| APrIGF 2024 Session Proposal Submission Form | |||||||||||||
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| Part 1 - Lead Organizer | |||||||||||||
| Contact Person | |||||||||||||
| Ms. Pavitra Ramanujam | |||||||||||||
| Organization / Affiliation (Please state "Individual" if appropriate) * | |||||||||||||
| Association for Progressive Communications (APC) | |||||||||||||
| Designation | |||||||||||||
| Asia Digital Rights Lead | |||||||||||||
| Gender | |||||||||||||
| Female | |||||||||||||
| Economy of Residence | |||||||||||||
| India | |||||||||||||
| Primary Stakeholder Group | |||||||||||||
| Civil Society | |||||||||||||
| Part 2 - Session Proposal | |||||||||||||
| Session Title | |||||||||||||
| Gendered Disinformation - Deepening understanding and exploring countermeasures | |||||||||||||
| Session Format | |||||||||||||
| Panel Discussion (60 minutes) | |||||||||||||
| Where do you plan to organize your session? | |||||||||||||
| Onsite at the venue (with online moderator for questions and comments from remote participants) | |||||||||||||
| Specific Issues for Discussion | |||||||||||||
| Women, trans and gender-diverse people are becoming major targets of disinformation campaigns in Asia. The main objective of these campaigns is to delegitimise the voices and credibility of their targets and ensure that they are excluded from public debates and cultural spaces. In particular, those who are more visible are more targeted, including women in politics, journalists and women’s rights defenders and activists. Countering identity-based disinformation such as gendered disinformation is particularly challenging, since it is sometimes difficult to define and isolate for fact-checking, as it not only relates to lies or false facts, but also to opinions and emotional content aimed at inflaming people and exploiting biases, prejudices and stereotypes. As a result, gendered disinformation campaigns are also often closely associated with hate speech and online gender-based violence, resulting in increased attacks on their targets. Further, emerging technologies such as deepfakes and other AI tools are being used to manipulate content and spread disinformation against women and other gender-diverse persons. Such disinformation has a serious impact on public discourse and democratic participation. Prominent women in politics, media and civil society are at risk of being targeted and silenced through disinformation campaigns, as are others who may engage in discussions around important gender-based issues such as sexual violence, rights of LGBTQI+ individuals, and rights of women in religious contexts. This session aims to deepen understanding and create awareness about identity-based disinformation, such as gendered disinformation, the forms it takes, and the impacts it has on its intended targets. It will delve into how emerging technologies are being used in disinformation campaigns and the challenges related to their unrestricted use. Finally, it will look at measures that need to be undertaken at the policy and community levels to address this issue. |
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| Describe the Relevance of Your Session to APrIGF | |||||||||||||
| The scope of this session fits well into the overarching theme of “Evolving Ecosystems, Enduring Principles: Shaping Responsible Internet Governance” as large scale misinformation and disinformation efforts are increasingly becoming part of the new online ecosystem in which we operate, especially with the use of deepfakes and other AI tools being deployed in the production of disinformation content without any regulation or oversight. The session more specifically aligns with the "Security & Trust" track. Disinformation undermines information integrity online, making it difficult to differentiate between fact and fiction and leading to dangerous consequences including inciting violence, spreading panic and eroding trust in institutions. Further, identity-based disinformation, such as gendered disinformation, has the potential to further stereotypes, deepen social tensions, and fuel discrimination and social exclusion of already vulnerable communities, leading to violence against them. It creates doubts in the trustworthiness of the information ecosystem and the internet as a whole. Finally, the session is also relevant in the context of the "Ethical governance of emerging technologies" track, as emerging technologies including AI are being developed and deployed with the intention to create disinformation for social, ideological and economic reasons. It is crucial that such technology is designed and regulated keeping in mind the adverse effects and harms it could create. |
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| Methodology / Agenda (Please add rows by clicking "+" on the right) | |||||||||||||
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| Moderators & Speakers Info (Please complete where possible) | |||||||||||||
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| Please explain the rationale for choosing each of the above contributors to the session. | |||||||||||||
| This session will be facilitated by Association for Progressive Communications (APC). APC is an international civil society organization and a network of members dedicated to empowering people working for peace, human rights, development and protection of the environment, through the strategic use of digital technologies. APC supports women, gender diverse people and vulnerable groups to safely connect and use digital technologies in ways that respond to their lived realities. We approach disinformation as a human rights issue since it has implications on people’s lives, rights and well being. APC conducts research on these issues and monitors and engages in disinformation policy and regulation at global, regional and national levels. Since 2022, APC has organised a series of consultations in collaboration with the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion on gendered disinformation, and contributed to her report on gendered disinformation presented last year. APC has also published its own report on the issue. Pavitra Ramanujam is the APC Asia Digital Rights Lead. Pavitra coordinates APC’s digital rights work in the region, which includes a rights-based and gendered analysis and advocacy of ICT laws and policies in Asia. Lisa Garcia is the Executive Director for the Foundation for Media Alternatives, Philippines (FMA), which is a civil society organisation promoting strategic and appropriate use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) for democratization and popular empowerment. FMA has been focusing on online gender based violence for many years, and has recently begun researching on gendered disinformation and its impacts. Bishakha Datta is the Programme Lead at Point of View, India (POV) that focuses on empowering women, girls, and gender and sexual minorities to shape and inhabit digital spaces. Point of View is currently implementing a project in the country to better understand gendered disinformation, its impact on various stakeholders and on creating awareness through community engagement. Asma Shirazi is a senior Pakistani journalist who anchors the primetime current-affairs show on Hum News in Pakistan and a member of The Coalition For Women In Journalism. Asma has been targeted by numerous disinformation campaigns and in 2023, she successfully won a case in the Islamabad High Court against Pakistan’s media watchdog complaint body related to a disinformation campaign targeting her. Mia Møhring Larsen is Tech Advisor for Human Rights & Global Engagement, at the office of Demark's Tech Ambassador, which leads the work at the Freedom Online Coalition Task Force on Information Integrity Online, a coalition co-chaired by Denmark, Netherlands, and Wikimedia Foundation. Its intention is to identify solutions to support trustworthy information online, engage the broader multi stakeholder community, and develop and propose policy recommendations for governmental institutions and lawmakers. |
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| Please declare if you have any potential conflict of interest with the Program Committee 2024. | |||||||||||||
| Yes | |||||||||||||
| If yes, please detail the person and his/her level of engagement on your session proposal. (e.g. 1 or more of the PC members are co-hosting/moderating/speaking at the session) | |||||||||||||
| Moderator is part of the program committee | |||||||||||||
| Are you or other session contributors planning to apply for the APrIGF Fellowship Program 2024? | |||||||||||||
| No | |||||||||||||
| Brief Summary of Your Session | |||||||||||||
| The session was an exploration of gendered disinformation and it's impact on various stakeholders, including public-facing actors such as politicians, journalists and activists as well as others such as young women and girls in urban and rural areas, LGBTQ communities, sex workers and others. The session began with a question to the audience on their understanding of gendered disinformation. There were a number of suggestions and sharing of experiences around this issues, including it's intersectional nature - for instance, women of religious minorities groups are disproportionately impacted by gendered disinformation in some countries, and queer persons are deliberately targeted online for their identity and labeled as 'predators' in other countries. The four panelists discussed the definition of gendered disinformation, its connection both to other forms of mis and disinformation as well as its connections to many forms of technology facilitated gender based violence. They shared specific examples of gendered disinformation campaigns that had been targeted at specific persons or communities, the impacts and harms of such campaigns, and measures that has been undertaken at various levels by civil society, through law, at the policy level and the community level to counter such impacts. The session concluded with questions from the audience on how such efforts could be undertaken in the context of their countries, what more could be done to advocate with social media platforms on this issues, and how spaces such as APrIGF and others could be better leveraged to raise awareness about these issues. |
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| Substantive Summary of the Key Issues Raised and the Discussion | |||||||||||||
| In Asia, women, trans and gender diverse people are often major targets of disinformation campaigns that are designed to attack their gender identity. The main objective of such campaigns is to delegitimise their voices and credibility and ensure that they are excluded from public debates and cultural spaces. While women in the public sphere, such as political actors, journalists and HRDs are most often the targets of these campaigns, it can in fact impact all women, even those without a public profile. This is due to the fact that gendered disinformation attacks are often opinions and emotional content aimed at inflaming people and exploiting existing biases, prejudices and stereotypes. They are also in most cases combined with other types of online gender-based violence, including hate speech, harassment and doxxing of the target. The disinformation campaigns are aimed at othering the targeted individual, allowing other forms of attack and harassment that accompany it to be normalised, creating an unsafe environment for those targeted online and offline. Countering gendered disinformation requires a whole-of-society approach, with both states and the private sector playing a key role. While states must regulate disinformation with caution, to ensure that it is does not disproportionately limit legitimate freedom of expression through criminalisation, it must seek to regulate emerging technologies such as deepfakes and other AI tools that are being increasingly used to manipulate content and spread disinformation against women and other gender-diverse persons. Social media platforms must better regulate disinformation on their platforms, including by having robust, transparent reporting mechanisms that recognise gendered disinformation, demonetising mis and disinformation and disincentivising such content on their platforms by removing such content, reducing its virality, and providing fact-checks and labels where relevant. Finally, states must work with civil society to raise awareness about the issue and counter existing societal biases and stereotypes about women and gender-diverse persons, provide support and protection for those targeted, and build capacities including through digital literacy of its citizens. |
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| Conclusions and Suggestions of Way Forward | |||||||||||||
| The session discussed a number of ways in which gendered disinformation campaigns can be addressed. This included: - Raising awareness about gendered disinformation and other identity-based disinformation so that those consuming content online can recognise such campaigns; - Digital literacy and capacity building programs for various stakeholder groups, including women and children, so that they are better equipped to recognise such mis/disinformation, seek out correct information, and engage in counter-campaigns where needed; - Digital safety programs for women, children and gender-diverse persons so that they can protect themselves better online; - Creation of positive content about gender equality and inclusion that provides alternative narratives in comparison to rhetoric based gendered disinformation campaigns that rely on gender stereotypes and bias; - Ensure that social media companies recognise and adopt better policies to counter gendered disinformation on their platforms as well as better content moderation and reporting mechanisms; - Advocating for responsible regulation of synthetic media that are being used in the creation of audio and video deepfakes, which directly contribute to the targeted spread of gendered disinformation; - Exploring legal measures such as civil defamation for those impacted where such measures are possible. |
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| Number of Attendees (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||||
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| Gender Balance in Moderators/Speakers (Please fill in numbers) | |||||||||||||
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| How were gender perspectives, equality, inclusion or empowerment discussed? Please provide details and context. | |||||||||||||
| The session's main theme was gender, and looking at how gender identity is often a target of misinformation and disinformation campaigns for a number of reasons, which ultimately results in undermining the voices and credibility of women and gender-diverse persons, and leaves them in situation of vulnerability and compromised safety. The session discussed ways in which such gendered disinformation can be addressed, in order to ensure that women and gender-diverse persons can feel empowered to actively take part in public conversations without fear of censorship or harassment. | |||||||||||||
| Consent | |||||||||||||
 I agree that my data can be submitted to forms.for.asia and processed by APrIGF organizers for the program selection of APrIGF 2024. |
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