Miami (September 20, 2024) - With a harsh diagnosis of the role of Artificial Intelligence in its intersection with journalism and a call to present a united front against the proliferation of disinformation and the detractors of democracy, the IV Global Summit on Disinformation, held virtually, concluded on Friday.
The two-day Global Summit on Disinformation brought together more than 35 international experts on disinformation. The event had more than 1500 registered participants from 50 countries who followed the debates and presentations with an active participation in the chat room and comments.
The Executive Director of the Inter American Press Association, Carlos Lauría, focused on the negative impact that disinformation campaigns are having on democracies: "Journalism is crucial to bring reliable information to audiences", he insisted. From the Organizing Committee, Adrián Pino highlighted: "Disinformation is a global challenge that requires a coordinated and collaborative response", said the director of Proyecto Desconfío and member of the committee that promotes this Summit.
The director of Meta's Global Threat Disruption Department, David Agranovich, stated during his presentation that after detecting coordinated campaigns to interfere in the electoral process in the United States, "we deleted accounts and profiles to stop this malicious influence".
The case is repeated in other electoral instances, as reported by the data verification agencies FactChequeado, Chequeado and Maldita.es. The latter organization evidenced that "the false information identified did not have the expected response from the big platforms", especially in the case of TikTok and YouTube which did not intervene to stop or dissuade such contents in the European Parliament elections.
As for Artificial Intelligence, Proof News founder Julia Angwin opened the event by denouncing the biases, harmful and unrigorous information shared by the most popular AI tools when it comes to issues of public interest. "The need for professional journalists cannot be set aside to be replaced by the use of artificial intelligence," she remarked.
For his part, the leader of the Journalism Trust Initiative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Bertrand Mossiat, stressed the need to "move towards a quality standard for journalists. This is part of the condition for rebuilding trust in the media," he warned.
With four main thematic axes: Strengthening democracy in the face of disinformation; Media strategies in the face of disinformation narratives; Innovation and AI in the face of disinformation; and Education and Media and Information Literacy (MAI) in times of deepfakes, the Summit provided a series of proposals for an effective fight against disinformation in the future, and showed the importance of collaboration and innovation in the protection of democracy.
The Executive Committee of the event announced that in the coming week it will issue a statement to mark the challenges posed by the problem of disinformation in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
The IV Global Summit on Disinformation was supported by the Google News Initiative, the U.S. Embassy in Argentina, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), the Kimberly Green Center for Latin America and the Caribbean (LACC) of Florida International University (FIU) and Bertelsmann Stiftung.
Accompanying the event were: International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), IJNet and IJNet en Español, Medianálisis, Asociación Nacional de Prensa de Chile (ANP), Fundación GABO, Asociación Colombiana de Medios de Información (AMI), Asociación de Entidades Periodísticas de Argentina (ADEPA), Knight Center for Journalism of the Americas, United Nations Bolivia, Diario Perfil, InfoVeritas, ConverCom and Bolivia Verifica. In collaboration with DW Akademie.
The IAPA is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending and promoting freedom of the press and expression in the Americas. It comprises more than 1,300 publications from the western hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida, United States.
