The following session will take place during the 2025 RightsCon Summit, 24-27 February, Taipei, Taiwan. For more information on the Summit, visit www.rightscon.com.
Roundtable discussion facilitated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, and the Wikimedia Foundation
Everyone, everywhere should be able to participate freely and safely in the creation, consumption, dissemination, and evaluation of information and ideas. A healthy information ecosystem should support and advance human rights, in particular freedom of expression. But recently, efforts to protect free speech and reliable information online – including with legitimate reason – risks undermining human rights. This includes both governments’ and companies’ active actions to control speech (including under the guise of countering disinformation), as well as their lack of addressing phenomena such as disinformation and hate speech to ensure people can safely access pluriform information without interference.
The right to freedom of expression and the global information ecosystem are complex topics. Global discourse as well as a majority of initiatives, and policies seem to primarily focus on the effects of the rapid spread of disinformation and misinformation that pollute the information ecosystem (which is accelerated by the developments of generative artificial intelligence). While disinformation is serious issue, overfocusing on content that needs to be removed may lead governments and companies to insufficiently address the essential ideas, values, and strengths of a healthy information ecosystem. Recent announcements from big tech platforms further underscore the need to refocus the conversation to what kind of global information ecosystem we wish to build and promote – rather than just focusing on what we would like to remove, block or take down.
Chaired by the Governments of Denmark and The Netherlands, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the Freedom Online Coalition’s (FOC) Task Force on Information Integrity Online launched a Blueprint on Information Integrity, which articulates a positive vision for a healthy online information ecosystem that supports the production and sharing of accurate, trustworthy and reliable information, and that protects and promotes human rights and democracy. The Blueprint presents three interconnected pillars: Agency – Trust – Inclusion.
During this roundtable conversation, the co-leads of the Task Force will briefly present this framework, and open up for a discussion about the key principles that underpin a healthy information ecosystem and how these manifest in different contexts. Participants are encouraged to contribute to this conversation on how we can utilize this framework to move forward this agenda, and to shift our attention towards the promotion of the key components needed to support a healthy, trustworthy, reliable, and inclusive information ecosystem.
2023 Freedom Online Coalition