Guide to NoC RightsCon Tunis 2019

Wednesday, June 12th, 2019

 

Creating Shared Global Workflows for Social Media Monitoring (ID 1421)

The Future of Media in the Age of Misinformation, Strategic Roundtable

Speakers: Nat Gyenes and Jeff Deutch. Moderator Daniel Arnaudo.

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 9:00am - 10:15am, Utique.

Host Organization: National Democratic Institute, Meedan.

Description: The central objective of the session would be to convene groups working on social media collection and monitoring to describe new efforts to integrate datasets of social media data, develop and define workflows and standards, demonstrate tools for content collection and verification, discuss strategies for collaboration and integration, provide some feedback, ask questions, help develop tools, and incubate a new group of potential users for content collection and sharing. While initiatives like the Credibility Coalition, the Journalism Trust Initiative, Trust Project and TrustMetrics, NewsGuard and the W3C Credible Web Community Group are making efforts to develop standards, and numerous initiatives are working on datasets, limited resources are being devoted to communities in the Global South. Stakeholders such as the international human rights community and organizations working toward protecting free expression should also be more closely involved. In this session, our aim is to bring together more of the RightsCon community into the conversation and determine practical steps for moving forward.

 

Terrorist online content regulations in Europe and beyond: changing the platform liability paradigm? (ID 151)

Democracy and Conflict and Shrinking Civic Spaces, Panel

Speakers: Jessica Dheere, Georgia Holmer, Virginia Pérez-Alonso. Moderator: Joan Barata

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 10:30am – 11:45am, Leptis

Host Organization: Center for Internet and Society - Stanford Law

Description: The approximate structure of the session will be the following: - Opening remarks on the most relevant legislative anti-terrorist proposals (at the EU level and beyond) and their contrast with international standards and most important regional liability exemption regimes. - Reflection on the effectiveness of legislative measures introducing responsibility provisions vis-a-vis platforms regarding terrorist online content. This approach will be provided by anti-terrorist expert(s), using the experience of international security organizations and national law enforcement bodies. - Presentation of cases of national legislation and its effects in different regions of the world (mainly South East Asia, Europe and Latin America). After these presentations, participants in the audience will be asked to share and discuss specific cases, experiences and approaches. The panel aims at fostering a debate that shall combine a human rights and international standards approach together with a proper consideration of the adequate tools to effectively deal with terrorist online content, with the aim of defining best possible models. The debate will also identify global and regional tendencies aiming at transforming the general liability system applicable to online platforms, and possible actions and efforts to properly tackle these tendencies and adequately understand the impact on freedom of expression.

 

The big dataset in the sky: challenging geographies of discrimination (ID 1059)

Intersectionality on the Internet: Diversity and Representation, Fishbowl

Speakers: Nandini Chami, María Paz Canales and Arthur Gwagwa. Moderator: Diego Valadares Vasconcelos Neto.

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 9:00am - 10:15am, Carthage 3.

Host Organization: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Description: An interactive discussion on challenging “geographies of discrimination” that will bring a perspective from the “Global South” to ,e.g., (1) international trade and investment agreements negotiations, (2) the Sustainable Development Goals implementation, (3) the United Nations and regional human rights mechanisms work, and (4) ensuring accountability to the Global South for decision-making and governance of digital technologies. Digital technologies can contribute to the realization of human rights, including the right to development. They also present great challenges by building a brave new world and a highly unequal one. Digital divides and closing gaps can be addressed in terms of access to and affordability of digital technologies and platforms in developing countries. However, “the big data divide” is a far larger gap. This is the divide between those who generate data and those who collect, store and use data, the former excluded from access to data, expertise and processing power, power which is increasingly opaque, indecipherable and too vast. This is not a question of privacy or protection alone, but one of discrimination and powerlessness. The session will debate challenges to closing geographic digital divides, in what is a highly uneven, under-regulated playing field rife in money, profits and big monopolies.

 

Let’s Get Playin’: A demo of SMEX’s board game on online mobile safety (ID 576)

Privacy and Surveillance and Individual Security, Meetup

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 12:00pm - 1:00pm, Limes

Host Organization: SMEX

Description: Participants will play Proxy, the board game that SMEX has developed to teach Lebanese youth about privacy and security. The game, which debuted at MozFest and will have been played by various groups of young people in Lebanon prior to RightsCon, is a competition between a “hacker” and a team of three activists, each with a unique identity and skillset. The activists win when they work together to reach three “safety levels” and the hacker wins if he outwits them first by obtaining three types of personally identifying information (GPS Location, Mobile Pin/Passphrase, and Email Password) about each activist. In our 90-minute session, groups of 4 will play the game for the first 65 minutes (15 minutes to explain, 50 minutes of playing time); during the last 25 minutes, we will elicit feedback about our specific game, but also discuss the core digital safety issues that board games and other offline tools can help address.

 

Privacy in Employer-Employee Relationships: The grey areas in workers’ rights to privacy protection and employers’ legitimate interests (ID 1551)

Privacy and Surveillance and Individual Security, Workshop

Speakers: Renate Samson, Mark Lehmann, Mónica Estrada and Maria Solange Maqueo. Moderator: Judith Mariscal.

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 12:00pm - 1:00pm, Carthage 3.

Host Organization: Centro Latam Digital.

Description: The use of diverse technologies as a means to improve work conditions and increase productivity has been embraced steadily by various industries and sectors all over the world. This has transformed privacy boundaries in employer-employee relationships. The right to privacy admits certain limits or restrictions, particularly when obligations are assumed within a work relationship. But this cannot be considered an unrestricted excuse to invade the private sphere of employees or to treat their personal data inappropriately. There are many grey areas, especially when the working conditions are not clear and when neither employers nor employees know the scope of its functions. This panel will analyze challenges around these tensions, focusing on the opinions on processing personal data in the workplace issued by the European Data Protection Board, which provides a basis for reassessing the balance between the legitimate interests of employers and reasonable expectations of workers' privacy. Speakers will analyze to the criteria that both the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have used to determine the scope and limits of employers’ legitimate interests and whether these can be translated to different contexts and local legislation in countries like Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay and Perú.

 

The Network of Internet & Society Centers Information Quality Meetup (ID 1125)

Show and Tell: Skill-building for Advocacy and Campaigning, Meetup

Moderator: Sandra Cortesi

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 1:00pm - 2:00pm, Carthage 1

Host Organization: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society - Harvard University

Description: The Network of Internet & Society Centers (NoC, https://networkofcenters.net) is a network of almost 100 Internet and society centers around the world. As many NoC representatives attend RightsCon, we hope that by hosting this meetup NoC representatives can (re)connect and new people can join the conversation. The meetup is envisioned as a highly engaging, participatory, and somewhat gamified encounter. The idea for the meetup is inspired by a cards-based activity designed at the Berkman Klein Center (bit.ly/iqcards1). In short time intervals, meetup participants are encouraged to find someone with a stack of cards and have them introduce their project using the card as a basis for the conversation. Those receiving cards will be able to keep them and invited to reconnect with those they spoke to during the conference, opening opportunities for channels of collaboration.

 

Tech Demos: Getting Chatty – rethinking secure communications (ID 1308)

Privacy and Surveillance and Individual Security

Speakers: Holger Krekel, Khaled Ben Driss, Ksenia Ermoshina

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 1:00pm - 2:00pm, Elydhafa

Description: First Part - Build contextual chatbots and Artificial Intelligence assistants with open source conversational AI framework (RASA NLU) (Wevioo); In this tech demo, we will present how to develop a chatbot from scratch using an NLP open source framework (RASA NLU). The Rasa NLU framework is a set of open source machine learning tools for developers to create contextual chatbots and assistants. What is a ChatBot? What can you do with a Chatbot? Presentation of Natural Language Processing Solutions (NLP / NLU), Discovery of RASA an open source framework AI for NLP / NLU, Handle contextual conversations with deep learning instead of hand-crafted rules, The heart of Chatbot, Preparations & Configurations, Connecting to an external API, Integrating ChatBot with your information system, Integrating ChatBot with social networks, Improvements to Chatbot based on usage. Second Part - Delta.Chat: rethinking decentralized secure communication _with_ at-risk communities (ISCC CNRS); Delta Chat is a decentralized secure messenger using email for transferring messages. For the last year we have been designing and testing use-cases for human rights organizations and journalists working in at-risk environments in Eastern Europe. During this session we will present Delta.Chat project, not just as another "messaging app", but as a community effort to decentralize secure messaging infrastructure in an interoperable way. Then, we will give the floor to our partner, Eugenia Andreyuk, from the Human Rights Information Center, Kyiv, Ukraine, that works on monitoring human rights violation in at-risk areas, such as Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. She will give elements of local context, risks and threat models. After we will propose to the audience to try out the app by themselves. We will wrap-up with a round of open comments.

 

Are we seriously going to trade away our privacy like cars, rice, or bananas? (ID 1557)

Data Trust and Protection and User Control, Workshop

Speakers: Lisa Garcia, Burcu Kilic, Estelle Masse and Pablo Viollier. Moderator: Francisco Vera.

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 2:15pm - 3:30pm, Carthage 3.

Host Organization: Public Citizen.

Description: When data becomes a trade commodity, privacy is treated as a trade barrier. Policymakers are using this logic, and therefore privacy and data protection rules are undermined by binding, enforceable trade agreements. Trade deals containing data governance rules are crafted by technology companies who are the only stakeholders represented in the negotiations. Appearing first in the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP), these rules constrain how countries regulate the cross- border transfer of data. Since the TPP, these rules have emerged in a growing number of bilateral, plurilateral, and regional trade agreements. This is despite the fact that such provisions directly undermine nations' human rights obligations. Furthermore, these rules could worsen competition between platform companies as they grow to become international data monopolies. This session will collectively map and strategize a way forward to influence trade policy making on behalf of digital rights organizations and all those who defend our human rights on the internet. The highlight will be a facilitated discussion about what each person can do to get involved to defend privacy and fight for a more diverse internet economy worldwide.

 

Network Disruptions in Times of Conflict: Strategies for circumvention and resistance (ID 582)

Turn It On and #KeepItOn: Connectivity and Shutdowns, Fishbowl

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 3:45pm - 5:00pm, Oya 3

Host Organization: SMEX

Description: In this session, participants will come together to discuss the impact of network disruption and internet censorship in times of conflict, and what strategies people have taken to circumvent it. A diverse group of regional researchers and activists, network measurers, and circumvention tool designers will come together to bring their own unique perspective on the effect of disruptions and censorship in times of conflict, and how the the impact can be mitigated. Whether a state or non-state actor is initiating these disruptions, they often have dire consequences for the people experiencing them, hindering their ability to communicate and their access to reliable news sources; and limiting their access to emergency services. The discussion will build on the existing work of the participants and hopefully inform future research and the development of circumvention tools. (For the AccessNow folks reading this, I have confirmed NetBlocks and Psiphon, but am waiting on them to tell me who. Potentially Helmi Noman who researches Yemen too. Very happy to add anyone else Access might recommend to this session).

 

Tracking Takedown Transparency Today and Tomorrow: Lessons Learned and Next Steps for the Emerging Practice of Transparency Reporting on Content Moderation (ID 989)

Forging Alternative Models for Business and Human Rights, Workshop

Speakers: Stephanie Elder, Kim Malfacini, Nicolas Suzor and Alex Walden. Moderator: Spandana Singh.

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 3:45pm - 5:00pm, Dougga

Host Organization: New America's Open Technology Institute

Description: As social media companies have increasingly become gatekeepers of online speech, they have also faced growing pressure to provide meaningful transparency around their takedowns of content based on violations of their terms of service. In 2018, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were the first companies to finally start issuing transparency reports on their content moderation efforts. This strategic roundtable will survey the current state of this emerging practice and discuss how to ensure a robust future for content moderation transparency: companies that have already issued reports will share lessons learned in the implementation of their reports, companies that haven't reported will discuss the challenges they've faced, advocates and researchers will highlight fresh insights derived from the data and flag what additional data is still needed, and all will brainstorm new ideas for how best to expand the practice to include more companies and more innovative features, in a manner that will give policymakers and the public a meaningful window into platforms' content takedown practices. 2018 is the year that content moderation reporting finally became a best practice; we want to jointly strategize on how to ensure that it is standard practice by 2020.

 

Multistakeholder Models of Content Moderation: A Global Perspective (ID 498)

(un)Censored: The Future of Expression, Workshop

Speakers: Rasha Abdulla, Pierre Francois Doquir, Nighat Dad, David Kaye and 'Gbenga Sesan. Moderator Megan Metzger.

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 5:15pm - 6:30pm, Carthage 2

Host Organization: Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi) - Stanford University, ARTICLE 19

Description: This workshop will function as an opportunity to develop the practical terms of a participatory, multistakeholder social media council(s) for the moderation of online content. The need for a multistakeholder model arises from several trends: first, recent government legislation which poses threats to freedom of expression online; second, the extraordinary control over content exercised by private companies whose platforms increasingly represent the public square; and third, the urgent need to combat harmful online content, while protecting and respecting freedom of expression. With input from speakers who are experts in online content and human rights, and specifically the unique challenges faced by those in the Global South, this workshop will address practical questions for building a feasible multistakeholder social media council. Some key questions will include: How should we properly structure such a body to ensure effectiveness, buy-in from governments and platforms, and protection of human rights principles? Who should be a member of such a body? How should members be selected? What will be the specific function of such a body: will it review individual appeals on content, or serve as an advisory body to help establish global standards? Should there be a global body, or national- or regional-level bodies?

 

Combating Fake News: Exploring approaches for protecting the messenger, and the message (ID 1163)

The Future of Media in the Age of Misinformation, Workshop

Speaker: Gabrielle Lim. Moderator: Courtney Radsch.

Details: Wednesday June 12, 2019 5:15pm - 6:30pm, Caspian

Host Organization: Committee to Protect Journalists

Description: The new “fake news” rhetoric is providing a dangerous framework for repression. CPJ has seen “fake news” used globally to justify attacks, harassment, and arrests of journalists. In order to frame the scope of the discussion, the session will share relevant research into where fake news legislation is in place, has been proposed, or in rare cases, been revoked and its impact on journalists and civil society. After a brief overview of existing research and its findings, participants will break into three groups for each of the categories to discuss potential action or approaches that could be helpful to repeal or prevent fake news laws, and to try to understand what led to their revocation in rare cases. How does “fake news” legislation manifest similarly or differently around the globe, and what can be learned? A rapporteur for each group will take notes and will report back to the entire group at the end of the session to share findings. CPJ will collect the findings and put together a lessons-learned and advocacy strategy based upon the discussion to share with participants. The takeaways from this discussion will inform CPJ’s and other organizations’ advocacy with both tech platforms and with newsrooms.

Date: 
Wednesday, June 12, 2019 (All day)