Disinformation and fake news threaten democracy and it is necessary to demand much more transparency from the major digital platforms to combat them, UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay said in an interview with AFP on Tuesday.
“These platforms have become the place for public discussion, while giving them the power to set rules and norms,” said a United Nations official in Punta del Este, Uruguay, where he attended an international conference on Earth. Freedom of the Press Day.
The emergence of digital platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in the management of news content in recent years has created opinion bubbles that radicalize the society and affect the reliability of the press by changing the rules of the information game.
“All this happened extremely quickly,” he admitted. “There are certainly new challenges we must address if we are to preserve quality independent information vital to democratic societies.”
Algorithms that “govern the distribution of information” and the lack of transparency about them prevent major platforms from taking responsibility, he said.
Given the enormous influence these companies have on public debate, it’s essential for Audrey to prevent them from creating rules that will apply to them. It is urgent that governments address this issue,” she said.
Another threat to the press is financial survival in the face of the explosion in available digital content. In addition to rethinking their business models, they have to redouble their efforts to tackle complex disinformation campaigns in the context of digital education that barely distinguish between factual information and falsehoods or lies.
“There is an economic challenge because there is an illusion of reciprocity in digital. But nothing is actually free. Information has a cost of production. Moreover, the digital world is not free, it just lives on commerce. Data that people still have little awareness of,” Audrey said.
Journalists targeted by attacks
For the UNESCO director, another urgent task of protecting freedom of the press is to ensure the safety of journalists, who are the target of constant threats and violent attacks. “It’s governments that should help these protection mechanisms in the first place,” he guessed.
“The freedom of journalists is the freedom of citizens. It is the possibility of accessing accurate information, independent information”, so “awareness raising is absolutely necessary” in the society.
According to the data of the UNESCO Observatory for Murdered Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists, a total of 956 journalists worldwide were killed for doing their work in 2010-2020, 2,647 of them were arrested. Moreover, according to the UN agency, 85% of the cases of journalists killed in the last three decades remain unresolved or unreported.
Audrey Azoulay underlined the work carried out by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, headquartered in San José, to demand the application of protection mechanisms in Latin America, where threats and crimes against media workers predominantly stem from organized crime. “We must be aware that what is at stake is actually the heart of democracy.”
source: Noticias
