What is the information space? It is the global public square, the agora on the scale of the planet where we can exchange information, ideas, opinions, but also videos, data, advertisements, invectives. Thanks to the digital revolution, the potential for communication between individuals and cultures has increased unimaginably, and this could be good news for humanity. The problem is that communication technologies suffer from a virtual absence of democratic regulation. Individual rights are in danger and democracies are drawn into a spiral of destruction.
A “digital jungle”
We live in a “digital jungle”, an “information chaos”. In the jungle, predators rule the day. Democracies are under attack from inside and outside. Technological facilities have freed old phenomena that the regulatory framework of the world managed to contain: disinformation, rumors, hatred, the spirit of conspiracy.
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The democratic debate is polluted by it. At the same time, authoritarian regimes are taking advantage of the New World Information Order by putting up barriers to entry into their national digital spaces (such as the Technological Great Wall of China), while exporting their destabilizing or propaganda content. .
The globalization of information is more or less the equivalent of what would be an economic globalization where certain national markets would be open to all winds while the other markets would remain protected. We know what this gives in economics: the destruction of the productive fabric of those who open their borders without requiring true reciprocity.
The slow poison of excess
In the informational domain, this results in the destruction of civil harmony and democratic public debate by the slow poison of the bullshit and excess and by the maneuvers of foreign manipulations. The national legal framework (rights and obligations) is obsolete and international law unsuited to this new situation.
Democratic institutions cannot let digital platforms make decisions that shouldn’t be theirs. We cannot let a platform suspend accounts on anyone’s social networks (the example of Donald Trump was the extreme example) without respecting democratic standards. We cannot let the same American company behave like a world ministry of truth, with an algorithm that for months censored the thesis (of which it is not known whether it is true or not) that the Coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan was the consequence of a laboratory leak.
« Code is law “. Computer code is the law. For the information space, technological companies have replaced the Parliaments which adopted the laws and the independent magistrates who applied them. It is urgent to put an end to the power of technological companies to enact and apply the rules of the public space.
Media blackmail
Neither should they be allowed to blackmail the media when a law on media funding does not please them. There is also an urgent need to end the fundamental asymmetry in the global information and communication space that gives authoritarian regimes a comparative advantage over democracies. The Digital Services Act (DSA) under discussion in Brussels is a promise of progress, but it will not be enough.
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Creating a system of democratic guarantees in the digital space is the meaning of the Information and Democracy Initiative, launched by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which has resulted in an intergovernmental partnership now signed by 43 states . After three years of work, a summit on information and democracy brings together the foreign ministers of this Partnership on September 24 in New York, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. This summit, chaired by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, and of which the Forum on Information and Democracy is a key player, is of major importance.
This coalition of democracies is meeting to discuss the very concrete recommendations formulated by the Forum on Information and Democracy, which is an original institution, an organ adapted to the challenges of the 21st century.e century. It enjoys total independence because its governance is the responsibility of civil society. The Forum, which brings together technology specialists, researchers, jurists, economists, from all continents, has put on the table hundreds of concrete recommendations, in its reports To put an end to infodemics and A New Deal for Journalism. In short, there are solutions, it remains to implement them.
Democratic disruption
Along with climate change, democratic change is one of the two greatest threats to humanity. The same level of mobilization is necessary. To put an end to “information chaos”, we need the equivalent of the “conferences of the parties”, the famous COPs, and the equivalent of the IPCC, which we are going to launch.
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The New York summit is a historic opportunity for important breakthroughs. For the informational chaos there is not yet the equivalent of the reference to the 2 degrees Celsius increase in average temperatures, but the democratic melting is underway.
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