
Like I was very keen to know more about JTI, you know, because we would like to know and be supported by the initiatives. Thank you.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you so much for the question. I'm going to go to Olaf first in that case to address the specific question, and then to the other panelists to address that question as well as the one raised by Guy in the chat. Olaf, over to you.
>> OLAF STEENFADT: Thank you for the question and the interest.
I think the reason for this is that very early on we thought it is maybe not such a good idea to turn the JTI website in a registry for media outlets that use it or publish their compliance transparency reports because we really leave it up to the media outlets to do it on their own.
I can tell you we have currently a number of larger -- a little under 100 media outlets using the JTI at different stages. You would find there are a number of national television broadcasters, public broadcasters as well like CBC radio Canada, Irish, Norwegian and Swiss. And also a large commercial publishing group in Norway with daily newspapers in Sweden and Norway.
You would see a number of smaller, and I would say more alternative examples of Tiempo Argentino, for example, which is member owned. Or The Wire in India. It is a broad, broad picture really.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you, Olaf. And if you don't mind, I will pass your information on to our colleague here in the room after the session.
Let me go to the rest of the panelists to address kind of both of these questions. We've got Myanmar, very specific situation. You have got, you know, the pros and cons in our face right there. As well as to Guy's questions around whether there can be a global approach and I think this also links with the question around Myanmar.
So Claire, over to you first.
>> CLAIRE: I hate to be the person that says it's a hybrid, but I think Guy is absolutely right which is there are certain things, and this is Olaf's point, too, there are certain things particularly around ethics that you should say there should be a global ethical approach.
But actually on the ground making this work, I mean it's wonderful to hear the colleague from Myanmar. I mean who are we to even have an ounce of understanding of what is happening in Myanmar and to really understand that landscape, the newness of what it means to have a free press in a country like Myanmar.
So I feel like we are very not good at coming up with hybrid approaches. And of course the platforms won't scale, but we see that they're not having to apply different regulated responses due to jurisdictions around a particular country.
And I think what does it look like for us to think similarly around that, which is we want there to be certain core values but with a recognition of -- I remember we tried to do work with partners in the APAC region with using the same kind of models. And this was back in 2016. And so I think it is that hybrid model, what does that look like in practice, how do you resolve that, which it always comes back to resolve things. But I think Guy is right and that's why an organization like UNESCO that has that global view but with an ability to connect with partners on the ground has to be the key to this to make it sustainable. And again, prevent the unintended consequences.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you so much, Claire. Jason, your thoughts on this question?
>> JASON LAMBERT: I can respond to this in Myanmar and also Guy's question.
So Myanmar, I have been working with media in Myanmar since 2015, I think. Not just with the larger independents but withe media across the country.
And I have to say Myanmar is a standout market in all of them that we worked with globally. So went from something like 4% internet penetration to more than 100% within the space of five or six years.
Facebook became the internet. And I remember going there and trying to actually leave the Facebook environment to get out on to websites. And we got pop-up messages saying you are now leaving the Facebook environment. And it was a major discouragement even for us to leave that environment to go to websites because the websites were slow and inefficient. They chewed data and it was very difficult to use.
So as for how to establish which media are trusted in Myanmar, it is super ethical situation there right now because all of the media that were working in the country are now forced to work in exile. And there is a lot of citizen journalism, in fact, that's coming out of the country.
And how balanced is that actually when it is not by people trained in journalism? So this actually relates back to my previous comment about blockchain. So I don't have the answers regarding Myanmar except to say that it is a very, very unusual market and a very special market.
To Guy's question or to Guy's comment rather about scale and creating these alliances of journalism outlets.
I made reference, and it wasn't a shameless plug but to some research that we put out in -- earlier this year in June. And this was about finding ways to gather data, performance data on media businesses. So what works and what doesn't.
But like any business, that is your own secret sauce, and you don't want to share that with everybody in a way that can be reconciled back to you or your country or your competitors.
So we suggested a framework that would essentially obfuscate media outlet type. And we actually defined 16 types. Just an idea for a framework, but something where performance data could be shared and where benchmarks could be shared.
And that is really exciting in the fact that I have now spoken with nine organizations, some of them in this room, to help us to define what that solution should be.
So we are really trying hard to create something that is bigger than our own programs and our own interests to do something at the sector level. Yeah, I would like to talk to anybody that has an interest in discussing that.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Great. Thanks so much for that.
I want to just focus on a couple of things that have been raised before we turn to kind of the final section to talk about where do we go from here and what's next.
You know, we mentioned free basics. I don't know if everyone knows what that is, but it's Facebook's subsidized data plan so that you can use Facebook without using your data. That has all sorts of implications for the news media, and we have discussed that at previous -- I don't know if we had it at the IGF, but we certainly had it at Rights Con and I believe the Center for International Media Assistance has had some reporting on that.
So I would encourage people to reach out. And I'd ask Dan if you can maybe search out those links and stick them in the chat.
That is a really critical aspect to how we think about this because, of course, which media outlets are on the those subsidized data plans or subsidized platforms, it's going to have a significant impact. And usually those subsidizations are created in concert with the government which has all sorts of implications for media freedom.
And Myanmar is such an interesting example because not only where we have seen the transition to democracy and then the coup but also the focus of disinformation in that environment and really the role of information operations, the challenge that legitimate media have had in that country to be seen.
There was a recent report that there were troll farms -- not troll farms, like clickbait farms in Cambodia and Viet Nam that were using Facebook Live videos -- sorry, they were using Facebook live videos, repurposing them and reposting them simply to be -- to raise money because they were getting then funding through the monetization schemes on Facebook and Google like Ad Cents. And of course, then making them look like live videos when they aren't live videos.
which is the whole other dimension, the issue of deep and shallow fakes and authenticity which I don't think we're going to have time to get into here. Although if any of the panelists want to address that in their final kind of wrap-up remarks, I think that would be kind of really important.
Because as we get further into the sophistication of machine learning and these tools to create inauthentic audio, video, et cetera, that is going to pose an even greater challenge to the issue of news integrity and trust.
So with that, we have a few minutes left. I want to just really quick see whether there are any last questions from the audience here or in the chat.
And seeing none, that will give us the remainder of the time therefore to hear from the panelists. I would like to hear from all of you, just a couple of minutes, maybe take one minute each. Final thoughts, where do we go from here? what do we need to pay attention to? And what are you focused on in the coming year? And let's start with Olaf.
>> OLAF STEENFADT: Thank you. This also allows me to come back to Guy's point earlier because in his statement there is a deeper layer of dimension in this.
Because if we speak about trust so much it is not only about media outlets and journalists on the one hand and the consumer on the other or media and advertisers.
But trust also matters a lot between journalists in working together. And particularly at times where we work more and more remotely, where we have new models of distributed journalism of teams working on a journalism project for a limited amount of time, you really need to trust each other to work on a project together as journalists, particularly across borders in investigative journalism.
This is where for the journalism trust initiative at least in one field we are moving into by saying we key can provide a value-based environment where individual journalists and media outlets and associations and different types of stakeholders can collaborate on the platform based on a certain understanding and also a pledge and really a commitment to certain principles which we believe is super important and was really not really tackled and addressed too much in the past.
So this is like kind of what we can offer as a look forward. Thank you.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you so much, Olaf. What about you, Jason?
>> JASON LAMBERT: Yeah, I think two main points really. One is that when we work with media outlets, we see a lot of -- what is working differently is they take much more active role in becoming trusted. It is much more difficult now than ever to become a trusted media outlet and get recognized as so.
And the benefits from doing that will be significant I think as we go forward in this much more kind of crowded space that we are working in now.
Last comment really is just about this kind of measurement of trust and integrity still being kind of a new space. Like any market in its infancy it is fragmented right now. Do we need one golden standard for this?
Maybe not yet. We need to be better at creating frameworks that are fit for purpose and relevant. We need to use the different indicators we are talking about regarding trust. Whether that is advertising or finding the right partners to work with or the drivers for media literacy. I learned a lot in this conversation. Thank you.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you very much, Jason. Claire?
>> CLAIRE WARDEL: As I said in my introduction, my day-to-day is the mixture of trying to understand the bad stuff and the good stuff. The thing that I'm pretty obsessed with right now is understanding that the disinformation ecosystem is really participatory and dynamic and people in the ecosystem feel heard and they feel they have agency.
If we look at our information ecosystem much of it is still top down, linear and hierarchal. And that is why it was set up, that is the meaning of a gate keeper.
But when we have the conversations around trust, I keep thinking what does it mean for us to really understand the importance of a participatory information ecosystem and networked information ecosystem? The "New York Times" is on Facebook. Is it really listening to the things that its audiences are talking about and asking about? Yes, credibility indicators is critical.
An outlet can't just say I need to be trusted because I'm a trusted news outlet. When the consumers have choices, they can seek out and find choices that reinforces their world view, which we know. How can people be heard and feel like they have agency. This is one of those kind of end conclusions, and I don't think we can have the conversation with trust if we don't recognize in many ways we are still acting like we did in 1996.
What does it look like to think about trust in 2021. I know how we can be with the passive relationship. We have the idea that we are the trusted gate keepers. Doesn't matter how many we have if we don't understand the relationship that the audiences want to have with the information providers.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thanks, great point and something that we don't hear that much about.
Appreciate all of these final thoughts from the panelists about where we go from here and what you are all going to be thinking about.
I think some of the things that we are going to be working on with the Dynamic Coalition is how do we take some of these efforts forward and make them more accessible to members.
It was great to hear from our colleague from Myanmar about wanting to know more. How we make these accessible and make sure they are applicable in all countries.
I'm here on behalf of the Global Forum for Media Development which represents small medium global south organizations, media organizations around the world in part because they can't always be in the room, they are out doing the journalism.
You don't want the journalists who are investigate in the corruption and covering the live protests to have to come sit in a conference room in whatever country it is being held in because they are out doing their work. Great to hear that so many of the people we heard from today are focused on really listening to folks on the ground.
And I want to invite people to engage with us and come up afterwards and put in the chat, we are all happy to share information and get involved with the Dynamic Coalition.
I want to thank the panelists and transition to Dan to conclude this and tell you more about how to get involved in the Dynamic Coalition in the next year ahead. Dan?
>> DANIEL O'MALEY: Thank you, Courtney, and thank you to the panelists.
I think we should give a round of applause for a really excellent panel. That was really thought provoking and the questions were really astute and had us all in the room thinking about the different projects to work on and how we might engage.
If you aren't already involved in the DC sustainability, join because we have other events like this. Quite a multi-stakeholder group, we have participants from tech platforms and also from other tech companies.
Not just the platforms that are involved in the trust and digital ecosystem. And so that is just a plug for our group and for continuing this conversation.
One of the takeaways for me today is a lot is about visibility. That is what we are talking about with the trust initiatives that organizations can be visible and that the other takeaway for me and thinking about this is that we aren't -- this isn't urgent just for the news industry and figuring out how to make news information ecosystems financially viable, it's really about our societies and what kind of societies we want to live in.
Courtney mentioned the democratic accountability. This is a problem that needs a solution for all other types of development efforts that we want to undertake. I think that is just a calling to the urgency of the moment and the power of this type of engagement to envision what the situation will look like in two years, ten years.
We had a lot of learning in terms of engagement with platforms and some of the solutions we want to make them more inclusive so people understand them and understand how to plug into them.
Let's continue this really fruitful conversation. I want to thank the participants online on Zoom and all that were able to join us today from Poland and I hope everyone has a great rest of your IGF. Thank you.
>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thanks, everyone.