expression so toby what's what's the trend what's what's the what's defining free speech you know fortunately i'm getting to the point where i'm not that insulted anymore by being cold old so it's it's al right yes so you you as you introduced it says that what what has defined free speech in the in the last year or two years and i probably didn't read my instructions properly so i'm not actually going to talk about what i think define free speech but rather about something where i thought was a rather interesting development so it's it's you know it's it's not doesn't reach the importance of definitional but i think it's quite an interesting development in an important area and the area is on safety so very different from anything we've discussed so far and i mean safety in the sense of attacks on freedom of expression especially physical attacks and i mean this is an issue which the world has been grappling with for you know a long time and an issue which doesn't really seem to have experienced much success at all the number of journalists killed according to established ratings really i mean it goes up and down a bit year by year but it hasn't you know gone down in a structural sense over the last years the level of impunity for the people who commit those crimes hasn't also gone down you know goes up and down a little tiny bag that one doesn't move very much so we have this problem in two thousand and twelve the united nations n that plan of action was the idea of national safety mechanisms so specialized arrangements dedicated to combating well both to providing protection and to combating impunity because there are these two sides of under the sort of a safety umbrella those are the two main elements and at that time there were probably only two countries that really had a national mechanism mexico and colombia  and the reviews of those two and and a couple of other sort of more limited mechanisms were i would say largely negative in the mexican side almost entirely slightly more positive reviews of the colombian one  but not as so much so okay that was two thousand and twelve since then you know almost no i mean we got you know two hundred countries in the world forty or fifty have serious safety  issues almost no developments in this area despite that so it's sort of a frozen area and over the last few years we've started to see a few developments and and i think i mean they're they're interesting first of all because i think we're starting to see movement in this space firstly and secondly because the the types of mechanisms are looking very very different and i think much more integrated integrated in the sense that they deal with both protection and impunity and integrated in the sense that they build in civil society and multi stakeholder participation much more you know solidly into the into them and i will talk very briefly about two of those that i've been personally involved with neither of them has yet come completely so they don't actually exist as mechanisms yet but you know they're sort of on the way the first is in nepal and they're the mechanism will be it will be i hope optimistically speaking based in the national human rights commission the national human rights commission of nepal has an amazing mandate it has the were to go out and directly investigate crimes of you know that breach human rights it can require the attorney general to bring a case so e the ministry of justice so the police sorry the ministry of the interior the police and several civil society organisation and of course the national human rights commission beneath that a working level again with civil society hardwired and the working level group will where an allegation comes up action you know the network of primary investigation and protection providing mechanisms so really a radically new model working on both sides where civil society is completely integrated from the top to the bottom the second mechanism where i've been working is in iraq and iraq if those of you who follow this issue will again a sort of an oversight committee where civil society is hardwired into it it involves all of the key players including in this case the judiciary which i think is very important you know partner to have in inside of a mechanism that not inside of the nepal mechanism so i think it's really interesting that after years and years of sort of lip service to this idea finally now we're seeing at least some ideas although they haven't yet as i said being in place but at least some concrete plans and what's really interesting they're sort of multi in the sort of both sides of the equation and multi stakeholder in the proper sense civil society properly integrated ask you what do you think has been the key development or key defining moment for freedom of expression over the last period yeah well again i apologize for not being nany because money would have shown up very well prepared to this panel and i didn't have enough time even to ask her for all her notes but she would have kind of chapter in verse on many cases around the world that that are being fought right now you know overall i think you know the attack on online civil society is is growing worse the committee to protect journalists on whose board i said you know tracks jailed journalists and in addition to journalists have been killed and and other things and you know the the largest group  of jailed journalists are online are those reporting online and and they define you know doing journalism online pretty broadly in part it's because of course government's kind of see how effective civil society has been using effectively civil society and independent journalists have been in using the internet but i guess to come down to sort of the defining issue around freedom of expression and the internet in the past twelve months it's it's really brexit and and the u s election and the election of the current occupant of the white house that's the only title i'm going to confer upon that person but you know and and i think a little bit of a moral panic on the part of democracies or at least in part of a segment of people and democracies who define themselves is not populist about the way in which platforms are being manipulated for disinformation campaigns i don't like the term fake news but for information warfare and disinformation campaigns and i think the the kind of concern the rising concern of you know not only is there an issue with censorship but there's an issue of kind of the the flooding of the the discourse space with disinformation with hate speech with other things that drowns  out other types of speech you know and and so so it's kind of a battle of the volume of different kinds of speech which then certain types of speech are either drowning out or silen g the right of certain types of speakers and and so how do you deal with that right and and how you deal with the the centralization of information platform which you know whose rules or mechanisms then can be gamed by certain actors more than others that certain voices kind of are in a better position to take advantage of those platforms than others  what you do about it and you know on the moral panic side that there's been sort of a and we'll talk more about this in the next panel but sort of a jump to regulation on the part of some governments that has been quite unhelpful and you you see in global voices among other organizations have been tracking and of the the proliferation of anti fake news laws around the world and you know you have the nets dg which isn't officially an anti fake news law in in germany but you know there's that kind of aspect of it but but you see a number of countries from  malaysia to you know a whole range russia you know a whole range of different countries enacting laws around disinformation china has had a law against spreading rumors for a long time under which somebody was jail quite recently who was reporting on corruption so so yeah we i think the defining moment is we're realizing that kind of freedom of speech and and how you actually govern speech in a manner that enables the freedom for the freedom and look rights for all voices not just the the strongest and the most well financed but also how do we avoid the moral panic that will just make things worse thank you i in fact may be to follow up on what you've just presented i think it will make sense maybe fo understood differently from from this country in many european countries as well as cultural security and both informational security and cultural security allow countries to impose some countries to impose straightforward sanctions against information any information which comes from a particular source of such information from a country which potentially disseminates depend from country to country and the situation in different countries are different but i see them as is quite important trends to monitor whether they will become really stable and effective or in europe thank you thank you thank you very much also without mentioning you know who i'm probably gonna say some of the same things that rebecca said but less eloquently i think that that one of the most significant developments over the last year here in the us has been the deepening and complicating of the debate about free speech on social media and i would point first to the supreme court's decision in a case called packing him versus north carolina which was decided last summer and as a case in which the court struck down under the first amendment a law that banned registered sex offenders from accessing the internet and the fact that the law was struck down was probably not not that surprising but the language in the court's decision was very broad very positive about the democratic  force that the internet now has in our society very positive about the democratic potential of social media recognizing that the most important space right now for the exchange of ideas is cyberspace that ordinary people engage in all sorts of constitutionally protected activity on social media and recognizing that social media is now the way that many public officials communicate with their constituents so it you know it's a recognition at the highest level that of the connection between social media and and in the first  amendment now since then we've also seen a recognition of the pathologies engendered by social media and some of these have already been mentioned some of them stem from the actions of users on social media so abuse or harassment or machine amplified propaganda and disinformation i mean all of that is stems from the actions of third parties on using social media but then some of the pathology stem from the practices of the social media companies themselves pervasive surveillance filter bubbles seemingly arbitrary censorship which is paired with a seeming indifference on the part of the platforms to addressing abuse and manipulation by some of their users and i think that mark zuckerberg testimony just a couple of weeks ago before congress it was unsatisfying in many different ways but it the fact of the testimony was i think an indication of the the public's growing recognition of the power of the social media platforms and the implications of that power so  i think that that debate is you know only going to continue over the next year it's probably going to center around among other questions the question of to what extent platforms should be responsible for the content posted by their users as most of you probably know there is a statute in the united states that gives very broad immunity to the platforms for content posted by their users that statute was certainly necessary to the development to the emergenc of the social media platforms as we know them today many people think that that immunity is too broad and that the breadth of the immunity has many costs including free speech costs that the immunity disincentivizes the platforms from addressing abuse and harassment and because they don't address abuse and harassment many voices marginal voices are driven away from the platforms they they become disengaged from the public square and so you know a number of different scholars have have and and and advocacy groups have proposed narrowing the immunity and there will be it has been narrowed over the last couple months  through through regulation but it may be narrowed further over the next year so that's one question and the only the other question i wanted to mention is to to what extent is  moderation of content by the platforms something that we should be worried about or celebrate you know what should our attitude be towards content moderation on the part of the other platforms and that's actually i think a complicated question because the platforms can be conceived of in different ways you can think of the platforms as speakers or editors and they are sometimes speakers or editors or curators of expressive communities but sometimes it's less useful or less accurate to think of them in that way and instead we ought to think of them as facilitators of other people's speech and if you think of them as facilitators of other people's speech then maybe your attitude towards moderation or even censorship on the  platforms ought to be different and sometimes we should think of the platform's not as speakers or editors or publishers and not solely as ma as facilitators of other people's speech but rather as part of the infrastructure of democracy and if you think of them as part of the infrastructure of democracy  you know again your attitude towards moderation or speech or censorship of speech on the platform's might be might be different and certainly your attitude towards the constitutionality of regulation governing and the be talking about the impact of artificial intelligence on freedom of expression so while it's it's tempting to think of killer robots and you know a robot doing a lawyer's job for example as an organization we focused very specifically on short medium term impacts on freedom of expression and what i mean by that is that we're not looking at whether you know robots should be given legal rights but we're actually looking at how do machine learning systems that actually run our everyday lives have an impact on freedom of expression and to discuss this i think that the most interesting trend really has been how we're developing ethical guidelines and and how companies and governments and and and you know individuals are approaching this idea so i think usually when you think of governments at least i think of regulation i just assume that governments will want to regulate what's strange with artificial intelligence is that most governments are shying away from regulation they're coming up with ethical task forces and they're coming up with guidelines and they're coming up with conferences and centers of excellence in ai ethics but nobody is really talking about consider each government's risk appetite right so for example i come from india india's government recently came out with a task force on ai and the task force you know speaks about national security and how so not national security a is great for national security there's no human rights consideration there but in the retail sector is where we really have to think about freedom of expression right and then you you you move over to the uk and and the house of lo you know at one point he was also like how do you bring down content what what is content that you know you should bring down what what content should a itu's flag off automatically and i think the answer was anything that makes people uncomfortable and that that is not  in machine learning right can can human rights standards be the minimum requirement on which you build all of these technical standards you know when you think about things like regulating credit scoring say not in the us because i know it's well regulated here but in in countries that don't have have regulation how do you think about fairness how do you think about equality what we're finding is that human rights are the only framework that have shared understanding internationally and they have enforcement mechanisms which ethical guidelines don't have and that's really been a challenge to talk about ok ethical guidelines are great you know they let us evaluate whether we are on the good side of the bad side under tend is this to move away from standards if we know and understand and how do we bring back human rights language into a discussion that is almost predicated on it thank you very much the last  individual to participate in the public debate and criticize the government and the public officials without the fur of criminal proceedings and the right to journalists to carry out their professional in safe condition are to be seen as part of the institution of democracy rather than as corporate actors and that is huge of course implications the question of immunity liability of intermediaries quite an interesting one because we had a prohibition on you know false news disseminating false news and the supreme court fairly comprehensively struck it down so if you're legally arguing against that and interestingly there have been some cases in africa a really remarkable case from the supreme court of zimbabwe also you know for building on the the zulu case in canada we're talking about at lunch and even going further than that so i think that there's you know at the judicial level you know there is there is a body of work out there that highlights pretty clearly and wealth you know the reasons why those kinds of general prohibitions as opposed to inaccurate information related to you know hate speech to is this is a great time for the first amendment in american courts american courts i think first amendment claims do better than almost any other constitutional claims in american courts and the supreme court in particular complicated you know the the the supreme court has a particular vision of the first amendment which privileges autonomy interests over self government or truth seeking you know th supreme court is when i say the supreme court i'm really talking about justice kennedy you know who's you know on on this set of issues and many other sets of issues the most important justice for better for veteran worse but you know often the the supreme court's vision of the first amendment is one the privileges speakers over listeners that thinks of speakers in isolation rather than as part of a system of free expression and i think that that explains the supreme court's attitude towards campaign finance regulations maybe it explains its attitude towards commercial speech as well and the the  interesting one interesting thing about the social media questions is that you often have first amendment claims on both sides or at least free speech claims on both sides you have the platforms that are characterizing themselves as speakers  editors or publishers entitled to the full protections of the first amendment and then on the other hand you have the users who are also exercising free speech rights on these you know on these platforms and are invoking the same values even if they it's harder for them to invoke the first amendment directly but they're invoking the same values and so you have free speech you know you have to decide which free speech arguments should prevail and at the end of the day free speech is gonna win you know free speech is gonna win but it's going to be one version of free speech over another version and and i think that's a and i'm not an unprecedented thing but an unusual thing and something that one had all the reviews which were not made public by the way said okay now we see it's a national security matter we should allow the special services and prosecution to make the opinion within two weeks that was possible to draw from the constitutional right of individuals to receive information since the right to receive information includes the right to receive information both truthful verifiable and neutral as well as fix received from other sources to engage in critical thinking and increases the will to seek and long other views on the subject this leads to self realization of the person and encourages an ongoing social discourse on the subject nonny i really thought it was important especially with this question about courts and litigation to bring up the work that nani is doing with the digital freedom fund which is supporting strategic litigation around the world and and that's  precisely because it is in the courts where you know there's a real hope to stop bad law to to to reverse back to push back against bad practice and bad law and she actually sent me a list of a number of cases and i won't read all the details here but you know just last week in ireland the court of appeal agreed that the data of an anonymous  revealed and and of course that link between privacy and freedom of expression with anonymous speech is is really important and and so she's kind of god is citing a list of cases you know from court decisions that are what i think the panel would all agree on on the right side of a freedom of expression and and also around privacy so one of the cases she she didn't mention but i think is probably fairly well known to some of the people in the room is the indian supreme court's decision last year that private privacy is a human right you know is is is a civil right under in under the indian constitution and that very much interrelated freedom of expression in the indian context so so i think that in many countries around the world the courts are an important place for this fight and and it's i think organizations like nannies that are kind of helping and supporting people doing strategic litigation around the world to compare notes to to be globally strategic about these cases is is important  have a comment to build on jameelah's comments because i think he raises a really important point what about a court case a constitutional case or an international human rights case where freedom of expression is pitted against freedom of expression if you and i think basically my observation of being the courts don't know how to deal with that well they don't have a proper approach to dealing with that if you look under international law we have a guarantee of freedom of expression states are allowed to restrict freedom of expression but they have to you know jump through a lot of hoops to justify that restriction  basically you know strong presumption in favor of free speech and you know limited right to restrict it and that's absolutely proper because you know freedom of expression human right and we're restricting that human right but when you have a case pitting free speech against free speech or freedom of expression but you know broader concept perhaps that analysis doesn't work anymore if we imagine that you know to freedom of expression arguments against each other if the case is bought by the left hand but the right hand left hand you you know then then the right hand have to justify the restriction even though and if the other one bought so you could you could imagine the case where it was almost random or where the case was tilted based on the established jurisprudence and you see the courts doing that there you know the european court of human rights for example when it sees these two values pitted against each other it walks through exactly the same test it doesn't apply it properly because somewhere in its being it feels that there's a freedom of expression interest on the other side but it has not developed a proper juris prudential approach to that which in my mind would have to say now we're having an internal argument internal two perspectives on freedom of expression we can't just walk through this same t because the three part test properly creates an unlevel bank playing field and so i really think that you know there i don't have a i mean i've tried to think of what they an analytical framework that could be and i don't have one because the variety of interests are so broad and often you have a collective free speech interest you know the right of the listener to receive information verses or whatever it is but something has to you know i think the courts have to move forward on that and where we are now is not a good place on that okay so you you're you're  that the balancing rights approach cannot be applied when we are dealing with the same right no what i'm saying is the the free speech analysis under international law is not a balancing approach it's a we protect free speech and you have to justify your restriction go walk up a big hill go through a i'm mixing my metaphors but you know jump through a bunch of little hoops and you do manage to jump through those hoops we're gonna accept your restriction there is i think when you see conflicts between rights like between free speech and privacy then you get a little bit closer to it but courts have always said even in that case you still have to justify the restriction even though privacy is a right but you still have to jump through the same three hoops the three part test basically but i don't think that works let's imagine a practical example i bring a case claiming that my right as the consumer of news is threatened by the absence of strong anti  monopoly control over the media so there's no law in my country that prevents monopoly control this guy owns everything i'm not my right to receive information is threatened and then the court has got that you know the government's got to justify why it doesn't have an aunt monopoly law let's imagine another country where they have that law and the media owner brings the same case saying this i'm a developer laws restrict my free speech are the results going to be different is the test going to be different can't be so i think you know it's it's the balancing is not what normally happens and even with that's not how the courts treated so i think that there needs to another kind of test okay interesting so some kind of a new really technical development within within the the jurisprudence which i don't know we w apart from an independent judiciary take cases take far too long some cases that we initiated back in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten sandra knows well because they provided us some funding they still go through the courts and constitutional court level you wait another three years and then you take cases to the european court of human rights takes another four years so twelve to thirteen years lifecycle if you're lucky get priority treatment from the european court and i would say within ten years so redress mechanisms especially with regards to freedom of expression cases in europe this is not a unique problem to turkey but andre would say probably for russia in some other case countries  has been blocked in turkey for over a year now we're going to ask priority treatment from the european court of human rights next month but because the constitutional court is not deciding but by the time the european court decides it will be another three years but just majority of those sixty zero applications were rejected by the court because they said you have to apply to a commission which was set up last year with regards to state of emergency measures but that is taking time then any public officer you could find yourself in jail for up to seven years and basically the courts found that the provision does not make any sense since citizens should be able to to in or initiatives of monitoring of protection that can be established among the civil society for example and here i would like to share with you you mentioned that you mentioned giving a reference to a european development this time in two thousand and sixteen the committee of ministers of the council of europe adopted a recommendation which was addressed to the organisation's forty seven member states its focus was on the protection of journalism and the safety of journalists and other media actors so the first prong the protection of journalism covers all the activities involved in journalism so the pre publication activities such as news gathering substantive protection for content  freedom and also protection for the dissemination of the publication the second prong and tries to ensure that there would be protection not only for professional journalists but also for the growing range of other contributors to public debate so that's perhaps at least symbolic significance in itself what the recommendation tried to do was to take the expansive body of case law of the european court of human rights dealing with both prongs to the recommendation and bring it together organize it and operationalize it so it's all very well having these principles but what is still required in order to implement them effectively and one novel feature of that recommendation is a call on member states to set up or enable independent reviews of national laws including draft laws case law policy and practice to ensure compliance with article ten of the european convention of human rights so where as toby referred to some some promising initiatives that have yet to bear fruition this is something that has borne fruit but the fruit needs to be plucked this recommendation is calling out for political traction member states of the council of europe need to get on board and and and instead of and and actually implemented the council of europe itself is busy devising an implementation strategy and there were one or two initiatives going on at national level to try and generate this traction that it needs to get off the ground so i just wanted to put that on people's radar screens and if anybody's interested in more  a whole and wondering whether there's something that we might call the era of free expression which has a beginning an arc and an end and the question would be how geopolitically does that  drawn does it work this way or does it work that way etc and how does it relate to the function of this the way the panel sees the world and the way it is there the global project at columbia sees the world so it seems to me there is this effort to influence the arc that is to say we're all part of influencing the ark foundations are part of influencing the ark the press established with unesco just trying to talk about another challenge and then thinking for your comments on that we always had a relationship more problematic or less problematic between elections so during elections time we face in many countries of this dis planet more violence against journalists but we also can talk about media concentration and it effects and elections or freedom of information request about elections but now with this entire story on the so called fake news or false news we are experienced a lot of troubles related to elections and i'm particularly concerned in the role of the judges on that in many countries  have special courts for elections called electoral justice and we are witnessing a very complex way of the judges are dealing with this phenomena and the political parties in some countries are trying to extend the competition during the election period through the courts and this can be a risk to democracy although we need to deal with the problem of freedom of expression so i think we do have a challenge here in also assessing better the question you know i mean i think a lot of different mechanisms can be useful so another country that i'm working on on the safety issue is pakistan they have six civil society based or non you know government based mechanisms doing different things and some quite interesting things for example one of them is a group of you know an editor the editors based mechanism and they simply coordinate so that when an attack occurs you know they're all reporting reliably and more or less on the same facts about the attack so that you know it just and it helps build and they make sure they report on it so it builds the case and you know emphasizes the thing but i think that ultimately there are limits to how far a civil society based mechanism can go for example on the impunity side you know i mean civil society cannot really investigate i mean they can to collect some evidence but they're not professionals with that they don't have the legal powers and they don't also have the knowledge it's a very scientific and you know we need the police to do that basically or at least you know trained properly trained people they certainly can't bring a case and they  decide a case so i mean i think there are you know limits in pakistan where they have this thing still a important thrust of the movement for safety is to get an official mechanism so what i guess i would say is you know it's great to have civil society mechanisms it's not always easy to get an official mechanism and not every country has the level of problem that it needs an official mechanism not not saying that every country needs one of these things you know i mean i don't know exactly where tunisia is at the moment on that that was closer to the situation there so i think that it's you know different strokes for different folks but if you have a serious problem i think that ultimately you should be aiming for an official mechanism just to mention a little bit on the two sides what you also  the you know the protection side is about when somebody's at risk you know they might have received some threats or where they raised any credible evidence about being at risk you know we want to protect them before they become a casualty and want to the impunity side of things you know we want to stop these things the colombian mechanism which is a huge and very well funded mechanism it's entirely focusing on that side so it you know ultimately you some cases you can get an armored vehicle you can get protection you can get whatever but obviously on the impunity side and on the impunity side i mean it you know nine out of ten of these cases are never in the globally are never brought to trial now put in a lot of countries lots of cases don't go to trial because the you know police are not that efficient and these are sophisticated cases in most cases you know they're sophisticated criminals specifically targeting somebody with a high polluting on they're not just sort of ordinary criminals trying to steal some money that they might do stupidly so they get caught more easily you know they're they're prosecuting these crimes effectively let's say but most of the time so you but but you know that but in response to that and because of the seriousness of these crimes for the whole of society you know the censorship by killing is the term that the special rapporteurs have used in this context you know you need a higher level so you need more more more police resources you need better trained police you know you need to really make sure that impunity in these crimes is not that great if i may say something galleries i mean i think that this is a really really important issue and you know not just the judicial relationship but the whole space essentially if we look at the traditional tools that democrac have used to you know help create a level playing field during elections they are things like around spending and around balance and impartiality in the broadcast media those are the two main tools that democracies use you know with the space that we're going you know sort of decline in traditional media influence the ways of getting around and using relatively small amounts of money to have huge impacts using cambridge analytical and other clever tools so both of those tools are essentially breaking down and i think we really need to revisit the whole thing and not to be propagandist but my organization sponsoring a panel discussion at wri in toronto to which i'm sure many of your going edison will be on our panel as well where we're going to be discussing that issue i think we really need to start thinking a little bit outside the box on that okay  the the the whole idea of independent review of laws i keep hearing about this more and more and more more discussion of the need both for independent review and sort of impact assessment of proposed law or existing law on different rights both with innocent jurisdiction and also globally so there there been a number of cases where i've seen people calling it you know we already have companies doing human rights impact assessments on how particular policies or practices will affect their users globally in different ways i actually wrote something with with unesco a few a few years ago where one of our recommendations was that national laws that affect online speech should be subject to a human rights impact assessment that looks at the global implications for freedom of expression of that law not just within its own borders and and that that a country that's that's actually committed to global freedom of expression of feel one of the reasons why we are where we are today is that there have been too many assumptions made that the arc of history and technology is ultimately towards freedom and then everybody just kind of expected that that technology would automagically take us to more freedom of expression just kind of automatically and now here we are so so i i think that there isn't a predetermined arc and that assumptions about predetermined arcs are going to take us to very dark places where people don't take responsibility for their own actions and we all have to build the the direction of history directly ourselves and make no assumptions about it's going won't live to  regret it i promised myself i wouldn't be cynical the second time i spoke but i'm gonna break that promise because literally everything i have heard on this panel all i'm thinking is oh my god it's so much worse with machine learning it's so much worse with machine learning so right from safety of journalists you know we have facial recognition software that changes our perception of public space usually public space so you are guaranteed anonymity it allowed you to do things in the public space with facial recognition if that changes you know we alter how we behave and if you look at how machine learning systems work it's actually worse for the minority than it is for the majority because when machine learning systems are trained for example they have you know it's been proven that they have more  you know less dark skinned people in that database so now that database is worse at accurately determining who the dark skinned people are which means that they then you know end up arresting more people and it's kind of this horrible  circle where where our reality which isn't perfect is feeding something that doesn't understand context and i just wanted to leave y'all with that depressing thought thank you thank you just maybe yeah i i mean i i do ecosystem are quite baby actors in many ways and don't they need a bit more time to learn to become you know  actors within the global system if you think of the nation state which has several centuries of a history and they are not all acting very well most of them but they're you know i i don't know whether even democratic reasonably new actors in in the information system i can respond very quickly to that i think there's this romanticism of innovation i think maybe you were talking about five years ago i'm the problem with the way that actors as you term them baby actors and the way that they're functioning now is that they're not they have a real impact on everyday life that is often is reversible as well and and the they for example you know i can i can be upset if facebook took down a post but i don't know what to be upset about what i'm not seeing right so they influenced what i see but also what i don't see and if they have such know visceral impact on everyday life then we have to hold them to the standard that they actually exercise i don't think that the the reasoning of them being new to the ecosystem should be used because the the impact that they have is not new pervasive and it's dangerous and it's irreversible as well again negative but yeah i guess just just to add on to that and to state the obvious i mean they are baby actors in in the sense  of seeming to be considering for the first time the implications of the power that they have but they have immense power right if facebook wanted to decide an election tomorrow or in two years it could decide the election and you know just by making tweaks to its algorithms you know that privilege one political party over another or one set is you know effectively the only source of information and so yes you know we it's dangerous to act quickly when the technology is changing so you know so quickly but it's also very dangerous not to act and you know that that's what makes these questions so you know so so difficult is that we we have very limited information in part because the social media companies are opaque but in part because they they haven't been around for very long and at least in the form that they now take and yet we have to we have to figure out how to you know how to act very quickly to avoid the kinds of you know really substantial and irreversible harms that could result if we didn't act okay we have a few minutes  looking ahead could each one of you give us a positive milestone looking ahead within the next twelve months what is it that you think and the actors and and what technology has brought to to some places so just inviting you to reflect maybe more if there is a way to reflect m well i'm i started out my comments saying i may have misunderstood your your instructions on your email but on this one i'm pretty sure i understood it and you said what is some advice to resist and move forward so instead of something positive and i think i've been fairly positive to so far so i'm going to talk about resisting and how we can move forward and you know people have used to say anyway that you know the internet wherever or the digital revolution is like the printing press and i mean looking at it very much  from an informational and communication a point of view and i think that you know it's easy to get misled into that because it is communications driven but i actually think it's much more like the industrial revolution in the sense that it's fundamentally you know altering our entire social and economic and you know interactive framework much beyond misses a lot of communication base but it's much more than that you know the taxi guy that drove me and yesterday was worried about self driven cars and i mean if we look at what happened during the industrial revolution and i mean we you know you said we have to move klee this thing is happening in a massively reverse telescope the time frame but in the industrial revolution over a period a long period of time we completely revised our whole legal framework you know we we basically developed tort law we developed a new this morning said we should spend some money to you know government should be spending money to address the problems you know we developed the social welfare state okay which basically was the response from d i mean we completely you know sort of the before and after which was over a long period of time so it didn't look like the before and after but you know and i think that you know when we talk about should we regulate or not or should we this should be that should with that i mean you know these are the you know and the somebody this morning sort of mentioned marxism and you hope that i mean without being a supporter of marxism the theory of marxism and that political thing drove western states you know to reevaluate in more radical ways probably i mean i'm not a historian but then then then you know then they would have otherwise and i think we need to and i don't have the answers you know but we need to really be thinking outside the box i think we need to be thinking of this is a completely transformative moment for our world and that you know sort of how we going to regulate or not you know you definitely i mean i'm with annal absolutely we're gonna regulate but we need to think what or whatever we need to spend money we need to do a lot of things big things and not just you know let's you know some give a little bit of development money to alternative news or something like that we've got to really have big solutions to this problem is not a small thing okay thank you andrea a big solution oh well i don't think that anybody news and disinformation for three months or so and it came with a bit naive but still quite interested in a report about once ago or two months ago this month the european commission is to publish communi that the activities and the solutions and the regulation that will be suggested by the european union will be very much putting us back if not into the bo know the picture today that you show is  i think of all this technology as there's always two sided you know it's it's like discovering discovering fire you can use it to cook your dinner or you can use it to burn your house down and you know you know we should figure out how use it to cook our dinners to point to one specific positive development public officials i mentioned this earlier but public officials are increasingly using social media as a way of communicating with their constituents and i think that's a very very good thing i think that's a great development because it opens up the possibility of conversations that couldn't possibly have taken place without this technology now you can engage in a you know a virtual town hall with your with your elected representative and not just have your views heard by that representative even if you're hundreds of miles away from that person but communicate with other constituents about the policies and statements of that elected representative and these public forums that have been created through social media i think are playing an increasingly significant role in our democracies you know my institute has this case challenging president trump's practice of blocking critics on his twitter account and that's you know one of several suits that are in the courts right in the american courts right now i think there are a couple of candidates who know in which litigants are asking the courts to recognize these forums as public forums within at least in the united states within the meaning of the first amendment i think those are significant cases but even apart from those cases the practice of public officials communicating with their constituents in this way i think is an important development that we should celebrate thank you certain values at the center of it so the problem until up until now has been that engineers i have always said you know i don't understand what you mean by fairness like what do you mean by fairness can you tell me when i'm sitting down to write code what do i mean i think that is slowly changing  building legal and policy advice in technical terms and with we're explaining technology in legal terms i think that's that's a very strong development and and if if it you know if it carries on i think it actually has the potential to build bridges and power over what people can say both within and across borders and and what they can do and how our information ecosystem is shaped and how do you hold power accountable that's that's what governance is about and you know to to a something that was said many years ago by rosenthal alvarez who some people here know who's a professor of journalism and and at university of texas austin you know before the internet the global information ecosystem was a desert it was based on scarcity and the allocation of scarce resources and the governance of scarce speech right and and our entire political economy was based on that and now it's a rainforest right there's there's completely different organisms and the way you in which you govern a society based on scarcity and the way you govern a ecosystem that's based on in insane overabundance and excess and many monsters running around eating each other is is very different and and so you know just and just to speak to toby's fine we need governance innovation our governance structures are not fit for purpose they're they're pre internet age certainly pre a i artificial intelligence governance structures they don't work across borders well they don't hold power accountable within borders well and and we need massive innovation on the scale that we saw innovation to meet the technical change a technological evolution of the industrial revolution and it's only just begun and so i guess my optimistic point is as a daughter of a historian is th once upon a time the world was full of states run by you know whose only governance model was the divine right of kings right manage that we managed to the humans humanity has managed to evolve in in terms of thinking about how power is given legitimacy and who gets the power and who confers it on whom how its constrained and so on and you know we evolved again with the industrial revolution and we can evolve again but it's going to require some we've got a long way to go and it's going to be painful and the the other optimistic thing is that there's a movement building that's that's really committed but this is going to take several generations can i just one very quickly i mean one of the consequences of the industrial revolution was a massive growth in government ya know government was small and then government was big and i think you know your bill just riffing off your points i mean what we what we really  less optimistic now than i was then i was earlier we can build a new one you know i completely agree with you i was gonna just put some personal thought of individuals in terms of the the legal system governance governments humans and so on and so forth i i think one of the the the world that has not mean you know not that i'm questioning all of the data regarding facebook but some of them i am questioning i don't think but that's not the purpose of the you know so we also have in addition to the trend related to the social media and their power and what they may or may not do in some of the more fragile democracy we also have this conflict looming large right now and the reconstruction of the global order using some very old concept not pause the the issue to pose the problem in those terms may allow us to you know to to think a little bit outside the box and to think beyond the immediate moment which you know