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Hello and welcome to our second edition of Upgrade Democracy News!
Time flies and a lot has happened since the first issue of our newsletter on May 10. We held the second workshop in our impulse series with Humboldt Institute (HIIG) - this time on the topic "Potentials of Smaller Platforms: what can we learn from them?." If you want to know more about this, you can find a new impulse paper (in German) on our website and linked below.
Over the past two weeks, I've explored and contemplated the question of what civil society can do in practical terms to counter disinformation and strengthen fact-based, fair and lively democratic discourse on the web: What approaches have worked? What doesn't work so well? And where are the gaps to implement effective solutions? In addition to government regulation and research, I believe that practical measures to promote media and information literacy are an important lever in the fight against disinformation. In a few months, this will once again become a focal point of attention when election campaigns kick off to usher in the super election year 2024. In addition to elections in the U.S., India, and the EU, three state elections are also coming up in Germany. Unfortunately, it is already clear that anti-democratic agitators will try to manipulate voters and undermine our democracy with targeted disinformation campaigns. In addition to politicians and media we as citizens should also defend ourselves against disinformation and conspiracy myths and have effective strategies at hand in everyday life. Indeed, numerous capacity trainings and educational materials are already available. However, the dissemination of good practice and its sustainable anchoring in existing structures still seems to be a challenge. What good practice already exists and where effective approaches still need to be developed and implemented is something I will continue to look at over the next few months and will be happy to report on here. If you have any suggestions or tips, please feel free to share them.
In the context of preventive measures against the spread and influence of disinformation, I have been looking more closely at the approach of prebunking over the past few days. In contrast to the debunking method, in which false information is disproved through fact-checking after it is published, prebunking is about limiting the spread of disinformation, i.e. prior to publication. To this end, media users are sensitized to manipulation techniques and enabled to recognize false information more quickly. In this way, the damage caused by disinformation can be limited. That sounds very promising to me. At the same time, this approach seems to involve a lot of effort, and the more subtly disinformation is spread, the harder it is to expose it. I would be interested to hear what you think of the prebunking approach and what challenges and opportunities you see here.
Finally, I am currently following the debate about disinformation and AI with great interest. In the last few weeks, it has been shown many times how easy and deceptively real false images, videos or texts can be generated with AI: Images of Trump's arrest or Putin's genuflection before Chinese leader Xi Jingping circulated on the web a few weeks ago. Authoritarian anti-democratic regimes can use AI to produce and disseminate disinformation even more efficiently. How can this be dealt with in the future? What regulations do we need and how can we protect ourselves against AI-generated disinformation? But all this is, once again, only one side of the coin: because AI can also help to detect disinformation. The future will show how promising such approaches are. My guess is that the fight against disinformation will be about bringing human and artificial intelligence together and not just relying on one or the other. In this context, by the way, I find the noFake project by research center CORRECTIV, Ruhr University Bochum and the Technical University (TU) Dortmund very exciting.
We hope you enjoy Upgrade Democracy News and welcome any feedback and ideas for things to include or change. And: we would love it if you could help us spread the word.
The next issue drops in 2 weeks.
Warmly, Julia
All info on: Read paper
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