RightsCon Tunis 2019

Trends Monitor-Tracking down Human Bot activity over Twitter (Media Matters for Democracy, Pakistan) 

Description: The main goal of this session is to introduce the digital rights community our latest research "Trends Monitor" to measure the human bot activity on Twitter. Using a range of analytics tools, the research looked at how organized human bots in Twitter were manipulating the political conversations near elections in Pakistan. During the talk, we will not only be sharing our methodology but also some of the key findings. By sharing our work, we hope to spark a discussion on effective research methodologies to quantify and understand the human bot activity and their role in disseminating disinformation and hate speech. It will also allow us to collaborate with researchers in future in improving our research methodology.

Speaker: Talal Raza

Truth vs Truthiness - Fighting Disinformation with Blockchain-based Human Rights Report Notarization (NDI - National Democratic Institute)

Description: In the fight against disinformation, are there ways we can affirm the true as well as attempting to debunk, bury or prevent the false? NDI, the Design for Democracy Coalition, Emercoin and the Blockchain Trust Accelerator created a new system, DemocracyNotary.org, for verifying and publishing a known-good copy of important documents from civic or governmental groups. It was tested from civil society election monitoring group MOST during North Macedonia's recent high-stakes name change referendum. NDI will discuss their experience with testing the built-in integrity verification capabilities of the blockchain-based Democracy Notary for this project.

Speaker: Chris Doten

Ticks or it didn’t happen: Discussing dilemmas when building authenticity infrastructure for multimedia (Mozilla Fellow / WITNESS) 

Description: The research 'Ticks or It Didn't Happen' - looks at the technical solutions currently being proposed by start-ups, platforms, companies, and civil society organizations for authenticating images, videos or audio recordings on the moment of capture as well as tracking this through the content’s lifecycle and use. These innovations will have a profound impact on how we assess user-generated content, engage with citizen journalists and trust critical dissident voices. This lightning talk will discuss the impacts these solutions may have on citizen journalists, marginal voices, those who need anonymity, and people with limited access and connectivity or older tools. There is also the broader impact on society these solutions pose where a blue tick or a watermark is necessary to be believed. What is the impact of a potential move to 'disbelief as default' on images and videos and who gets included, who left out by this?

Speaker: Gabi Ivens

China’s Triumph on Taiwanese elections: Perspective from a crowd-sourced fact-checking platform targeting disinformation on closed messaging apps (Cofacts)

Description: Autocracy influencing democratic societies using disinformation is a world-wide issue. As many countries facing threats from Russia, Taiwan’s sovereignty is continuously under China’s threat as disinformation breeds mistrust in Taiwanese community, which embraces free speech and has a high press freedom score.

This talk is to share our first-hand experience operating a crowd-sourced fact-checking chatbot that embraces diversity and avoids censorship, how we try to elicit media literacy of our users, and how we are faced with the first election since the launch of the project.

Our chatbot, Cofacts, is a chatbot in closed messaging app, LINE. It was launched in late 2016, having 60,000+ users and has collected over 23,000 user-reported messages. It is our approach to counter disinformation, without the loss of speech freedom. With openness and diversity built into its core methodology, the effectiveness of the collaborative fact-checking platform has been challenged by the election results.

We will bring popular messages collected from closed-messaging apps and their statistics so that the audiences can get to know the landscape of the disinformation during Taiwan’s election. Lastly, we will retrospect our current approach. Possible future directions will be discussed in the session. More info on Cofacts: bit.ly/cofacts-quickstart.

Speaker: Billion Lee and Johnson Liang