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A regional summit of leaders has initiated a conversation about emerging and critical technologies as governments grapple with what companies and communities are already doing.
The Sydney Dialogue comes after Google invested $1 billion on a five-year digital research partnership with the Australian Government to nurture local start-ups.
Boss of online news firm Rappler and Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa called out “the virus of lies” in the information ecosystem, which was undermining relationships between digital companies and governments.
It was observed that authorities and users were often confronted with harassment and grooming, misinformation about the pandemic, radicalisation, and material fuelling conspiracy theories that undermine trust in governments.
“I don’t think any of us, not any of the tech platforms nor anyone living in a democracy, would want to see the status quo continue,” Ms Ressa told the regional summit of leaders last Thursday.
In line with this, delegates at the summit agreed that there should be a boundary between free expression and content online and the privacy and safety of authorities and users.
Twitter’s top lawyer Viijaya Gadde said that context mattered, such as clearly labelling government social accounts, so people can know whether the information they’re seeing is coming from a government-affiliated account or state-controlled media.
“But this is all in this context of providing more information, not less,” Ms Gadde said.
“We have to try radically new things here to help stem some of these problems we’re seeing.”
Twitter has already banned political advertising from their platform, saying that political message reach should be earned and not bought.
US academic Dr Zeynep Tufecki stated that while all technologies have created disruption throughout history, she wasn’t sure who should try to police content across digital platforms.
“Trying to micromanage the – who’s going to get platformed or de-platformed – and where’s that line, is super messy because I’m not even sure it’s the tech companies’ place to draw those lines,” she said.
However, Google spokesman Kent Walker advocated a solution to the issue. He stated that there should be a balance between responsible innovation and sensible regulation from governments.
“It’s important to remember that technology has been a huge force for good over the last decades and centuries, raising global living standards and bringing over a billion people out of extreme poverty,” he said.
Ms Ressa said that “guardrails” needed to be in place because people were being manipulated by technology, in a business model that’s been dubbed as “surveillance capitalism”.
“How much of our private thoughts can now be inferred through the data we put in,” she asked.
“How much of that is ours? How much of that is tax? And how much of it should be manipulated for profit?”
Convenor of the annual regional summit Fergus Hanson said, with tech bosses making decisions on future technologies that will have an unprecedented global social impact, the tension between national sovereignty and borderless technology has created issues between governments, civil society, and industry.
It was agreed at the summit that governments should think big on AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, and space technologies and not just try to catch up and draft new laws.
“There’s a role for the private sector, there’s a role for the public sector in trying to help define those norms,” Mr Walker said.
“You can get into authoritarian countries trying to exploit those sorts of approaches for their own purposes, and if you go too far down the slope, you’re into censorship and violations of human rights in ways that are problematic for all of us.”
This article was first published on Public Spectrum
Eliza Sayon is an experienced writer who specialises in corporate and government communications. She is the content producer for Public Spectrum, an online knowledge-based platform for and about the Australian public sector.
