Welcome to the Official Schedule for RightsCon 2019, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age.
Together at RightsCon Tunis, our first summit hosted in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 2500 expert practitioners will come together across over 400 sessions to shape, contribute to, and drive forward the global agenda for the future of our human rights.
Important note: Whether you’re a session organizer, speaker, or participant, you’ll need to login to Sched or create an account in order to get the most out of the program (including creating a profile and building your own customized RightsCon schedule).
Parallel to the development of global online social media, ubiquitous mis-and-disinformation have been spreading on those platforms, often allegedly manipulated by foreign governments or political groups. This phenomenon poses serious questions over the role of social media and the internet in modern democratic societies. Having analysed the fake news / disinformation-fighting ecosystem, we have identified the following actors: social media platforms, fact-checkers, monitoring platforms, analysts, media literacy experts. Clustered because of their different backgrounds and practices, we noticed very few cross-expertise emerge. Concretely, incorporating a social dimension to technological solutions would certainly develop more successful projects, and vice versa. A more structured and connected community could bring significant added value. The issue of disinformation can take different forms from one country to another. Therefore, we want to bring together actors from different nationalities and backgrounds and build transnational positions. We would like to interact with participants about their knowledge and skills regarding disinformation phenomenon and think about how the civil society involvement could efficiently contribute to fighting this growing phenomenon. From a case study on Iranian disinformation, we will try to identify needed skills and design cooperation possibilities in order both to tackle disinformation more rapidly and build early resilience to disinformation.
