Access to reliable information is essential for any democratic society. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine shows the challenges by systematic information manipulations and the use of the disinformation, but it also provides an important perspective on how to counter false and misleading content. We would like to invite you to the seminar about reliable journalism and information processing in the context of war. Scientists, journalists and student groups are working on methods to ensure verified information in social media and the press. How can the countries of the Weimar Triangle – Germany, France and Poland – join forces to ensure that their people can make informed choices?
I think everything works with microphone okay uh so dear colleagues my name is laureno and I’m the director of the center for French culture and Fran studies at the University of waro and of course I am most delighted to be here today with you and honored by the presence of our
Guests gathered in what is known as the vimer triangle format between Poland Germany and France that’s why I wanted also to start by using our three respective languages because it’s also our shared specificities that make these three party meetings so rich as I think the viar triangle of course refers to a
Framework designed to exchange perspectives and expertise between our three countries but I believe that even more than that it is a testimony to a desire to study together the developments on the Contemporary world and the processes underway that concerns all of us the subject of fake news which
We will be discussing today seems particularly well suited to this approach not only because it is an important part of the dramatic events that have taking place around the world in recent years and which seem unfortunately to be repeating themselves with increasingly shorter cycle but also because the virtual digital tools we
Know have at our we now have at our disposal and which are being perfected day by day are calling into question the traditional borders and jurisdictions of States however before moving on to this complex and fascinating topic I would like to hand over to his magnificence
Director aloi Novak who is the real host of this meeting today and whom I would like to thank very warmly for welcoming us here today and saying a few words to open our discussion Please Mr reor thank you good morning everyone this is a sunny day however situation in the world is
Not such Sunny so I am extremely grateful that we have a chance to meet today at War University and have discussion what is going on generally speaking as you introduced but first of all I wanted to welcome new Ambassador French ambassador sir you are very welcome and I wanted to
Underline that we have had and I’m ABS absolutely sure that we will be having very good co cooperation between University of waro and Embassy and Institute and center of French studies and French culture I’m also very pleased that we have a German representative professor and uh I wanted to underline
That both of your countries helped us very much in particular during the so-called martial law in both countries universities both French and German were always open for Polish students for Polish professors we could study we could work we could do research we could exchange ideas etc etc now com the situation is natur
Natural completely different I mean Poland became part of European Union so our doors for your students for your professors for everyone who is going to come to Poland to woro University are opened and will be opened University of woro is I think like other universities also in your countries are very open
Institution so this means that we you can present explain in whatever you way you wish the situation the uh problems of the challenges of the present economic situation political situation social situation etc etc I think that in particular cooperation between three countries as you said between the TR
Building the trango Germany France and Poland is extremely important just now taking into account what is going on in Ukraine not far away from here the attacks Russian attacks on Ukraine but also the tragic situation we have been observing for the last few days in
Israel for sure it will be having a lot of influences on what is going on in this part of the world in Europe in the world and in other places so I will say the discussion concerning democracy concerning peaceful development conserving concerning good treatment of the people tolerance etc etc is always
Important and um taking into account the different history between us I think that is also absolutely good moment to show by the discussions but not only but with everything we have been doing that it is possible to have number one extremely good neighborhood good cooperation good exchange of ideas good businesses and in
Particular good relationships between the people students in particular professors as well but not only between the Nations so for that reason I very pleased also that our Center or French Center F Center for French studies language etc etc is organizing this kind of meeting at wor of University and I’m
Absolutely sure and thank you director for for that and I am absolutely sure that we will have a nice discussion we will be trying to explain or to present different viewpoints and and uh this is a special event for us for the University and I
Hope it will be a special event also for you however such kind of events happen from time to time at at woro University but the time time is also special and um we are also grateful that the center exists and we have Center at sbon as well maybe not doing such well
Like it used to do but we will do the best in the near future to improve also this situation it is also probably need to be add that uh together with universities coming from your countries we have been building one European University I mean University of woro along with Heidelberg University
Sbon Copenhagen University Milan University Jen University and uh Charles University from prag we have been cooperating very strongly for the last five six years exchanging students building common Administration just now we are approaching to do common research in result we are going to build European University I mean the name the umbrella
Will be European and the pillars would be National University reason is very simply stronger cooperation but also competition against American universities and Asian Far East in particular Chinese universities we need a strong common institution so I’m absolutely as also sure that this Center our Center and students attending
Classes at w of University and the universities I mentioned about will be also part part of this uh program everything is being built both for uh um European Union taxpayers money but also for the national taxpayers money because the money we are getting from European
Union is not biging out so we have to support the universities from the mentioned countries have been supporting also this this idea so uh saying that I want wanted to show only that there is a broader cooperation we have been doing so also things in real discussing analyzing
Expressing our ideas but also doing something in real so welcome thank you for coming uh you are more we are more than happy and you are more than welcome at woro University and please always remember that the doors of the University of waro are always open for you for your colleagues for your
Students and uh I absolutely believe that the cooperation will be going on we will strengthen the cooperation and the results will be number one published but they we will be also implementing them in the real world so thank you for coming have a nice day at waro at waro
University and it waro and all the best thank you very much [Applause] thank you Mr director for your warm words and I’m honored now to invite M ambassador of friends to Poland to give his vision on this joint event please Mr Ambassador thank you all of you m Mr
Rector Mr sh ladies and gentlemen first thank you Mr Rector for the warm words of of welcome and as it is the first time I’m I’m in the vso University I would like to introduce myself so I’m the new French Ambassador freshly arrived from KF from
Ukraine where I spent four years as a French ambassador to Ukraine and I I went through uh the very painful situation of the war of aggression against Ukraine during 540 days um I have witnesses incredible courage and resistance of the Ukrainian people and as there are some Ukrainian
Participating to this to this seminar to this event I want really to to pay tribute to to the courage of the Ukrainian Nation facing this awful Russian aggression being here today I am um delighted for three reasons the first one is because it’s the first time that
I I have the opportunity to to visit your prestigious univers University Mr Rector and I’m very delighted to to start my my mandate visiting your University and I’m pretty sure that that will be not the only the first time and that I will come following your um your invitation uh regularly for addressing
Students or visiting you I’m also very happy and I want to to say a special word to you Mr director that and Co I I will come maybe um in the coming week to to visit you more intensively and see how your your Institute is doing but um
I’ve already heard a lot of good things about your work and I want to encourage you to to continue and lastly but um I want also to to express my my satisfaction to to do this seminar together with our German friends uh for us as you you know
Germany is is a key partner we are together at the European Union since the very beginning we have done so much during the previous decades that our friendship is is is something remarkable and doing uh this uh now light is coming I don’t know whether it’s because talk
About about Germany it’s it’s good um no I I just want to to to underline that the the format of this seminar meaning the the VMA triangle is very important for for France it’s a it’s a key um element of our diplomacy because it’s uh put together uh within the European Union
I I do think three key key Partners France Poland and Germany so as much as possible uh we will favor here as a French Embassy in Poland we are going to to favor this this format so I’m addressing colleagues who are present here if there are other ideas or other
Proposal to to work in that format I will always receive those suggestions with with great great pleasure and you you will get my my full support and going into the the substance of of your conference I would like to to underline that it’s it it is with a deep sense of
Responsibility and urgency that I stand before you today to inaugurate this seminar dedicated to the fight against fake news and disinformation this topic is particularly relevant in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine this joint initiative between France Germany and Poland the countes that makes that
Make up the Vima triangle and which has been joined by Ukrainian experts Bears witness to our commitment to confronting one of the most destabilizing threats to Regional balances and democracy we meet today as committed actors in The preservation of the Integrity of inform the phenomenon of information manipulation transcends National borders
And requires a collective and coordinated response even more worryingly massive online disinformation contributes to undermining confidence in Democratic institutions and processes access to Independent reliable and high quality information is an essential condition for the functioning of the democracies the rule of law and the International System and for the
Fight against the proliferation of information manipulation the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a tragic example of how disinformation can be used to legitimize to to put it rightly to to try to legitimize in justifiable and manipulate public opinion Ukraine is fac faing a hybrid war in which propaganda and Distortion
Of information are used as Weapons information manipulation spreads confusion distorts reality and blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction in this context it has become imperative to fight dis disinformation with unwavering determination at the European level several mechanism have been set up by the commission to combat fake news and
Disinformation such as the code of practice and the European disinformation Observatory and the European fact checking Network France has also launched in 2019 with reporter s Frontier the partnership for information and democracy Now with 51 member states it responds to the need to promote an environment conducive to Reliable
Information for citizens to enable then to form an inform opinion it hems as well to encourage the companies that structure the global information and communication space to respect the principle of transparency responsibility and neutrality and to respect human rights today we are bringing uh together experts researchers journalists and
Truth Advocates from Ukraine Poland Germany and France all will share their knowledge and experience in the fight against disinformation we have the opportunity to learn from each other to develop effective strategies to face this major Challenge and to demonstrate our commitment to the fight for truth in interaction with the audience in working
Groups following the speaker presentation and discussion will enrich the debate as experts researchers journalist and policy makers it is our duty to combat misinformation by using tools such as fact checking promoting media literacy and enhancing transparency in the information field we must also work closely with the media government ments academic institution
And Civil Society to develop effective conter narrative strategies as you know information manipulation is a complex and evolving challenge it cannot be conquered by a in a single day or by a single actor however by joining forces and sharing knowledge we can forge more powerful tools to counter the threat
I would like to thank all the participants especially our Ukrainian colleagues that I mentioned before for their commitment to this vital cause our meeting today is a demonstration of our share determination to protect truth democracy and peace may this seminar seminar be fruitful and may our collaboration continue to Bear
Lasting fruit in the fight against this this information thank you very much for your attention and I wish you all the best for your for your work and for your day of reflection thank [Applause] you thank you very much Mr Ambassador for your programmatic remarks and for
Your presentation of the topic and I now very honored to invite to intervene uh Mr Robert rer Char Adent of the German Embassy in Poland to give us his vision of this topic please yeah thank you very much your magnificent P Excellency Miss ambassad director ladies and gentlemen M
Sh P but above all dear students um I’m particularly happy to represent the German side of the VMA trango today and let me Echo um the previous speakers in sing first of all the co-organizers of today’s event the embassy um of France in Poland and Theil fr and our host the vasavi for bringing us together today and uh a particularly warm welcome also to our Ukrainian friends which are participating online directly from Kev if you take a closer look uh on today’s program and the illustrious group of participants it promises very challenging
Discussions uh as the Ambassador already mentioned in recent years the phenomenon of disinformation has become increasingly strong with the raise of social media and the development of artificial intelligence spreading this information has become a lot easier artificial intelligence allows the production of fake news at a large scale in consequence misperception is
Becoming more real and almost indistinguishable from truth and especially in uncertain times people are often looking for simple truth or orientation and populists have an easy time with simple often manipulated truths and so-called aternative facts whether in the coid pandemic climate change or Russia’s War of aggression against Ukraine facts are
Being distorted and untrue spread around the world almost 10 years ago I had been working as a spokesperson uh of the German Embassy in Moscow and the case Lisa some of you might remember fell in the middle of the criticism of Russia’s actions at that time in donbas as a reminder young Russian
German girl had disappeared in Berlin and Moscow immediately claimed that the girl had been kidnapped and mistreated by migrants as evidence they cited photos that came from a completely different context and even when it became clear that the girl had only run away from home sought shelter with her boyfriend
The Russian side stuck to its own narrative and every time I got into a cap in Moscow and identified myself as German I heard the same question what’s going on in Germany is it still safe to walk on the streets so you see disinformation has become a global
Threat it undermines trust in public institution it harms open discourse it polarizes our society it threatens our democracies disinformation makes it much harder to find the global challenges to tackle the global challenges that we need to address it aims to saw Discord also on a global scale disinformation aims to undermine Global credibility
This is the reason why today’s seminar is so important because disinformation has an impact on each of us and it is a huge challenge for journalists because disinformation aims to undermine the Trust in Media how will you as a journalist know to trust sources when deep fakes become so real so you see
Much more questions than answers and I’m looking forward to your insights wishing us all very fruitful discussion thank you very much mer [Applause] jeno thank you very Much so I’d like to thank the Sha for his very clear and let’s say inspiring presentation which will guide our discussion I’m sure for it and I also take this opportunity of course to thank all the three speakers for sharing their expectations with us on behalf of the
Three institution that are indeed the three pillars of this meeting so we are now moving to the Practical part let’s say of our program with two Ukrainian colleagues who joined us online and I would also like to take his this opportunity to thank Mrs Alena cuch from
The Ukrainian Embassy in Poland for your help in organizing these uh invitations of course so we will begin our keynote session with uh that of Mrs anait ceria who is online with us as I already told and who is the head of the department for countering information streets to
National Security at the center for countering disinformation in Kiev her team counteracts current and projected streets to ukrainians National Security interest in the information of of course sphere identifying and contacting disinformation but also preventing attempts to manipulate public opinion Mr Ser mentioned is the question of manipulation of course which is very
Important talking about fake news so of course as recent events in the Middle East already mentioned have so shown us the manipulation of information is not unique to Ukraine but in the context of a long and massive War which has become a kind of laboratory unfortunately for new military practices but also new
Forms of struggle can also be uh observed particularly in the field of information circulation this is why we considered that the views of our Ukrainian colleagues could be particularly relevant to our subject so please uh um I give you want Anan please for 10 or 15 minutes of presentation
Thank you very much once again thank you thank you thank you uh greetings everyone D do uh it is a pleasure to be here in uh and to take part in this uh beautiful discussion and um I need to say from our perspective from government perspective that um yes this was a
Challenge not from 2022 I think whole independence of our country is like a challenging part in our nowadays so um if we are go if I’m going to say about Center for countering disinformation and the role of it and how it was created I think it is a practical case how to um
Beat this disinformation campaigns because um when President zalinski announced about creation of Center for country and disinformation he mentioned that in future he wants to see as um us as a International Hub as Alliance because we have NATO as a military Alliance but also we need some aliens uh to counter
Disinformation within our countries uh because it gets more and more uh sophisticated and uh we cannot close our eyes on it uh so that’s why so our Center is pretty young uh we were created just in 2021 and um it took maybe half a year like bu budgeting processes Etc just to
Recruit people and it was in November 2021 and since we just created our system of analytical work because you know it’s a unique thing that we are um analytical C an an analy Center for uh our state organization State institutions because uh uh we are accepting all and um taking
All monitorings they they have and put into one big picture and also we are monitoring information threats too uh that’s why when we just started this process uh full skilled War started and we understood that we also should work with our people to be more open and
Transparent because um you know at that time uh we were in basement Etc and we didn’t understand what is actually happening where is the truth uh the Russians started they they used a lot of money to the weapons and uh other things but they also used uh pretty much sources
To to overtake our information area uh that’s why we started to uh constantly communicate with our people to verify information with our uh State organizations State institutions just to say for people that please don’t believe on this or that some somehow it was like government fact checking
Agency uh but um after that we understood that we need to show the big researchers how these information campaigns are working um in Russia uh and uh within our country uh because we understand that they are working not in our country of course but abroad they use every opportunity to discredit
Discredit Ukraine to destabilize inside our country too um that’s why we made a lot of researches and we publishing it constantly uh for example as nowadays unfortunately that is happening in Israel Russians using this uh situation too just to say that Ukrainian has illicit Market of weapons and they
Sending weapons there uh and other nonsense that they making uh but but still this illicit Market even uh of weapons started from um 2014 uh this disinformation campaign so it’s has a pretty huge history about it um so uh additionally uh we are trying I can say that coordination is a best part
In every country because we are constantly working with International Partners um for example ROV they are really close partners of ours we counter it information disinformation campaigns within together I think more than five uh campaigns and then um we are trying to find more our partners in
France uh in Germany we’re just uh trying to fix figure it out how we could maybe counter together some disinformation campaigns because uh we we see uh the influence there uh big influence U of Russian disinformation campaigns against Ukraine and over the world of course uh
So that’s why we are trying to um make this part that me president zinski mentioned make happen just to make this aliance all together uh so they S I think Direction like beside analytical Direction and Public Communication direction we’re working of course with our International partners and the fourth part is
Educational um honestly we haven’t even thought about it that uh we will get such requests from our society that we need to show somehow how to work with people um and what is this information and um we started from kids you know we made the cartoons for example with the
Office of Integra of national agency of prevention of corruption they have such office and they Pro like say please provide us information we want to make cartoons for our for our children what is information disinformation what is information bubble for example what is the boards because unfortunately we don’t have
Any uh explanation in our legislation but still we need to show our people because we are using this words pretty much but legally unfortunately we even if we are talking about Center for countering disinformation in fact in law fact we counter what that’s that’s the
Problem and I think uh we need to work on um Doctrine and uh legislation to be in one uh you know in one Circle and to understand one terminology within all countries not just in Ukraine and in our um Ministries Etc but within every agency in the Europe uh because we are
Trying to Y to make this y integration but we also need to have one have one terminology so uh regarding education we started from kids then we started from students uh continued with students because students had also a lot of questions about it and now we are working with State institutions uh with
Special services and um with even Regional Parts our representative from regions because uh we need to be on the same page and understand that this is uh a threat to our national security and uh we need to work on very hard and that’s why I think um probably we will continue
Our work within uh to provide our expertise to other countries and to understand which common uh work we can do together and um we are really open for it and thank you for these discussions I think due to these discussions we we we have opportunity to get this you know understanding what we
Should do next uh not just explaining Etc because cing disinformation is not just I don’t know debunking fakes yes uh dis information is something more it’s like in proactive cases Etc like we need to work hard on this level and to understand that we need to be together
Uh and um we need to work on this uh information influence uh malign information influence uh together just to beat it and to win uh that’s ukrainians is do every day and uh hopefully we will do also together uh and like the previous speech I want to thank you J [Applause]
Danon uh thank you very much an for your presentation and um in attempt to keep our original schedule I’m going to hand straight over to our second guest uh Dr yevan fenko Who was one of the main founders of stopfake.org website link it to the school of Journalism of the National University ke
Moila Academy of which he is the current director yevan has also worked for many years as a professional journalist and media specialist so I think he’s indeed the right person to develop this dual perspective stradling the academic approach and the practical eye of information creators if we could Define
So as a journalist so e can please uh I take you place for your presentation for 15 minutes uh please yeah good morning uh thank you so much for inviting me uh to participate in this discussion and uh with an we are very happy to convert wayar triangle to wayar
Square uh and and to share Ukrainian experience of uh fighting disinformation so stop fake uh would uh Mark almost 10 years of our activities very soon uh probably I might say unfortunately because uh uh fighting disinformation is important on one hand but it also takes
A lot of efforts uh and uh from from journalism because as it was said uh thisinformation occupies the space which is should be usually occupied by journalism that’s why it was one of the mission of us as school of Journalism uh to to intervene uh and to
Start looking for uh the solution uh how to fight uh back uh disinformation so as I said we’re around almost 10 years and uh it was very very important uh for us to start as soon as uh occupation of Crimea started back in 2014 because since then we accumulated a
Lot of knowledge about uh the Russian disinformation ecosystem uh including uh Doctrine how information war is incorporated into military doctrine of Russia was what is the Russian strategy well so mapped all Uh Russian uh main actors platforms for dissemination of thisinformation uh and uh narratives so we uh know basically in advance what
Russia is going to use against Ukraine or anywhere else and as anate mentioned we also monitor very closely what Russia is now doing within uh Middle East situation and we see a lot of parallels and we see the same uh Playbook uh which is used both by Russia and by Hamas to
Justify their terrorist action so knowledge is really very important uh also as a factchecking organization we mainly use uh debunking as a tool of fight but also we do a lot of pruning because if we know what tools Russia is operating we can much easily uh predict
What uh they are going to do uh also from our point of view it was very important to have an early start a early deployment of our organization well for The fullscale Invasion so when uh Invasion started we already were fully prepared and we knew everything uh what
Russia is going to use against Ukraine and we uh can use that knowledge against preemptively which was very very important also from uh Ukraine perspective it was very was very important to uh limit the presence of M Russian uh influence in Ukraine well before uh The Invasion so it basically
Uh prevented Russia from uh being fully operational in Ukraine when the war started uh and uh also we always been looking at the problem of disinformation as the global challenge so that’s why we were not only fighting Ukraine uh disinformation in Ukraine but we also were inter internationalizing those
Efforts uh outside of Ukraine to raise awareness about the problem in uh other countries uh and to explain how disinformation basically is ruining uh the media system and is uh uh decreasing uh the resilience of people including in the times of uh active conflicts and uh Warfare in terms of uh
Internationalization we expanded our presence in other languages rather than just Ukrainian uh and so now we’re available also in in Polish for example in German and in French uh so I encourage uh everybody else to follow us on social media where we have food presence in all
Those and many other languages as well uh also we spend a lot of time uh researching um Russian uh disinformation presence outside of Ukraine so uh the next week I will be presenting the new research conducted by St fake uh jointly with Carlos the university in Madrid so
It’s basically about the presence of Russian disinformation in the European Union and next week I would present it in in Paris at Sela uh with our colleagues at school of Journalism at S one so uh the the the preliminary findings are very uh obvious so yes Russia was always trying to operate
Outside of Ukraine and else to influence the image of European Union uh and separate countries uh country members of European Union uh for Ukrainian audience so for example we looked into thousands of the stories with the band and we uh selected those stories which were specifically targeting uh issues related
To uh EU and EU member countries and uh generally among the whole amount of the data we collected in those 10 years uh we have found that uh almost 27% of all disinformation was uh about European Union uh Poland was subject to disinformation items uh 14.8% uh the second place is Germany uh
With 14.6% and the fourth place is France with 5 uh 4% of disinformation pieces we deband they were related to your countries so that gives us the idea that uh this is a global problem and you cannot tackle it only in one place you really need very holistic approach to to
To to be effective so that’s why for example now stop fake is expanding our activities into uh Global South countries uh for example we open the Hub uh in Madrid from where we are dealing with disinformation uh in uh Latin American countries uh and also we do a lot of
Bilateral relations with different uh educational and research institutions across European Union uh including we work very actively with uh Military Academy in waro for example among other things uh and many other uh teaching and research institutions including in the military uh to share Ukrainian experience which is um quite uh unique
And of very high demand now I would say uh and the main idea which we see now is that uh again you cannot find uh you cannot fight uh kinetic Warfare separately from fighting the information Warfare and also what we notice that uh less achievements uh Russia has on
The front line the more efforts uh they invest into uh non-kinetic instruments including information Warfare uh cyber attacks uh intelligence intelligence leaks uh and other non-kinetic instruments so we definitely need to uh follow them very closely and to uh prevent Russia from uh expanding their
Presence uh outside uh of the EU so due to uh sanctions which were introduced uh in uh 202 to against major Russian disinformation Platforms in the EU Russia started very actively to relocate uh their disinformation Outlets uh outside uh of the EU uh included into Latin American countries uh where they
Now have a huge base from where they actually are targeting back uh EU countries including Spain uh and also they expand their bases uh in Fran ofone Africa in the Middle East uh and uh those activities are very actively expanded so we strongly encourage uh European Union uh to look outside of of
The EU and to also encourage uh non-eu members to fight back disinformation as well uh because as I said you cannot fight it just in ukra or just in the EU uh because that this system is is still uh pretty intact and uh we still need to
Invest a lot of efforts to uh dismantle uh this system and to make it non uh non-operational so I want to thank all the all the partners who invited uh Ukraine to this conversation and to share uh Ukrainian experience and I also want to encourage you to look into what
Stop fake is doing as a non-governmental organization but also I want to underline that we work very closely with governmental institutions in Ukraine which are fighting disinformation uh and this uh uh State uh non-state cooperation was one of the key uh important elements of building very effective system of uh fight and
Disinformation I also U uh all our find is are very actively used by different Ukrainian State institutions including Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ministry of internal affairs uh and um uh Prosecutors office and other institutions because as I said we already accumulated a huge database thousands and thousands of of cases
Which uh not only give you the idea of how big uh and effective Russian disinformation system is uh but also you can use uh those uh find find ings as evidences of the war crimes perpetrated by uh Russia and Russian disinformation system as a part of the military machine
Uh which uh is uh operating under the disguise of the uh Russian uh media system thank you very much again for for having us and uh uh I would be happy to answer any questions thanks a lot thank you very much and thank you for a presentation which so shows your
Different initiatives and which is which is important also because I think you are perfectly shown that of course to fight uh fake news we have to be connected to our screens we have to to use our machines considering the amount of information but we first of all have
To be connected between us to make it a let’s say common fight and it’s only the only way to make it work I think uh so yes maybe would we’ll just take a few question very quickly because we have to proceed after to the second part of our
Morning meeting but if you have some question from the public please don’t feel shy yes Professor steinach maybe just as an ice breaker so you offered to exchange information about disinformation campaigns on an international base but um is your experience that um disinformation is similar with respect
To the topic all over the place so for example in the coid crisis we had very different stories and narratives all over the world so so do you think this is a generalization um strategy or do you think it’s um only viable in your special case um um with this um Russian
Strategy of disinformation who want to to respond first you’re you’re welcome yes please EV oh okay uh sorry for taking the initiative um so yeah you are right on one hand thisinformation is specifically targeting uh each country and each Community which make it very uh domesticated localized and that’s why
Targeting those audiences in the far better way but also what we see is the same approach in in different places and the same uh tools which are used so that yes the topics might be different uh but very often uh the The Playbook is the same and it’s not only
For uh Russia but also for other State uh actor like China and Iran and others but also for nonstate actors I already mentioned Hamas for example and they are very actively using Russian playbook for for that so we see some Universal scenes which can work across the platforms uh
And also platforms are very important so because that’s the main uh place for distribution of disinformation these days so it’s important to work with them and for example stop fa is working with uh Facebook to limit the presence of Russian disinformation over there but also very often we see how the same uh
Networks are used as soon as we are involved in networks analysis for example you mentioned uh coid so surprisingly or not uh the same networks were used both for uh coid disinformation or misinformation and for uh Ukraine war disinformation for example so that gives you the idea that
Those networks are not very organic and they were created well in advance deployed in advance and then they can be used for anything very easily renamed targeting different audiences but the approach to organize the work and organize those networks is pretty much Universal thank you you can maybe Anna
You something yes just little short comment totally agree with you gu and uh on by the way we are now like exchanging our information with our uh Partners within every country and we see the similarities and instruments that you use using uh Russians uh for example and
Maybe other countries uh but uh I should mention that this is so common that that we need to sit all together and discuss it how to be all together it’s Alliance thing it was not like that you know so blah blah thing no it’s is the really important part that we should
Do all together and uh this is the same thing that they are using even in Africa now you know in 40 40 minutes I will have the um I have the uh research about Africa and what instruments Russians using there for malign influence and they’re pretty the same like in every
Country like in Europe for example so yes thank you thank you very much and so unfortunately because of the shortage of time we have to proceed to the second part but before it I would like to thank once again our two Ukrainian colleagues and maybe we’ll see you on the other
Occasions considering this important topic so thank you very much and uh now I’d like to invite uh to take seat our six speakers so please if you could come here uh all of all of you with the microphone because I think maybe Professor steinach has it I’ve already hijacked the microphone please yes
My no no it’s not exactly in the order maybe try to I don’t and uh well I in one person maybe ah okay so everybody is okay so thank uh you for being here with us today so I thank each one of you for our six speakers and uh we will move uh
In fact to the second part as I already told it to our meeting by giving the floor to the experts in a panel designed as an exchange of point of view between their different areas of specialization so um perhaps uh we could start in fact with Professor stabach uh an academic
Teacher and researcher at the Technical University of darhad and a specialist in the field of artificial intelligence and cyber security notably as the principal investigator of the project attiny if I if I read it well and uh Professor so given your experience uh in this field
Uh could you tell us a little bit more about the your main work of course but also give us some thought on the role of technology in the production and checking of information of course it’s very general question but maybe you could illustrate it with your more
Research topics yes and I I prepared a general answer so that it fits quite well so we have been asked to to do short presentation so I have some slides ready because it it structures things much better is this one is yes yes it’s the PowerPoint present ation and so
Maybe we can just move it here so I have the possibility oh yeah just with a with a quick and gentle push everything this technology that that works like a charm okay so yeah so we go to the yes maybe close here and okay this one
Yeah yes and then we go back to the full screen mode and I am so perfect so thank you and I quickly skip to the next slide so I’ve been introduced and um what I wanted to do is just have a a little bit of a structure on um how technology
Addresses the field of disinformation so disinformation at least in the academic field also knows neighboring Concepts like um misinformation or malformation which is a more extreme form of disinformation but I don’t want to go into detail here because this is very heavily discussed if you can for example distinguish misinformation and disinformation or
Disinformation and Mal information yeah but just to give you the idea that you don’t fall in the same rabbit hole and also spread disinformation about Mal information or misinformation about disinformation just keep in mind there there are many terms that are used differently and then um of course there
Are different media types of disinformation with text with images audio video all no different Technologies to counter this so it’s for example much more easy to develop a concept for identifying image manipulation recognitions and text manipulation recognition because text and image are totally different with their well form of creation and noise
And so on so so we have different types of disinformation and different media tabs but the interesting things then comes to the point where we want to start to counter disinformation and this is what I have under the bracket of degree of familiarity because um from a technical
Point of view it’s a huge difference and we just touched this in the Keynotes for example if you have the same disinformation uh known identical narrative that maybe is just respread with a different word with synonyms and so on or you have a completely new topic
So something like okay you have a the same methods or the same networks but um just a new topic this is really heavy or really challenging from the perspective of automatic identification so for me the decrease of familiarity are this nonidentical narratives then nonn modified narrative where you just
Exchange for example actors then you come to a known topic but a new narrative so in Co for example we had a lot of different different disinformation campaigns all about Co but completely different stuff and then you have new topics so I have Co and then you switch to Ukraine for example
Both heavy on disinformation but different topics and then you come to the different technologies that you can use you so you can use reidentification strategies for known narratives and this is a very low challenge this is almost trivial and usually just requires well Frameworks to handle data with um known modified narratives
You come to the similarity detection so you want to find out that something is similar that’s text about the same things a similar narrative that’s that’s okay but for new topic or also new narratives you need classification and here we come to machine learning Concepts and this classification you you
Raise your error rates so machine learning is very good it’s allows things that weren’t possible before but you still are in in a range of 10 to 20% error rates which means that when you are in a world with billions of um messages you are also in the range of
Billions of false positives when you deal with that and this is a huge challenge so you can’t hope that technology solves everything are just a few examples I won’t go into detail here just to show you that depending on what you deal with you have a lot of different Technologies so for example
The first line this image nonidentical narrative reidentification it just listed all the technologies that can be used here and then with text new topic The Other Extreme is a classification Str strategies you also have things like just finding out on what topic a um a message is but also check words in this
Detection where just point a human Observer on the um position in the text that needs to be checked because text is a lot of noise with very few facts and this is just an example and it’s um deliberately a funny example because I didn’t want to go into the
Really heavy stuff here this is just an examp example of how you can deal with disinformation um when you have a combined text and image that is a little bit known like here uh story that um a Corona vaccine is um based on alien DNA and you have some computer generated expectation crafts
That show you how human will look like when it when it gets um vaccinated by this um stuff and then what you can do here and these are these are really narratives that have been spread around in a similar manner so so what you can
Do here is of course you can take the the image and you can find out where the image comes from so this inverse image search based on perceptual hashing for example that shows you that okay this image comes from an old 1980s um movie Aliens Among Us so so you have one
Identifier okay this is not a computer simul ation of um DNA effect and on the other hand you can also go through the text and find out that a lot of um substrings a lot of parts of the text are have also been used in a previous narrative on genetic manipulation so um
This is how you technically really deal with simple cases just having a database matching stuff doing inverse image search and giving fact Checkers hints if this has been aggregated from previous hoaxes or um other content and this is really just the most simple example imaginable thank you so much and I’m
Happy for the discussion thank you very much thank you thank you profess St maybe before discussion I will also give the floor to Daniel Jona journalist working in Poland and United Kingdom initially specializing in economic issues and editor-in chief of the page 300 gospodar which presents an analysis of economic
News and in the broad sense let’s say so since 2022 he has also headed Google News lab for Central and Eastern Europe which aims to work with journalist in order to fight against fake news so uh uh to to complete a little bit the points already mentioned but um
Professor steinach uh could you Daniel um let’s say uh present us uh how this um relationship between new technology and the quality and circulation of information is uh viewed from the point of journalist today and uh also considering the massive computerization of their practices in fact so how do you
See it from the point of the practition let’s say hi thank you very much for invitation such an important topic and esteem guests um so um this is a very complex and difficult question I don’t know if we were going to solve that in few minutes we here to resolve yeah my
Background is not research at all I used to be a journalist for the big part 90% of my career I’ve joined Google a year ago where I’ve been leing Google newslab as you said which is a small new small unit within Google that works with journalists that work with fact Checkers
Uh researchers a little bit as well through uh to fight misinformation to increase uh diversity and inclusion in journalism and also to advance the level of digital transformation and of course the misinformation part nowadays especially in central eastern Europe is the key component here so we’re trying to look
Holistically at uh what new rooms need in order to not only survive in the online environment but also to thrive and actually fighting misinformation is is is one of those things um just to give you a little bit of a of background Google doesn’t work with journalists and fact Checkers out
Of you know some Grand ideas of course we do like to think that but it’s also you know it’s it’s a business and it’s also in our very own business interest so the better the content the bigger the higher quality content there is online that is found through Google search the
More users go not only to Google search but also to the websites afterwards so again this is not a charity or or nothing like that it’s just a pure business for us which actually makes me very happy that we can connect those two important things so obviously some of
The developments that we’re looking at right now here in central eastern Europe are of course developing uh misinformation narratives in Ukraine and I was very pleased to see Ean fenko here we are uh soon to start a partnership between us and this is one of the things
That Google News do in order to have stop fake um stop fake experts travel around central eastern Europe and uh give lectures and workshops about how about their experience of firsthand the banking Kremlin propaganda and how it works we are obviously looking at the development of AI and how it can be used
To spread misinformation but of course also how it can be used to fight misinformation and stop it and AI is this password that everyone now uses just want to say it’s nothing new really it’s been around for many many years Google search have used AI uh techniques
For a long time uh now with the with with the fact that generative AI has been made Popular by uh um by several different Tools H we are now looking at uh at this big fat of of looking into it so I I just underline this is just a
Tool like all the other tools it can be used for good things and bad things so for instance what we’re trying to do is every image that is going to be created with uh Google’s AI is going to be Watermark and it’s it’s going to be it’s
Going to have a Mark that it is created by AI Not a Human Being we are thinking together with the entire ecosystem of the best way of going forward it takes a lot of time unfortunately which is sometimes very frustrating but I believe personally this is the best time to get
It right so um and we’re looking forward to the whole discussion looking forward to hearing uh all the presentations uh here and thank you for the invitation once again thank you very much Daniel I think your your point is reassuring in some way because you are telling us that
Checking information or let’s say truth or whatever it can mean it’s also a business value so generally we heard that fake news is something wild and it’s used because it’s also more valuable for business but in fact truth also can be an interesting product so in
This way it’s interesting for us to hear that it’s reassuring let’s say point of view uh so now just for another aspect let’s return to more technical aspects maybe with Dr Eva kak uh who will talk about image analysis Dr evak kak specializes in Signal processing in telecommunications and works as
Associate professor at the University of Ren one and uh so we heard here some thoughts on the role of new technology in the construction and dissemination of information but from a practical let’s say point of view of the scientist what tool and methods do we have today to
Fight uh the visual fake news created by machines in fact how it works um so um I have prepared small presentations if you want to it here if you or you have it on your laptop yeah uhh can your us you trust let’s try to to maybe to put your
Laptop it will be easier so maybe yeah yeah I think just admi connection so e to connect no no it’s no problem so please so uh thank you for the introduction so I’m Eva kak and um uh I’m very happy to be here uh so um as mentioned I’m a researcher and my
Scientific background is on computer vision and machine learning and I have a strong interest in F applying all this technique in fake news detection though how you probably know uh fake news detection is a really active area in research there are many many many works because there are many types of uh
Manipulation and uh we already mentioned it um and of course we all know that uh the to fake news uh problem will not be only Technical and the goal of uh our work is more uh to find a way to uh automate uh the detection of fake news
In order to be able to process the large amount of uh misinformation that circulate uh in the web so uh uh considering the short time I will just be a little bit more technical than before and focus uh in images uh used in involved in uh fake news and in
Particular images uh in social media so I will not uh talk a lot about deep facts and there are many many things to say about it and I hope we will have the opportunity to discuss this later uh in the workshop um so if we focus on uh images
And how they are involved uh in uh fake news I will try to underline um for example what are the technique we can use and what are what are the limitation and why we are not uh now yet able to propose um a very good system um the
Images are involved in in fake news in with different cases the first one you know the image can be modified on purpose and with object insertion or dation so there can be some local manipulation but also Global manipulation like color manipulation cropping resembling and something like
This the other thing we can find is fully generated images uh that are presented as real and uh the third case is uh images we have mentioned this uh yet images that are used out of context I so in this case the image is not modified but but misc captured to
Support a false uh um claim um I will not have uh time to discuss this but this is a very interesting uh topic because uh it’s very it’s a kind of fake news that is very effective very simple to create but not so uh easy to automatically
Detect okay uh if we focus on modified images it has been said already image tempering or synthesis exists for a long time and what change today is the intelligence artificial uh based methods that are used now and while they previously were graphic based but in the same time uh the detection methods have
Evolved in the same direction meaning that we strongly rely uh on intelligence artificial to detect uh manipulations and that means we learn uh things uh from uh data uh again if if we focus on uh images on social media you have two um two different cases the first one is
That you the only thing you have and you can rely on is the image itself and in the second Paradigm you can rely on external or contextual data in the first case um what you can do is uh the developed method relies on lowlevel feature uh that can detect some subtle
Uh artifacts or in inconsistencies in noise or traces of resembling um and one because each time you manipulate an image you left some traces um and you have some example of different method here on these images uh this method are very effective but uh they are not robust to postprocessing
Method like rescaling multile recompression and so on because the Es are to fragile that they are erased in this case and that means such method usually doesn’t work well on images uh that circulate on social media uh in this case in the second case you can make the assumption that you can
Find uh many similar images on the web and hopefully the original one and this is usually uh what you do if you um when you try to spot if an image has been very has been modified you first go for a reverse search uh image engine to to
Check if you already find this image this is um reasonable assumption in the case of uh images that circulate on social media um this support that you have a great reference database that you are able to dyam dynamically update and uh once you have found this uh kind of similar images as mentioned
Uh the problem uh is just a problem of comparing two images a pair of images this is a really easy task for humans because when you see those in this example you IM immediately see if the identity of a person has been replaced or if just an overlay has been added uh
Of an image of or if the crop of the image has erased some important information you look directly at the semantic content of the image comparing a pair of image is also an easy task for a computer but uh it relies more or less on low level features to achieve the
Task and um it will raise a lot of uh alarms indeed in in every time a modification is encounter and um in the case of images on social media you can find a lot of edited images for example uh people add some text people add some overlay people
Crop it people make a screenshot and this make some difficult case for image retrieval systems and we will not discuss this here but uh also in term of comparisons this um Rises too much false positive because you will always find some differences and then it’s useless
In practice in fact uh we are stucked here with the problem of characterizing a modification so we are easy um we can easily say that to we okay that that there is a modification but uh we cannot say easily if the modification is malicious or not and
This is a problem and it not depends on the kind of modification because you can say that if you had an if you add an object in an image it’s a malicious uh intent uh but if you just change the color it’s not malicious but it’s not so
Obvious because you can have uh you know misleading crop for example because you you erase some um informat some context of the image which is important uh to the interpretation you can have an overlay that is misleading because it hide uh it hides an object you can have
Uh color editing modifications that are misleading because they make the image more threatening and so on and um um so this this is not so so so so obvious and just to finish um um just to say a few words about my current research Direction um I we we aim to uh develop
Uh system detection systems that operate more at the semantic level and also that is able to get an explanation about the spotted differences and technically just to mention we want to leverage some recent advances in language of and vision models though probably you are aware with some of them uh just to
Illustrate what we called uh Vision language models our models as the name indicates that uh deals both with images and text so for example image captioning models uh falls into these categories you give an image and okay the system automatically generate um a caption that describe the image for now this caption
Is really um generic but uh it it works at some point you have also some um systems that perform image text matching task in this case we measure the semantic visual similarity between a sentence and an image so in this example for example a true match will be to say
That there is a man wearing a helmet and a mismatch will be to say there is a man holding a helmet and uh maybe you already see this there are also um systems that are able to uh manipulate modify an image based on prompt it’s instruct P to PS for
Example where you put an image uh as as an input and a text like uh swap St flower with veres and the system will automatically change the image though our IDE is kind of uh take advant take advantages uh on this method and kind of reverse the process in order to propose
An image difference captioning system where you can uh input two images uh to the system and he will create um uh caption describing uh the the modification and this ensure uh this is a way to ensure that the system really learn a semantic feature and also um a way to understand the
Modification so I have several I don’t go into details of how first results but um generally speaking concerning the fake news detection we have several challenges the first one is generalization because uh we need some uh huge amount of annotated data and generally the system we developed are
Very specific to the data to the data we see during the training and so we need to have um methods that are independent uh uh um on with respect to the method we um Target and a method that is effective on real examples uh we have to
Be robust to minor changes to low resolutions for example in case of deep fake detections and we have to provide some explainability to to um find a way uh to explain why our system take the decision about uh an image or a video being a fake or not and I just stop here
Because of times thank you thank you very [Applause] much so thank you very much for a presentation which shows concretely uh how in fact it works and uh what can be done is this case it’s a little bit frightening to to see how what are the
Possibilities today of the I EA um but uh I would also maybe go into door now to stepan was head of the verification Department of the German news agency who is also familiar with Ukraine where he worked for many years uh but who also deals with the issues of digital research and uh
Defects uh so maybe could you tell please as how research for example things we saw with Eva is ultimately received and used by the major press agency today and how is communication with the academic world is constructed uh concerning the work of this main agencies uh that you present thank you
Very much um thanks for your introductory um research work what we have learned and heard this morning is on the one hand that we see this technical Revolution uh you might remember Photoshop you might remember that for 30 years it has been fooling people in all societies now we have
Something new uh machine learning or AI on the one hand and uh Robert R from the German Embassy said it’s almost indistinguishable now that’s what we all fear it used to be uh seeing is believing or hearing is believing what I see this is not true anymore but then
Martin mentioned yeah there are technical options and Eva as well but so far the tools are not perfect to detect everything and we’re on the way so what should we do as journalist should we wait for you guys yeah maybe but I can tell you something else there is a
Perfect or an excellent tool to detect synthetic media and deep fakes and it’s not the smartphone it might help you does anyone of you have an idea what the tool is it’s your brain logical thinking logical thinking is of course it’s everything is important we have to
Develop this stuff but until now all relevant fakes we have seen so far can be detected by logical thinking and doing research and Martin talked about a tool called inverse res inverse image research or reverse image search I don’t know if you have ever heard of that
Technique it’s very easy this is part of media literacy and you can debunk a huge part of all fake so far with this technique I won’t go into detail but it’s just you compare it it’s a question with zilinsky holding up a shirt with a swastika on it and you just use this
Tool which is implemented into Google for example very easy and that should be part of not only journalist’s work but every Citizen’s work and if I talk about logical thinking you might have remember the photo of zilinski holding up a shirt with a swastika and if you looked at it
Maybe you also thought H does a swastika look like that that’s really strange bend in a way yeah so that’s the first the first start of this logical thinking in a way the answer to this was easily to be seen was easily poorly manipulated was it number 55 or something on the
Shirt whatever that was the main reason why it was curved and bent that way so coming to your question laon is for factchecking claim checking of course we are following all the technical new things but for us it is very important to not only fight disinformation but also to fight fatalism fatalism in
Society as I have mentioned it oh I have no idea we have no idea what is happening in Ukraine at the moment nobody can tell that’s wrong we know a lot of things that are happening which open in public which happen in public space with where people eyewitnesses
Have taken photos of videos of we can see them we can monitor we can find them we compare them and we use the research techniques research techniques like geolocation is this the place uh chronol location is this the time what are the trees is there snow in the street stuff
Like that all these different techniques and the same is also with we can if if there’s are news relevant events we can contact those people we can directly ask and compare that’s journalistic work work but it should be also work of society debunk the stuff and I’m coming
To the end so far that’s some good news we have not seen real perfect fakes I can tell you they are not there yet so this is they might come in a future or you might say maybe we we haven’t detected then no they are not there yet
What we are seeing are cheap fakes you have shown them very cheap fakes seems to be enough to deceive half of the population the cheap fakes are there and a lot of people are fooled by it yes but can you e you can easily debunk it by knowing how with some techniques that’s
What we are doing thank you very much Stan for this introduction which is very interesting because it show that the machines are important but the center of it the principal actors Remains the brain or take the human being of course so until now if this problem has appeared indirectly let’s say on several
Occasions we have discussed fake news exactly as a technological let’s say issue isue aimed at controlling the veracity of facts or fact checking as we say it in a more easier way however it is clear also I think that information is a question of interpretation is here
Intervene the brain in fact or narrative so I’m going to ask uh now Professor yasek vasileski from The Faculty of Journalism at University of waro expert for several public Institutions and in the media field and specialists in this course analysis to come back to this topic in fact so could you please uh
Tell us or give let’s say an overview of your work but also explain what role language techniques play in these issues of manipulation and how we can efficiently disc construct if we turn back to the deconstructivism which most popular in French uh these oriented narratives in fact consider the
Information the language in I have also the presentation so to uh okay I’m I’m very glad that we have Among Us so uh so many optimists as Stefan Vos because um I doubt in uh in the abilities of human brain because uh we want to believe uh in anything that is Con uh
Consistent with our emotions okay so even cheap cheap fakes have no emotions H yes they hide them of course so so I want to I want to tell you about a project it’s is it it was it was some kind of of research before it but I want
To tell you about some kind of social intervention we prepared in at the beginning of of War because we knew that that we’ll have uh many refugees uh and in Poland came mostly at the beginning of of War uh mostly children and and women and of course they uh they
Really uh needed special care and uh and we just uh uh we just knew that that uh that there will be inevitably a burden on public services uh on I mean uh schools and and hospitals and and things like that so we uh so we at the the war
University uh it was it it was the it was the initiative of uh journalism Department try to help uh local uh local authorities and and uh uh public uh Public Service just to try to help them how to identify classify and disable or just block the action of fake news
Because we uh we just we just thought that there will be many of them because uh we had the experience of uh of pandemic and uh it was very it was very strange because because uh uh because uh people from our government uh are on our black list and
Uh we rarely cooperate with them and uh and we are we were on The Black List of government so it was hard to it was hard to act together ER so it was kind of U Anonymous cooperation and uh and we we offered uh our governments some kind of
Short uh short manual for uh uh people from public services just to recognize and react on on on fake news because uh uh because uh we thought that it could be kind of mental vaccination for uh uh for those people so uh uh so we uh we
Made kind of guide for them just to just to make this uh this mental vacc vaccination and uh and U and we uh uh we thought that uh uh refugees uh would be uh would would be treated as as a threat for polish for Polish society and we U and we thought
That the there should be such topics like inequality domination chaos fear and some some kind of focus on odess okay some fake news just underline that they are different people and they’re not not like us and of of course some some fake news could top could focus on
Historical accounts and uh and for conservative uh wing of Polish Society it is very important topic especially uh in uh uh in east of Poland so uh so we identified at the at the first at the first month of uh of War uh many of fake
News with uh with such threats I uh uh I showed us and of course the many phrases like uh there is no room for me at doctor’s office hospital or government office okay so it was many of iterations of of such such phrases but but it was very it was very
Similar so we uh uh so we just collected all all the phrases and and and things that were very common in uh uh in in structure because uh we thought that structure of fake news uh and uh and the sentiment will be the the easiest to recognize for uh people from Public
Public services and and we prepared of course uh uh some possible answers uh for uh for uh for them because when you are a a director of Hospital in small town maybe you have not enough time to you know to uh uh even to check every day uh
The F checking sites so when they have manual especially at the at the help desk or or uh or the or in the in the information uh in the information services in uh in local authorities in hospitals in schools also it will be easy to you know to to to uh
To give the the right answer for people that really believed in uh such uh uh fake news for people that uh that became a victim of uh of that uh information War so uh uh after that uh we we also uh we also uh gave them uh
How to check the uh the news if if it’s right or not and of course uh we based on your uh on your work uh and uh uh and we prepared also a a phone talk manual because uh because uh people from local institutions uh had many many phones
From uh uh from ordinary people uh about this uh about this Ukrainian threat so so we so we made scenarios of of such uh of such talks and uh and uh uh and uh propose some kind of answers uh for the information services and it
Was the project uh it was the project uh uh it was kind of sub substitution because first at the first stage we we tried to we tried to engage the public television in in in such activities and uh and it was impossible because it was a conflict between the Prime Minister
And and the chief of Polish television so uh we couldn’t make such uh such uh talks in TV series because we thought that it would be it would be the best way to uh vaccinate people and uh and it was kind of failure uh so we so we
Decided to make such manual and uh uh and and we tried to uh we tried to support people to to react properly on people that believed in fake news thank you thank you very much thank you for this very interesting presentation because it’s also because
It was short yes also it was point but I think the main point was the term you use of vaccination so it’s fact preventing fake news but also the term that we can fight it before it’s uh it arrives so in fact it’s I think a topic
We could discuss after our our panel uh so now I would like also to turn to the last of our speakers the last but not the least of course whom I haven’t forgotten but uh I have helped him in order to put the aspects let’s say that have just been mentioned into a
Different perspective so we have with us d fris uh thank you very much uh who is a consultant of on defense issues for the LC French uh information let’s say Channel but for a long time he was also War reporter of great R Renown uh covering various conflicts and even
Unfortunately spending 10 months as a hostage of the Isis in Syria was the best thing I did I I suppose so so I’m going to ask you to present maybe uh your position concerning the role of fake news in um contemporary media it’s a general point of course but also to
Give as your thought let’s say on the recent changes in the work of reporter or journalist of the field as we said in French if we put it just translation considering uh the general framework work of a profession that seems to be increasingly penetrated by technological
Approach so what does the field is means today for a journalistic board well well so yeah basically I’m I’m I’m as the beginning of of the chain of information we are the one the stupid ones so because we we can’t really elaborate we go and see so basically we are the one
Producing the information from the ground and that’s important and we always have been confronted to propaganda that’s nothing new uh what is new is the techniques uh which are used uh to produce them and the amount of it because of uh of the internet and all the social media so people which are
Receiving all this fake news are in front of a stream and we are the opposite we are not working on stream at all uh if we need to debunk and uh and and and and work on streams then we will turn to specialist who will develop the
The tools to try to to to differentiate from news and fake news what we do basically is to go and see and and find sources and work with people and listen to what they do we and and and and see by ourselves so basically we Are Witnesses uh in the whole process and
That’s the the role of the press press is to bring information it’s not communication it’s not stream it’s it’s it’s go and find the facts try to be as close as possible to the facts don’t say truth because we don’t know truth but at
Least we are trying to do it in a in an honest process uh when I say we’ have always been um uh facing and confront to propaganda I mean it’s again it’s nothing new and it’s it’s it’s it hasn’t start uh with uh with Ukraine or or or with Israel
Palestine today I mean every public is subject to propaganda it was the same during the Iraq War and and and all this propaganda uh actually mind or or or put some uh put in the mind of the people a a duped a doubt uh on uh what is truth
What is true and what isn’t because basically what are the propagandists doing they lying but for the lie to actually be B but or to be accepted by by the public they usually use other lies and say because the other one are lying so why do you trust them so I mean
And and basically their their aim is not to say the truth it’s just to destroy confidence in truth and I cannot be uh more to agree more than my colleague from Germany the they they’re going to use most of the time your uh your emotions that’s how it works it’s so
It’s like every time you’ve got a strong emotion and you have to to think about what’s actually happen and you have to react stop breathe and think that’s the first thing we have to do just wait why I mean why is this image coming out why are those people telling me
This is it I mean is it cerent with the situation you have to be aware of the environment you’re working in and why some strange news which actually is stronger than the others is coming to you so how was it found how the people who are bringing you that news I’ve been
Finding it what we do as journalists and that’s the difference with the social media when we bring you a news we explain to the people the process of finding the news where we were how did we get it what were our sources that’s how we work we don’t just give you news
For you to believe you are free not to believe the news we are bringing to you what we have to do is to explain the process by which we brought you a news so you can make yourself your opinion we don’t ask you to believe what we say we
Are trying to give you tools and argument to make your own mind by yourselves that’s the difference between propaganda and communication which is a form of propaganda and information and you always have to keep this in mind when we come to Ukraine we have to understand one very important thing it
Hasn’t start with the invasion of Ukraine on the 23rd of February this battle the news battle from the propaganda battle from Russia has been starting years ago and it started even when they they occupied Crea with the little green man and explain that you know it was people
From Crimea who all all of a sudden decided to raise themselves against the oppression of the ukrainians and we reporter when we were on the ground looking at those guys all in the same uniforms with weapons and uh you know acting like military people very obedient very disciplined with a leader
I mean this is little things we saw which actually showed us that there was nothing like an apprising of local people and even the local people were speaking with different accent were telling the you oh yeah they are coming to protect us as the Russians so basically because we were under
Theground we could see it so basically why is this uh War has been why did they use propaganda propaganda is used today and you will see it in all the campaigns they will do because we are in a war in which Russia tries to legitimate an
Invasion to do that they have to uh develop arguments against the Ukrainian so we had the Nazi uh we had the bombing of the local population we have the corruption and what they and we have now also you know the uh like it’s because you’re helping Ukraine that inflation is
Coming so and all of this is for one reason European Europe Europe and uh and the US are not directly fighting Russia they’re supporting Ukraine only Ukraine is in an actual War except in two Fields those two fields are C cyber but we can’t see and information in the information
Field why do they attack us and why do they do that it’s because the support to Ukraine the depth the strategical depth of Ukraine is the West all the weapons is coming all the money is coming help is coming from the West if they do
Break the the uh the belief in the west that they should support Ukraine then they want to obtain a military Advantage by the fact that the West is not going to support Ukraine anymore and so they can win that’s the only reason why they are making that much amount of of effort
Into trying to uh use the the fake news the way they do that’s the reason why every time we see a new campaign we have to look at is it true because sometimes they use truth or is it not and why is it so this I think it’s very important
To keep in mind the uh the awareness of of the reason why the the environment in which we are working when we are producing news and I think that everybody should ask himself every citizen as you say should ask himself in which environment do I receive information or fake news
That’s so yeah stop breathe and S thank you very [Applause] much uh so considering the proceeding of our panel maybe I would ask you uh of all of you so those who want want to respond can please feel you feel free uh the question of one one aspect we didn’t
Mentioned yet but with which is Central and banal let’s say is our U information media experience it’s time how how do you manage time in fact today because one of the main aspect is that one news replaces another and very very quickly so to uh fight against fake news do you
How do you see it from your perspective scientists perspective journalistic Report perspective and so on because do we have to concentrate on some main uh let’s say topics and try to to defend this front let’s say or do we have to prevent uh with big Advance as as for
Example yes excited I mean prevention so a vaccination against V so how do you see this or how do you see it also in the analysis from uh artificial intelligence do we have to also to to develop our machines or to be uh develop programs that are more precisely acting for
One or another aspect so so maybe how you can introduce this uh scientific and also philosophical term of time in your practice let’s say sure okay should I try to do it in Stereo you some yeah so um it’s an excellent question it’s actually an unanswered
Question as far as I know because nobody until now could tell me how much time you actually have to really stop a disinformation campaign from from having impact so you don’t know if you need to stop it in 3 hours 12 hours 24 or three
Days or whatever but um so so I can only tell you my um technical um perspective here so I think when we have um a disinformation campaign at least at first um technology cannot help to counter disinformation immediately because as I said error rates are too high so if you had
Something like an integrated filter within um something like a social media Network that would block stuff when it thinks okay it’s fake and you had a really high chance that you have for example 10% of blocked messages and of course the problem then is um also what
Is actually truth truth changes how can you really um react on true so so when you have a terrorist attack and you say Okay country X is a peaceful country and then you have a terrorist attack and by by a snap of of the finger it’s not a
Peaceful country anymore but how can the machine decide whether this is true or not so this is really really a challenge so what I think is that um what you need to do is you need to support um humans by reacting on disinformation campaigns and this will take some time this will
Take hours and maybe days but what you can do afterwards is um inform the machines filters that this is actually a disinformation campaign this is a effect and then you then have um reinsertions or you have distributions over new networks or you have um small variations
Then you can block this quite easily so I think um you have certain delay and then you have a filter effect afterwards this is so far as I can say the only realistic strategy at the moment some else thank you just uh very quickly this is a great question because as we know
From our talks to fact Checkers and everyone who Tred to debunk misinformation just doesn’t work very effectively right because not a lot of people actually read debunks because it’s not that engaging it is pretty boring and it is usually too late so I think what Professor vasileski mentioned
About the idea of vaccination we call it so our research arm jigaw uh made this research and uh put forward an idea to do pre-b banking campaigns which we’ve done together with YouTube last year in Poland Czech Republic and Slovakia so you would present basically the idea is
You present short odds on YouTube before any videos about some techniques like scapegoating for instance right Scape goting on Ukrainian immigrants in the case of Poland and the research showed it actually worked very well in Poland and Czech Republic there were some slight issues with Slovakia didn’t work
That well but Slovakia is basically if you look at any research it is a hot bed of misinformation especially from uh Kremlin misinformation in central eastern Europe now we’re trying to repeat that experiment on a quite larger scale with DPA in Germany as well so I I
Don’t think there are already any uh any outcomes of that probably yeah okay um and one other thing uh apart from pre- banking is you know we I think we can also try to find out which narratives might be uh trending in the future so for instance for many disinformation
Campaigns again coming from China and from Kremlin they first test most of those campaigns in count in developing countries in Africa or Caribbean so for instance Kenya is a testing ground for a lot of them and the ones that work there are we we very often see them a few
Weeks or few months later uh coming out in in Western countries or in Europe so I think it is possible we just have to align better we have to pay attention we have to tackle the issue globally as I think fenko said about it’s not only about tackling misinformation in Ukraine
Or po or what have you but tackling the issue globally seeing what narratives are circulating then globally and trying to stop them uh if possible at the core thank you thank you very much Daniel it’s maybe did end after time is a very important issue I I
Started because see I’m quite old so I started 40 years ago as a journalist and a as a war correspondent at the time there was no computers and there was no set phones okay we will go to Afghanistan we we will go for three months nobody knew where we were then we
Have time to understand what’s going on and speak with people when we come back it took us hours in PESA or in in Chad in to to type or stuff and we will explain what we’ve seen for at least a week you know in double Pages or in magazines and
People will take time also to read and understand the situation so time and space are a luxury which actually produce news and information it’s change it changed uh changed in uh in the ’90s with the with the set phones and things and and the the the the direct the feed that you
Know the first U golf War where you could see on CNN the the green lights behind the the the the Anchor Man on the top of the roof and you had the impression of seeing the war but then you had no distance to understand what was actually going on and the problem
That from that time the reporter lose some autonomy because every day he was on the phone with his chief editor which was organizing the news in a general kind of you know putting it in in a in a presentation and now this and and and from in
We came to stream and stream is not the same thing as as information and now this stream is even more and more it has been industrialized in a way and and like all industry it has been attacked by low Coast so it’s getting down and the the economical model of the press
Now is more on the stream than information reporter likes me uh we are a very few amth actually and we are used as a marketing uh marker uh for our news agencies or our new our media but and and and that’s where you actually can I mean the the the propaganda can
Penetrate uh the mind of the people because it’s it’s the stream is just an aggregation of things which are existing but that the journalists haven’t taken by themselves most of the young report journalists who came out of schools are no have no chance to go on the ground
And Fire information by themselves and that’s an issue for our democracies because you cannot fight disinformation propaganda just by technical means or just by uh official uh organization it’s very good that the the the Foreign Affairs or the army look into it because there are parts of this
Action which are military action or are diplomatic action but at the end of the day our societies we will be uh vaccin against fake news only if there is a vivid uh an an actual information that people can trust and and and there’s no way people can trust
Information is the process of making these informations is not clear for the people that’s very important and time is part of that yes I thank you very much for the interesting point of view it’s very just in fact yes so stepan maybe you can let thank you let me add one
Aspect of that why time is so so important um so how do you usually are getting those information and probably disinformation or so-called fake news via smartphone I assume or maybe in the WhatsApp group you have with your family and the crazy uncle always sends stuff
And if you look if you look at the the account which is spreading that false information I assume you have never seen that before that’s it’s not the the whatever Ministry of Foreign Affairs from whatever country you might imagine so those are some some accounts which are just publishing stuff and how do
They come into your WhatsApp group algorithms mainly algorithms of the platforms which are pushing stuff that see oh people are reacting on it we have interference so that is a huge problem this makes everything faster and faster this is maybe one reason why big platforms which are now under pressure
From the DSA and the code of practice have to react have to be transparent in that what does it mean for journalists we can partly react on this time pressure partly we will never win this game you can never be as fast and as as uh whatever extremis and as uh loud and
Screaming as those fake informations are but we we are we are a news agency we are used to work very fast in a way what we sometimes do is a format what we call called something like about a a bigger topic where it’s totally unclear we
Write a format which is called what we know yet and we we do not know yet so so we are not waiting until the absolute end but very transparently say hey we have debunked this element already we have debunked that already this is false on this and this point we still have to
Do some research on that so times but of course every material we are publishing has to be double proofed and this takes time thank you very much maybe someone else want to add yes please have okay I can just add um some another aspect on
Um from a technical point of view so um yes time is a a great Challenge and um for example as I mentioned um more than uh new um new new fake uh when we Face a new uh method to create uh deep fakes for example this is very challenging because
Uh as I mentioned we we may have I take the example of deep fake we have some algorithms that are able to detect them and as I mentioned they rely on artificial intelligence that means they need a lot of data to train to detect this kind of Def and generally
They are very specific to one method that produce a defect and there exist a lot of method uh that can create such defects and the if uh a new method uh is um used and published on social media media we uh usually existing method will
Not be able uh to detect it and we need a lot of time to uh collect to identify the method collect data train the algorithm and so on so that’s one point Thank you very much and maybe uh continuing your your reflection in do
You think that I am I’m a little bit uh pessimistic on this point but do you think some regulation for example could intervene because Stefan spoke about algorithm for for example do you think you could regulate it or it’s completely naive to put it in this way what do you
Think maybe Professor rki is H I think that we should allow people to uh to believe in anything okay so uh so regulation is just you know it’s just like there is one through and one truth and uh you can’t you can have your own perspective but uh when you talk about
Time I think that we should have time uh Dimension and intensity because because one uh one fake news or gossip because uh all the time all over the time there were gossips and people have some kind of fake news but it was spread in different ways so uh so we know in in
Banum and in in in in in in Poland there were many ways to you know to inform people and to Mis mislead people but but when when when when the pattern is just like diffusion okay it’s about my uncle my aunt my uh the boyfriend of my
Daughter it is it is maybe stupid but it’s not dangerous but when you have an attack and the intensity uh is very strong in uh in one moment because because uh some kind of narrative was chosen to was was chosen for such attack so it’s it’s really dangerous and we uh
Then have to act very quickly so uh uh so I I think that the pattern of diffusion is uh is normal but the but the very strong intensity in one moment is is very dangerous because we have no you know we have no tools to to to react
Immediately we have to have this double double proof and all the all the process cedures we used to we we used to check so uh I’m I’m afraid of I’m afraid of very strict regulations because uh sometimes uh people really do reveal something okay when when when there were
When when there were uh regulations about uh about you know Flat Earth okay so Copernicus couldn’t couldn’t uh print his his book anyway he couldn’t print his book H he made this in in Germany so thank you a lot about that but but we have to let people uh uh
To be uh misled I think but we have to have tools for reacting for attacks thank you very much but but in fact when I was speaking about regulation I wasn’t meaning the regulation of information of the content I was speaking of some technical tools for example using
Algorithm and so on because when we think about this situation where we we know is something that appears for us very natural that for example there is a regulation for handle of weapons it’s something normal it’s now I’m sorry yes yes I I I forgot about
That it’s it it usually it’s done for entertainment okay so so there are many many cases that we that we uh that we are misled by entertainment uh people uh people watch some kind of tire and they think it’s it’s you know it’s kind of
News Okay so uh so sometimes you know we we we can’t help them okay thank you thank you very much yes Martin yeah but so so I’ve been talking with this about uh about this problem of Regulation and Technology with a um professor of Law and he gave me one interesting idea and
I like this very much so the important thing with regulation is that um as soon as you have for example a law or a rule that you must not distribute deep fakes without some information that this is entertainment stuff or fun or whatever but you you just spread it and there’s
No deep identifier there then when this is not allowed and you have a good means of identifying deep fakes you can simply react on breaking this regulation that you must not spread deep fakes without showing that this is a deep fake so you don’t need to go into debunking
And analyzing and questioning okay would it be censorship if I remove this or whatever it’s just okay you have the regulation there’s no it’s not allowed to spread deep fakes without an info so you detect it as an deep fake and you can act on the content and this is quite
Helpful because it takes away the need for a higher interpretation you really can go and into a technical analysis of course it’s still a challenge because you have a need a reliable way to to detect this but if you have this it’s quite helpful to have such a regulation thank you
Much I don’t I don’t know much about technical things about algorithm but it’s true that it’s a problem in our societies we all have bias we are I do have I mean everybody has and that’s and and and what uh algorithm are working on is that they feed our bias and they uh
Amplify them and that’s very dangerous uh even I think for ourselves uh I’m Every Day I’m trying to when you know you have to fight by yourself about about your own bias so you and that’s what’s difficult uh if because we assume we’re trying to organize news for reasonable nice normal people but
There’s nothing you can do about people who want to believe and there and you can tell them everything you want and give them the proof they will never trust you and believe you because they are stuck in their beliefs and people would don’t understand that there’s
Nothing you can do you can put all the subtitles you want it won’t never work so uh yeah that’s an issue but even but that’s an issue for ourselves and and it’s more and more difficult to have different point of views and we have to force ourself to listen to the others
And to try to find out why are they doing something even if you don’t agree with them uh what are uh their motivations like typically I I’m totally against and the occupation of Ukraine I think it’s it’s terrible I try to understand what what is The Logical of
The Russian behind it because if I don’t understand that or again I’m not going to say but you know why did they change the strategy why did they did what it when did you know went and when they took hostages what’s the strategy behind
It’s not to try to excuse It’s to try to understand and that’s and the only way you can do that is to also you know look the way they they they are making their their decisions because all those decisions are taken by men I mean they make the wrong decision but they are
Taking those decision so we have to find and that’s our work as journalist to explain how it came to that decision to that point where you have to report on it and that’s that it’s it’s an effort you have to do on yourself every day thank you very much so once again we
Come back to reflection in fact Stan maybe you wanted to add something very shortly on that regulation I would like to to to answer one thing on that of should it be allowed that people are spreading false information lies just maybe you can ask yourself is that okay
Yes of course it’s okay that’s freedom of speech you are allowed to do that if you want to write the Earth is flat and here is a study on that that the Earth is flat absolute that’s fine we’re in Europe uh we can do that now honestly
This is very important yeah what is important in this whole discussion again about regulation we have to regulate the platforms again who are then again pushing false information we talked about this a minute ago but we should not regulate people so the answer to that is also I’m a fact Checker that
Means what we need is also on platform here’s the false information and here is a fact check or something like that here is somebody with a proven history or an expert or certified expert who explains how it is and gives the proof to that we have that partly with with platforms
Some do already others do not do it now we have the DSA and the code of practice things might change now but it’s very important to understand that we’re not talking about whatever it’s forbidden to do this or something like that that is the the core point in here we need need
The discussion we need arguments counter speech is the word for an open Society to in the end fight disinformation thank you very much uh so maybe coming back to the question of time the central question which uh was in our discussion I propose that we go to the coffee break maybe to continue
This discussion in other format but before it I will just say a few words about the organization of the day so after the coffee break I propose you to come back in this room at 11:30 so after 50 minutes and we will split in three groups uh for different Workshop
Animated by two specialist as we planned it uh originally I mean one from the academic world and one from the Practical uh World journalist so uh we will tell you this uh what are these groups uh after the the coffee break but we uh We Gather here so in 50 minutes
And we will after continue in three different room uh on the on this floor and also on the first floor uh under under under us here so so good coffee break and see you here in 50 minutes the coffee just here it’s just on this point
Thank you very thank you thank you and of course thank once again for the discussion and for our [Applause] speakers hello uh hello everybody good that you’re still here uh we are going to change a little bit the rules of the game I’m going to explain the rules so
So please the first uh thing you have to do is to move forward because now we are going to do such a thing like a fishbowl discussion Well normally it’s for a bigger audience than we are but uh to give you the opportunity to interact with speakers it’s uh it’s the better
The best possibility to to get into interaction so first thing please all of you move here lot of chairs free more more forward okay more forward pleas you please yes everybody yeah it was your also you’re just sitting uh move on well here three please come over there a it’s free please
Come closer uh because if not it’s not going to work so what what we are going to do uh we we are trying a more interactive presentation of the results of the workshop so this means we I’m going to invite as a moderator the speaker the presentators of uh the working groups
And uh there will be there you see there are four seats one seat will be occupied by me two seats occupied by the moderators of the working group presenting their uh results and then I expect you if you want to intake if you want to to to share some views of your
Working group just come to us join the group and uh there will be one seat free and uh interact with the people who are already presenting when you are finished whoever is finished while just leaves his chair free or her chair free and then there’s Poss possibility for
Another one to come is this more or less understood any questions no so please the speaker the presentator of the first working group I would like you to come I think you are the first was the first on the list Stefan and yatc please yes together so you’re doing your you’re
You’re being my Ginny pigs now that’s so great uh so you had the discussion about uh the possibilities capabilities of artificial intelligence what are the major what was the discussion all discussion all about what are the major findings of the group where are the problems okay I’ll I’ll start with it y
You jump in you will contradict me that’s what we agreed on where we didn’t agree that’s good yeah we talked about the the opportunities of AI uh so far concerning disinformation uh means to create and also to debunk um we first we first just asked ourselves
So how present is our AI generated fakes in our real life and I guess most of participant were asking themselves how do I know do you really see them so it was more or less it is not really there that I would say every day in my
WhatsApp group I get these deep fakes I can see them so on the one hand we have reporting on AI is there and AI can do everything and can deceive you on the other hand it is not it’s not present real one but we’re quite aware that if
It’s not there yet it will come that’s on the one hand we discussed we discussed uh a lot about the the the opportunities of AI we were a little bit coming from different positions on the one hand um yek and others also mentioned how capable AI is already what
You can do in general with AI to deceive to to fool people uh my position is still uh from a journalistic point of view that it is still impossible to create news relevant once again news relevant fakes for the time being for the moment because you can still put it
Into the context you can verify it you can check it so that’s where we are but we we’re not talking about the future on that so so far on how AI is there at the moment uh so it’s definitely not the catastrophe which has built on but uh we
Are expecting a lot would you like to contribute yes of course because uh um we find out that I’m pessimistic one and uh and Stefan is a bright star in our group and and and Stefan was convinced that it’s quite easy to it’s quite easy to to distinguish between uh True News
And a fake one because there is lack of consistency and the and not everything is perfect so the brain of journalist could analyze it and uh and distinguish and it’s okay and the pessimistic part of our group was not so convinced and and I said that it’s not
So obvious and some of uh uh participants in our group for example pav kuchma uh try to make conscious try to make Stefan believe that we are unconscious of the flu of of fake news and it’s not so easy and if we don’t know uh what is uh what is
Fake fake information and what is uh what’s not we can’t say that we that we are able to do it and uh and there are many uh many information that uh that we uh uh that we receive from entertainment and and and others gen not only news and
It makes our attitude towards some things uh uh in in special way and that tendency is very important in reacting on u in in reacting to to fake news and because of that we could omit some uh some signs of inconsistency and because of that we uh we could be eager to be
Misled or eager to be to be misinformed and and of course for for our sake uh another uh another man of Ideal World uh didn’t agree and and it make and it made me happy because uh because uh uh because having such uh such people around us in
Our group uh I could uh I could feel safe uh and we and we made also one uh one one distinction that we can act in the citizen mode when uh we are responsible for others responsible for society looking for for regulations looking for uh uh for uh for solutions
To uh to be rational and we are also in the consumer mode when we try to try to feed our self-esteem and uh and some of our stars in our group assured us that we we could be uh all the time in the citizen mode and I’m very happy that I’ve heard
That okay H in the end is the question who’s who’s going to be responsible do we need any responsibility regarding I AI is there any question from the audience who would like to or would you like to add something from your working group because we have that please Mr yeah well now
Yeah the front so so um I I come back to the this concept of time because maybe time is an interesting question here because you said um AI doesn’t allow fakes that are news relevant but I think with um the concept of news relevance it could mean that you
Can verify you could for example um have a close look have second opinion call people and so on but um this of course means that there’s a huge DeLay So when you for example just just an example you have a war zone and you say okay there are pictures of soldiers shooting
Civilians and then you have emotions and of course in a war I guess it’s hard to to call somebody that you really can trust that he gives you the correct information and so on so things can become really complex but with a with AI you can create perfectly reasonable pictures of a scene
Where soldiers shooting um civilians and they they will look really good and um so the question is um are we talking about the same thing immediate response was okay do I print it in next tomorrow’s newspaper I fully agree with you um the question of time of course
But if you have a scenario like that uh it is still the question there’s somebody who who is just creating fakes for example but how can that person deliver it to public to society it could be okay you might say it is already a very big account social
Media account but then it has a background or is maybe even notorious so we know them or we mistrust them otherwise again if somebody creates it we need the algorithms in it to to to make harm if if you are creating fakes and nobody sees them because you have
Only two followers on Twitter you can do that and you know what I mean but there’s no result there’s no harm in that really so this is the point I see for that uh for the moment where we should also act I agree with you if
There are out these uh these things and Bill millions of times being shared already then time plays a big role and it makes harm but once again still the creator has to achieve it that millions of people can see it and therefore you need the algorithms of the platforms and
There we should start with regulation as as well if I’m answering your question or your point don’t you have an DPA the army of bots if we are fearing the are we fearing the army of no don’t you have of if we have an army of BS no maybe you
Should uh I don’t know why okay because because uh usually when you when you plan an attack uh for some institution or uh or uh or just just you want to attack media with some topic you have uh thousand of uh fake fake accounts and
You can make it in uh in one hour with uh with with thousand connections okay and uh and and usually is it is just just like an outbreak okay so so this is not the question how to spread the information okay it’s the question is
How to uh how to foresee it I I got your point it means like like this is really like fake industry we talked about this you mean where you have already thousands of accounts and and a bot Army behind you I agree with you that’s another Point thanks for clarifying this
But uh have we seen that already just yeah at the beginning of than at the beginning of uh uh of uh of War Ukraine with Russia the army of boat that was used in in pandemics switched to to be the to be to be the Russian Bots and uh and uh uh uh
They were trying to blame ukrainians for the war outbreak okay so so I think that uh that it is and it you know this this this Army is is in the uh in the sleep mode and suddenly it is it is used and and and even if you even if you
Recognize many accounts uh uh new new one started to be you know to be uh to be uh ready for the uh ready for the next strike and especially uh nowadays when Elon Musk uh uh proceed with you know freedom of speech on Twitter uh X platform it’s it’s I think
It it will be worse okay the condition will be will be even worse than before thank you very much are there comments from other members of other groups so you could have my chair do you want to no no pleas oh no no no it’s okay so we
Everybody can so please well who who else are the the presentators of the working groups are there some of you going to present a working group so please come take the seat thank you um hello everybody so uh in our group we actually discussed a few questions right and among them we
Started by uh asking ourselves how much efforts we are willing to put in uh to inform ourselves so we can agree on two things information costs money but informing yourself on social media doesn’t right so um what I mean by information costs money is that to actually get the
Information from its source you have to be willing to invest money uh in field reporters for them to actually go on the field and look for the information by asking people questions and actually being there and and seeing for themselves right what’s going on and so later this information is
Communicated by source that are much more reliable than social media right because from where we got the information from reporters um so I’ll give you the yeah uh and so nowadays people tend to inform themselves on social media but there is a real problem with that which are the
Algorithms uh because they close you in sort of a bubble um and you won’t be able to see other ideas and visions of uh of life um and people tend to stay in sort of a laziness because they’re they are not going to try to go out of this bubble
They’re just going to continue to to scroll and uh and stay in the same ideas but there are some solutions to to fight this because you have to force yourself to look for for different opinions um even if it’s the opposite of what you’re thinking it can annoy you but it’s
Important to make this effort and to try to to look for other opinions so that you don’t stay in this bubble because no matter what is your opinion it’s not a good thing to always uh be uh confronted to the same ideas uh so yeah by looking at different
Opinions you’ll contribute to break this bubble um one more thing um there’s another another really important um thing when you’re informing yourself it’s to look at the sources because you don’t always know where the information is coming from the the news just pop up on your
Feed you look at them you read them you remember them but you don’t make the effort to try and check where they coming where they are coming from uh there’s no real trustability of the of the information so um at the end of the day
We can say that we can say that while we live in a world where um most of our sources of informations right they are from social media right so we go on our phones and we just log in right on Instagram Facebook like whatever your preferences are and we
Just take our information from there and so we can see that the re re reliability of the info we’re getting is a pretty challenging topic and so we can deal deal with this issue and I mean two ways that we can think of right now is first
Of all like as Maya said before Imagine This this bubble and when you’re in this bubble it means that the algorithm is giving you information that will that will actually suit your preferences right whatever your preferences are what whatever the topic is and so you can start by breaking this
Bubble by going and looking for other sources of information that won’t align with your way of thinking so you can just get another opinion so that’s the first thing you can do and the second thing you can do is actually treat information as if it was your food
Try to know where it’s actually coming from what you’re feeding your brain with and you can also ask yourself the question what for what reason the information that your reading has been diffused by who and what were his intentions yeah and uh about that for instance you
Can uh think about the chicken you ate for lunch uh it was in your plate for some reasons you know that it complies with the European regulations uh and uh there is a trustability not like the information that you see on social meas yes some of
You yes so because the girls uh have talked about this effect of social media bubble let’s say and the fact that the young people your generation is so much affected by disinformation in social media uh what do uh maybe researchers and journalists think that uh the government governments and the state
Institutions should do about that because uh the girls already talked about Solutions what young people should should do in order to to cope with this challenge of disinformation and fake news on social media but uh still a lot of fake news and disinformation is is available and not every uh young person
Is um fact checking and uh you know checking the source the dates the the provence of of each information that they see so what can governments and um and institutions maybe more regulation of these platforms of social media or uh what kind of solutions do you think or maybe more uh media
Literacy in schools from very early age for for people to to be informed about these challenges and and this risks from the very early age in order to uh let’s say look more critical Al the information that they see on social media if I may thank you very much for
Your wrap up we we got a lot of things understood what you have done in your group uh your question and and the comments you made on uh what should be done in regulation this is my private position on that I can’t speak on behalf of my news agency is definitely I would
Wish that we put some light into the black box of how your mobile phones or your Tik Tok and other tools platforms are working why do you get the particular things why suddenly as there more Pro Russian content or why is that specially and We Know by by uh by by
Research that uh for example the Tik Tok users that in my generation over 50 that I get totally different content which might not surprising than people under 20 for example this is okay if it is just really whatever cat video versus football video or something like that it
Would be but if we come into Political disinformation as well that seems to be something behind it so my hope is uh and I’m again as you said optimistic on that I’ll see in the DSA in this regulatory process in the EU also the hope that the that the platforms must be transparence
That they allow researchers to look into into their algorithms how it works to give answers to that and that will be not very convenient for the platforms I assume that’s how they make money but this is definitely a need for it because once again otherwise it’s totally unfair and one small thing on
That definitely you’ll say for the Youth again uh the maybe even younger people might nevertheless be U more aware of the opportunities to fake that that they they it is maybe more difficult to fool them by by technical things again by Photoshop or I would say it’s a it’s a
Higher level of awareness at least ah this is rather a fake or something I would assume uh than than older people again who can be still fooled by by Photoshop in the concern what I wanted to say is definitely media literacy is necessary but once again for all generations that is
Important so one thing more about because I want to be in contrary to to Stefan this is my role that he asked me to one thing about the media literacy because every post on Instagram is fake news okay because it’s unreal of course the real post are very bad and no one no
One want no one wants to see such such photos so when we uh when we talk about social media it’s about self-presentation it’s not about information so when I have the when I have my wall it’s my wall for self-presentation and when I read some site of media uh it’s about
Information and having something that that is that is not so pleasant on my wall it’s not it’s it’s it’s unpleasant for me it’s it’s it’s it’s not self I feel badly with that okay and having something something maybe not so pleasant on uh DPA sides uh it’s okay
For me okay so so social media walls it’s not space for informing it’s about sharing information but sharing as self as self-presentation as we you know make some uh signs about ourselves okay so it’s very hard to uh to uh it’s very hard it’s very hard to make something
Better improving uh social media because because it’s it’s not the medium for information it is used uh to to inform people but but the main function is uh really opposite to uh to informing ENT uh are there other questions and comments and commentaries information you would like to share
Please uh so why why I don’t care just don’t know the rule because Olga was allowed to stay in her seat but I have to okay you should be visible thank you thank you because you’re on the camera yes so Olga could also have been on the
Camera I think it’s that’s not an argument so um so the question um that I I’m wondered about was um when we have a regulation for example so what how could this regulation um look like so you ask the question or maybe I give the question back to you if
You have something in mind because when you for example in I think in YouTube and other channels we had the thing that first of all there was this um influencer advertisements and they they didn’t tell you anything about and then they were forced to to show that there
There is advertisement but did this really change the way things are perceived so is it like oh is it’s advertisement I don’t trust him anymore and I’m not influenced by him because there is a sign so so um when we force people for example in YouTube to put a
Messageer so this is not actual news content but a personal opinion of uh content creator would this really change things or do we really need to to go to the level of um controlling which content is distributed and when this this is um the way to go then I guess it
Becomes really hard on deciding what to dist so it’s really not I don’t want to be nasty but um speech Yes freedom in speech so this is when we are at the point of um when we really regulate the content but when we um go a little bit more early and say um
We just somehow distinguish between between information and entertainment then my question would be even if we force people to um Make a Difference by having a logo this is just entertainment or this is just opinion but not news content would it really change the way it interacts with the
Viewers would viewers then really have this Gap in mind say oh so now he’s just talking as an Entertainer and not as a news bols person or would the information not leak into the brains of the people nonetheless I have no idea I’m not a psychologist but I
Please from your interventions comes to one idea because you said like how how we would regulate it and one idea is uh behind this that it’s all an algorithm this one is secret that was also the topic of the previous speakers and uh the secret is how they make money behind
So we understand that the um social media platforms do make money by selling targeted ads they need it they won’t disclose the algorithm most probably so how about uh limiting the use of algorithm to paid ads for example like as as of today Facebook for example just to to
Name one example makes sure that the contents we have in the news feed is filtered by our preferences so if some of you have 1,000 contacts on Facebook you would see contents that are published by 20 30 relatives and the others you will just not see them and
Those algorithms that they use for private use or private not so private depends what Ed people make of it do we need to apply them the same rules as the uh business use of Facebook which is also to send ads the ads can still be personalized if without that they would
Not make money but would there be a way to just control the fact that to to limit the use of algorithm for uh individuals use so I have a microphone so I just can react that’s totally fine but sorry actually I have no idea how idea how this interesting because we
Have all the people from the from our uh Workshop uh have been discussing all of this and and and so that’s interesting because we had that discussion one of the issue is um there is also a lack of confidence uh in official uh Co Corpus uh organization States even media
Mainstream media and I’m part of the mainstream media some people will think that because I’m part of the mainstream media I’m part of a plot uh and if even so we so we had this problem to to to to make a difference between first what is a normal debate
You might have stupid idea but you you’re allowed to have them and basically who is going to decide your idea is stupid or not so basically if they don’t break the rule I mean you have all the right in the world to express yourself that’s freedom of speech and that’s one of the
Difficulties in trying to regulate this kind of debate uh so that’s why we went on the discussions about how actually we can uh operate in an environment where we are the users of this algorithm and and and social media because it is very difficult to regulate
As such because the line is going to be very SE in between what is censorship and what is uh making uh I mean enforcing the law and there are so many laws that nobody can actually enforce so we can make some new ones but you never know who’s going to use them
And for what so that’s an issue and and the second thing that those people who actually don’t trust you are going to use those laws to explain that they are right because taking lows against them is the proof that basically they are the right people and you part of the plot so
Is it efficient we don’t think so we didn’t add an answer as such I mean everybody I suppose has his own answer to that question and that’s what’s make it difficult we are in a situation where we actually don’t Master uh the tools that we are using every day as if they were
Neutral though they are not and that’s one of the difficulties I think we we had that’s we also had the discussion about how a new generation might use it differently from an older generation and we maybe will find their own solutions to this problem but I don’t I’m not sure
That uh taking low full decisions either for when it breaks the law which is totally different but to try to organize an arena of discussion which is going to be like a normal academic scientific reasonable is going to work against what we see on the social media which is a
Kind of flow of emotions so we actually do have to master that tool and that’s a long-term process there I don’t think there’s any my personal position I don’t think there’s any easy answer and any easy answer is going to be dangerous because we don’t know who’s going to use
It maybe I can try to answer your question or comment on your comment so um what you propose is that the social media doesn’t filter news or Target news anymore so you’re basically you use your social media account and then you get arbitrary news and um I wonder if people
Actually would use a a news system like that or if the next step then wouldn’t be to have something like a user configurable um filter that um the user that is not assigned news anymore automatically by analyzing how did but maybe I just say Okay I I don’t care
About soccer as all no no soccer um I want um information about this kind of music but please no mainstream Rock and so on and then um I think within a few days people will would build their own own bubble again so uh I could at least
Imagine I don’t know if it would be like that but but um so from my experience when I look at um news channels I I never open news channels and just tell say okay tell me what happens I usually I ask okay I heard about this um
Occurrence or that problem and then I I look at news about this and um this is this is filtering so I of course I can miss things so this um type of um Pro podcast generic um news um feed this is something that I only experience when I
Really watch TV news so when I in the morning I usually watch some sort of news program and then I get a collection of news that somebody thinks is important to know and that’s that’s good for me so I I have rough idea what’s going on in the world um in the morning
Good feeling but um as soon as I really use the computer so then I filter and um don’t know if we just change the um social media driven filter with personal filters I have no idea if it’s better or worse and and just to quickly that’s why we ended into discussing about the
Question of trustability uh as Maria and and Juliet said basically if you eat something you now you’d like to know where it comes from um and when you feed your brain should be the same you should know where it comes from and then you about to know
And you make choices uh based on uh on basis on on a kind of a so maybe more than a rule it’s just the qu the being able to find where information is coming from where it’s leading to maybe a solution in between you know censorship and free debate
Censorship and free debate free debate who wants to participate some comment from your working groups the S working group should didn’t we have three no we have no we were one this one so we can finish group two all group two okay the other people so I would like I
I had thought that maybe with the discussion well I don’t have have to had to call all the uh working groups on stage but now I will please ask the last but not least working group on stage it’s uh Daniel and Eva so please come over take sorry thank
You do you want me to summarize uh yeah if you want sure okay so many things have already been said during this discussion and to summarize what happen during our uh session so the topic was how we can detect uh fake news and we spent uh many
Times to uh show several examples and discuss uh which uh kind of artifact we can find uh in uh images or in data for now though we agree that um for now uh there are still many inconsistencies that are detectable uh in actual um um current uh fake fake news and we also
Discuss several existing tools like the invid one I think much of people know it so how it works yes very great great tool um okay um there are um mostly two uh other point that uh were uh discussed and um one uh has already been mentioned
Is about uh the fact the problem and the fact that we cannot uh estimate by definition how much fake news uh we are not able to debunk either manually or automatically and so in fact we don’t know where we stand uh and what is the
Amount the amount of um fake news we are not aware of and another question interesting uh interesting is uh how where how can we ensure that uh content is authentic and uh because we are uh talking a lot about how we can detect something that has been modified but how
Can we ensure that something is really authentical and because there is um a counter kind of um counter effect right now is that uh some politician uh claimed that real videos from them uh are indeed uh fake ones and uh it’s a way for them to not assume um easily to
Not assume what they have uh said before um for this problem we mention some um promising direction that can be Active Solutions like watermarking where you can inject some uh invisible or not but some information in the image or in the video to ensure the authenticness and uh of course uh this
Kind of Watermark should be robust to many um manipulation but uh this is um promising Direction but uh it can only apply to some content and uh will not uh resolve all the problems and that’s all I remember yeah I think I also established but a lot of
Some participants didn’t agree that what Stefan said at this at the very beginning in our Workshop that uh we didn’t find any examples of deep fakes that were actually very impactful and people would fall for it so I still think that cheap fakes are the big issue and we don’t need any sophisticated
Technology like that to fool people and to influence our policymaking decision making Etc so it’s more about still education and critical thinking um and this kind of work at the ground to consume content content I hate this word news and yeah content with with much more criticism and a little bit less uh
Trust unfortunately because there’s no not enough trust in the society happy for any participants to take the floor as well yeah nobody needs to to move until now so I’m just wondering well I can’t can’t cannot not comment on this idea of water marking because I’m doing water marking
Since 25 years now and so the unsolved problem with water marking until now is security robustness works perfectly fine you can do really well watermarks that um stay into content but so far things like for example copy attack so taking a watermark and moving to a different content and then um having the
The watermark on that content this is very possible it’s really hard to to to counter such attacks and this of course means it when you have an environment where you say okay you can trust things because there’s a water mark in here just copy The Watermark and put it on
Your disinformation and then you have a even more evil way to to um spread disinformation because you have a certified disinformation campaign and it’s also the other way around removing waterm marks especially when you have a a lot of content with one water marking and um verification scheme it’s very
Easy because you you learn the the pattern of the watermarks that’s a signal basically a watermark is a signal and you have arbitrary content with the same signal you just put all the signal all the content um stack it and you have a very strong signal and then you know
How to remove it by inversion and so it’s really you need to be aware of this that waterm marking is perfect for some applications but I’m not really sure if it’s perfect for this application so it’s really a technical challenge so far as I know unsolved okay and there are no
Other active method that can guarantee that the content is you can attach to the data or yeah but when you when you attach things to data you usually can also remove it so this is quite quite easy to do so so the best strategy I know right now is still to
Have sort of robust hashing like you use it for inverse image and then you take the content create an robust hash put a digital signature on the robot stach and give the meta information and put it somewhere and then when some content occurs then you can take the robust
Stach and look if the same content is already in the in the signed list and you can derive the The Meta information but it but also robust taching can be attacked so it’s not like it’s it’s perfect but it’s harder to attack I would say than this watermarking
Strategies and what you can do with um for example robust hashing is then you can store the original so as soon as somebody claims that the content is like it is and you you um use the robust s you can show how the original looked like and then it’s easy to debunk um
Anything that um has been successfully injected by Ching content but this requires infrastructures but it’s a really so far the only strategy that I can think of that can somehow help to deal with this content manipulations thank you very much somebody else who wants to take my place
Here to ask question to make to do a comment last opportunity last call for commments no comments one two three no comments okay and so the the closing of this Workshop is going well of this seminar is going is not going to be done by me but I I
Would like to close this Workshop session uh I think it was extremely interesting well we started with with your your presentation to the morning and now we we got something new we work work together with you as participants whether there three basical point basically points well we we have been
Talking about lot about techn te logical development and we nobody nobody knows where go where what it’s going to lead us uh and easy tricks are not available so far I learned as well just for watermarks well this is not going to be the magic trick to get us out of fake
News um then be then the next issue was responsibility well this was also a topic that we discussed very much well responsible do we need a regulation or not well this discussion is ongoing I think also not only in the workshops but uh after the seminar also and the basic
Question are we more citizens or more consumers are we rational beings or more emotional this are at least the the three issues I’m going to take out from this session very thank you very much for being here while for sharing your opinion and your findings with us and uh
I head over the phone well the microphone not the phone for closing remarks to laon thank you very [Applause] much okay thank you very much flori and I thank you all uh I don’t know if I will summarize let’s say this uh day uh of uh dedicated to fake news because we
Told many things I think we had many answers but we had even more new questions I think which was of course predictable and which is a good thing I think academic world but also in general for our Reflections I of course found this very interesting and I I hope you
All of the public also um uh considered in in this way having maybe some new inspiration for the reflections uh to put things maybe more generally I would say that uh I um reflected about this um this this day considering that finally we talked of course about Technologies we talked about uh responsibility
Rationalism uh uh maybe some magical side because we also we told it in uh many workshops also that many of us also want something extraordinary so it has hasn’t to be real it has to be extraordinary for of all it maybe this is one of the main issue here that we we
Don’t only think Russian in IR rational way and as floran put it it’s one of the important things here I think so I would maybe say that the the interesting thing is finally that the individual aspects is in the center of strategies against fake news and finally it’s the not only
Our brain but also our position in the society as you put it at the end as a citizen but also as a consumer as a human being we it’s we’re considering it from our part of point of view and not only General things of society community and so on because Community is something
Important but it’s also a way to anonymizing responsibilities and when responsibility is anonymized it’s not it doesn’t work so well in fact I think so maybe we have to reconsider uh our this individualism which is always underlined today saying that uh social media are also a kind of uh of Castle of
Individualism because in a way uh they present each one of us as a kind of self- glorifying statue because publishing posts publishing videos photos and so on is a kind of uh self- glorification I would say also but maybe uh of course we can’t fight against it
Because it’s we have technology here we have a social practices which are already very deep established but we could maybe for also for our young listeners uh students and um uh also from the people from the French Lum of varo say that I will put it let’s say this way that maybe we
Have to reconsider this individualism uh not from this self glorifying point of view but from a point of view of human beings who are aware of uh and responsible for their own power because finally we decide what uh to do with fake news we can be guided by algorithm
We can be guided by maybe social practices we can be guided by our laziness let’s say but in fact uh Floren put it in this way that we are lazy to be uh we are too lazy to in fact verify information so on but finally laziness is a kind of rationalism it’s a
Rationality to to be lazy because we we we simply think in a way of what amount of effort do we dispense to obtain one or other goal so in fact it’s being rational being lazy but in fact if we uh replace this perspective from Individual and the in term of responsibility I
Think this would be maybe the the way to uh fighting against fake news because coming back to the question of time when uh time is the main aspect and we are always light uh behind fake news which are preceding in let’s say all our efforts to fighting them maybe
Considering it from the field where this fight is going on I mean our head would be the main um main strategy to fight them so uh we have for that of course some methodological tools also as a historian I would say that one of the maybe first and basic question will be
To ask why and for whom uh an information and image was published because why we we don’t have to lose the question of why not only what but also why and uh I will finish maybe here finishing on a why maybe it’s not a very inspiring solution but it’s maybe an
Inspiring way to uh continue this Reflections uh between us and at least in our individual heads so once again I uh thank all of you to be here uh with us I thank you for this wonderful I think um discussion and inspiring reflection and uh I hope that uh it will
Also be uh for us a kind of platform to uh reconsider our position in front of fake news but also in front of uh all our position in the society and our civic responsibility let’s say in in this uh this way so thank you very much
And U we were very glad to have you with us and uh have a good day for the other part of this um reflection thank you very [Applause] much