Moderator: Jodie Ginsberg, CEO, Internews
Speakers: Patrick Penninckx, Head of Information Society, Council of Europe; Elena Fadeeva, CEO and Founder, FleishmanHillard Vanguard; Sally Lehrman, Founder, The Trust Project
Jodie
Thank you, and welcome to this session on free speech, dangerous speech, free media, and misinformation in which our panelists will attempt to solve in 45 minutes, a question to which the world’s biggest companies and pretty much every government in the world has so far failed to find satisfactory answers. However, if anyone can do it, I’m confident that this panel can. We’re joined today by Ayeni Adekunle, CEO and founder of BlackHouse Media and international public relations and communications company from Nigeria and recently opened up in the United Kingdom.
We’re joined online by Patrick Penninckx, currently heading the Information Society department of the Council of Europe, which coordinates standard setting and cooperation activities in the fields of internet governance, data protection, cybercrime, and artificial intelligence. Here in London, we’re joined by Elena Fadeeva, founder and CEO of FleishmanHillard. Vanguard, the largest international communications firm in Russia. She’s also honorary chairwoman of the Russian communication consultancies Association, and CEO of PRCA Russia. And finally, also online, we’re joined by Sally Lehrman, CEO and founder of the trust. An international consortium of news organisation aims to build a more trusted and trustworthy press. So, we’re going to have five minutes of interventions from our panelists. Then we’ll have Q&A and hopefully questions from you. And by the end of that, hopefully, we’ll have some recommendations that we can deliver to the likes of Facebook and Google and the UK government to try and deal with some of these most thorny questions.
Ayeni
Thank you so much. Good afternoon. I hope everyone can hear me. I’m going to take a bit of a different direction and make it personal. So, I was born a stammerer, and I don’t think for the first 15 to 17 years of my life I could make a complete speech without, you know, stuttering and all of that. For somebody who’s grown up. To become a communicator who communicates for a living, you must understand how difficult that was and how devastating it would have been if I was not able to conquer that deficiency, right? That’s one. So, when we think free speech often will have all the balance we like to think of, you know, governments, I think of big tech and all of that and you know, when we bring a home, I think of ourselves. And if someone were to take our voice away, how does that impact everything that we do and everyone around us? That’s one. True. I’m Nigerian. My business is headquartered in Nigeria. We’ve only launched BH m in the UK in March of this year. In my country, Twitter, which is one of the most remarkable, one of the most powerful media platforms that people who are otherwise disenfranchised, voiceless used to get hurt. I’m not only going to go ahead to actually do business in your careers. In my country, Twitter has been banned since the fifth of June of this year. Most of you in this room may not even be aware. Right? And it’s because this is Africa. So, we were discussing earlier, and I like what the last gentleman said about when you talk about diversity, you’ve got to take it further and talk about inclusion.
Sadly, now I have a voice. This is what I mean; I speak everywhere now. I think I communicate much better than I did 15-20 years ago. I use Twitter because I am in the UK, often. But there are millions around the world like me, who were not able to get out of their developmental issue, that they had a long speech and who live in countries where they are not able to get around regulations and dictatorship and all of that. But assuming that we consider that on the one hand, and then we come to Europe and America and think about the millions also who have access to good health care who have access to technology, and those governments are obliged to be well quote unquote, we’re also the responsibility that we then have when we have free speech and all of that, and not outsourcing that only to big tech, to summarize big tech and governments have a strong role to play. But we as individuals and organisations also have a very strong role to play and that responsibility must meet if we’re to make the world better.
Jodie
I think we’ll come back to the question of personal responsibility versus government company responsibility. Patrick, can I turn to you now because that’s a good segue. You are really thinking about the role of governments and how they use a microphone, please. Yep. All right. Thank you. Sorry about that again. Patrick, can I turn to you, you’re thinking hard about the other side of the coin, about how governments work together with corporations and how we can come up with some standard practice to ensure that we are able to speak freely but also that we’re not exacerbating harms. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your work.
Patrick
As Nitin Mantri this morning mentioned in his introduction, that ICCO is cooperating with the Council of Europe. And that’s important because it basically states that ICCO is cooperating in the field of human rights, rule of law and democracy and take that as a basic starting point. That’s an important stance and I think European gangboard is probably in the room. I would like to thank him for that for having a second, I would like to thank you, Jodie, because as you as a moderator today, you also moderated one of our key conferences some time ago, on human rights in the digital in the digital sphere, where we worked with the European Court of Human Rights and where we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the United States, Canada and Japan as observers of the Council of Europe. And since that time, since the fact that Aiko has been working with the Council of Europe, we’ve been setting up quite a number of cooperation initiatives and I would like to congratulate you on setting up the global PR industry policy paper on global communication channels. That’s important. So that basically Aiko sets the scene for us and that is important. I would also like to say a few things. Of course, we started some years ago about trying to define what information is. What is this information, especially when we started with the whole discussion about what is fake news? What news can be trusted, and I’m sure that Sally will say much more about this afterwards. But the key question really is, is there the need for a balancing act between free speech, dangerous speech free media and misinformation? Or do we instead of trying to balance that, ensure that what we’re talking about is basically free speech? Free speech, when defined by the European Convention of Human Rights, is not unconditional speech? Maybe unlike the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, for Europe, there may be preconditions to free speech, and those precondition those conditions is basically starting where the free speech of the other and that’s putting it very simply, for the free speech of the other starts. We cannot tolerate the promotion of hate and hatred. We cannot promote violence. There’s a number of things like that, and that’s why we for example, I’ve now been working very, very precisely on how to define hate speech, what is hate speech, what is what is the fine line between freedom of expression on the one side, and promulgating hate and promulgating racism, and promulgating? Discrimination basically, so that I think the internet as of course provides us with tools and as ever, as provide everyone with tools to be able to communicate directly we’ve all become editors, thanks to this little device. We’ve all become editors, we’ve all become communicators, but do we need to regulate this? And do we need to ensure that the ones that content moderate or moderate the content of what is visible online, does not transform the Internet into what we could call a toxic net toxic net, and that we need to ensure that citizens, media companies, PR companies are engaged in that same vein? I would leave it at that to start.
Jodie
Patrick, thank you for that. And I’d very much like to come back. When we have the discussion to really think about a question actually that you raised. I think any about how ruleset made in somewhere like Europe have an impact outside of Europe because I think that’s something that we really don’t discuss enough as we race to think about how we regulate this, this global network. Elena. I know you’ve been thinking a lot about ethics, and I know you have some slides, perhaps you could walk us through your initiative and what you’ve been working on in this sphere.
Elena
Thank you very much for this kind introduction. Yes. Can we go back a little bit? Yes, I’m very happy to share with you a couple of things. This is a project which is very close to my heart. Just to tell you something about trash public relations as a sector as agencies and Russia is 30 years old. So compared to many international countries it was very, very new. And these 30 years what we’ve been doing is setting up standards and raising the bar. And we do it all the time because this is something that helps us grow the professional markets where professional public relations agencies can flourish. So, we started about six years ago. Yes, here it is. In 2015, we launched the first ever code of ethics and communications in Russia. We did it under Agus which is the Russian communications consultants Association, but also United some other associations in similar fields and it was fantastic. For six years ago, it was really outstanding to try to build not only for today, but for the future as well. But six years have passed, and, in that time, the world has changed, global pandemics, digital media, the world has really changed when it comes to communications. And also, a very big part of change if you’re looking at the communication services industry, is that there’s been a shift 10 years ago, a very big part of marketing communications was advertising and traditional media. And now it’s digital. It’s integrated and a big part of that is coming to communications firms. So, what we did this time we united twenty-nine national associations, from public relations to advertising to digital to lobbying, and we created one set of standards that can raise the bar across the whole marketing, communications media industry, and that can help us develop that was very interesting. For instance, it took us about a year and we’re doing it in the middle of pandemics and we’re thinking not about yesterday, but also, we tried to look into the future and to look into things and standards that will be important tomorrow, five years from now with all the changes in digital and distance working. So first of all, we build on your codes on self-determination. So, it is not something that is dedicated by the government to some things that all 29 associations and all the communications agencies, from media buying to lobbying take on themselves to follow and for about that, and we have created some commands. And as you can see on the slide, they cover very different bases from things like mutual respect, honesty and openness to professional responsibility. Following legislation for some countries, which is still an important part. To say, to make a special point about quality of content to realise that this is something that is important. Set a place to set standards not only for today for tomorrow, but also fair competition. Prevention of conflict of interest, confidentiality, human rights and equal opportunities, and also a belief it’s important to strengthen the reputation of the industry, because there is a lot of conversation now about the role of public relations and other marketing communications. Agencies play in building the trust, trusted, immediate trust communication. So, these are our 10 commandments, and we believe they will really help our market to move it further and to set new standards and to make a better future. And our next steps are that we have created a very good system for solving disputes. Because it’s wonderful to have a code. It’s wonderful to have the law. It’s wonderful to have commandments, but it truly works when you have the system of making sure that it is actually accepted in practice every day. So, this is our work, representing standards for agencies. The next step is for us to greet the clients. And Russia is an association that represents corporations. And now we’re working together with PRC in Russia to create standards that will unify all agencies and their clients together and set up hopefully for the next maybe next six years. help raise the bar and communications impression. Thank you.
Jodie
Thank you. It was really heartening to see the words quality content in there and to hear you talk about trust and I know that obviously that’s something that’s very dear to suddenly our next speakers heart trust in both PR individuals but also in journalists has been falling over many years. Interestingly, a survey by the Reuters institute this year showed that trust in media apart from in the United States has been growing during the pandemic and I think one of those reasons is people have seen the lifesaving importance of access to trustworthy information. So that makes the work that Sally has been doing. Really interesting. Sally, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your work in more detail.
Sally
Yes, thank you so much. It’s really great to be here and to hear from my colleagues. I also wanted Patrick to thank ICCO because we have a collaboration as well. To focus on these trust indicators that I’ll be talking about as a way for public relations experts and others to build more news literacy around the world. And that does come from how do we help people understand the difference between trustworthy news and other kinds of information out there? So, what I’d like to do is just tell you a bit about how public relations professionals and your clients can actually take this leadership in this crisis of misinformation. A lot of new sites now are stepping forward to try to be more trustworthy and I think we’re seeing the results at this and also, we’re seeing that the public is becoming increasingly interested in knowing that they’re looking at trustworthy news and this is the opportunity. We did a study with Ipsos, the international research firm and 28 countries. 82% of people globally are looking for trustworthy news. Now we did some interviews ourselves that I wanted to tell you about this past summer, and what we also see is a lot of anxiety about the news. So of course, that’s not surprising, because of the content of news, but there’s also this feeling of being overwhelmed and fearful. So as one person said with social media, fake news is everywhere, and you can just start believing it. People are emotionally exhausted because of the content and because they’re looking for ways to act. I am always looking for information that isn’t just to stare or push bias. I’m looking for actionable information. One person said, and then people are looking for diverse voices. So different perspectives, bring more information and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The people we talked to really felt responsibility for finding accurate news. Now, that’s another piece of our research. So, when we, when I first started the trust project, we talked to people across Europe and the US and asked them what it is that they value in the news and when do they trust it? How do they decide? And we came up with four user groups, those user groups are all now more active. So, we have what we call now the taking action group. They’re using the news to decide how to help; they want to donate to curate what we used to call just the Engage they’re subscribing to news, following it. They’re now avid so they’re sharing. They’re active and following the news consistently and maybe constantly, right formerly was what we call the opportunistic group that sees a responsibility to be informed to be internally engaged. So, they may look at the news in the morning and in the evening. And then finally, we had what we used to call the angry disengage. Unfortunately, now they’re engaged with trust news, which is not trustworthy news. So, I partly show you these different groups because we tend to focus on the people who are engaged with the wrong thing. That’s what I want you to see is there are so many other types of people that are present a true opportunity to help so especially what we call here in the middle, the anxious middle, the Avid and the informed internally engaged, that are you saw, they’re concerned about finding the right kind of news. And then those who are taking action also we can enlist to help. I just wanted to show you this is a very similar kind of result that you see in vaccine attitudes. So, the proportion of vaccines endorsed on one end by a group of rich users on the other. This is the US and what they call the movable middle so are anxious middle they’re movable metal, we can help them. By making it easy to differentiate true, honest news. We can motivate them, influence them and build trust in their own ability to assess news. And here’s where the trust indicators come in. We developed these eight trust indicators through marrying journalistic values with what we were learning about user needs and wants. And all they do is explain who and what is behind an individual news story behind a new site. And just quickly, I’ll go through them and connect them, so people wanted to know about the news agenda, meaning what is your new site really trying to do? So, we all have our new sites explained by showing their ethics or ownership that their purpose is to serve the public diverse perspectives, making it easy to see we bring in diverse voices so that you don’t have to go out and find them? The journalist, what is their expertise? What am I looking at? So, is it news or is it opinion that these are all labeled on our sites? To more trust indicators are about well, how do you know you know journalists? So, we offer reference methods for stories that might be more controversial or that might be investigative in nature. New sites offer information well, is it locally sourced? Where were our reporters there? Do they know the community and then finally, commitments to allow the public to participate and to actually respond? And we find these trust indicators do work? We’ve done a number of studies that show they help with the evaluation of the news organisation, and the reporter. So, on our website, we have resources with these trust indicators made into a literacy tool so each trust indicator can be flipped so you can ask questions about, well, “is this journalist an expert, can I tell what type of story this is? And then also ways to share the campaign?” So, I hope we can talk more about collectively, we can all join in the mission to amplify transparency, accuracy, inclusion and fairness in journalism, so the public can make informed choices.
Jodie
Thank you, Sally. And I see lots of people in the room. I don’t know what you’re doing online, but I imagine you’re doing something similar. We’re all on their phones and I’m imagining that because everyone is tweeting out the amazing content from this session. But just to check. I want to do a quick experiment. How many people in the room have ever shared a piece of information that they haven’t necessarily been sure about the source of? Oh, a couple of people are honest. I definitely want everybody here. All of you. Pure as the driven snow or you haven’t thought necessarily about your roles in sharing. misinformation, rumours. Unsourced content and I want to start our conversation. I think we’ve got about 20 minutes looking at the back with what you talked about yesterday, which is it’s on us. You know, a lot of this is about us and how we interact with this relatively new tool. What do you think that individual users should and could be doing to ensure that all of us are able to both express ourselves freely but ensure that simultaneously people can identify and access trustworthy, accurate information?
Ayeni
Thanks, as individuals, we need to order ourselves to higher standards. But I put that within the context also of the role that society and governments have to play. I take you back to Nigeria, again, where the quality of education is not comparable with the quality of education, say in England, right? Where I cannot then entirely put the burden of the responsibility on just the individual because they’ve not been trained in a way that prepares them to understand misinformation, disinformation, and all of that. So, the individual has a role to play but our role would succeed or fail, depending on how much society and government plays its own role. That’s one, but also as PR people everything we’ve preached a bit since 2014, is that PR holds a very, very strong responsibility in making people and companies actually do better. It seems like the word wants to use PR only for the tactical aspects. Everybody thinks its media relations and publicity know the kind of ethics that guides PRD. The foundation upon which PR was built, that thing is to be mainstreamed in such a way that every board member, every executive, every minister, every government understands, and they are almost like they are, they are playing the rules like they’ve signed up. And they’ve been told those principles because when those principles drive big tech, we will not be having this kind of discussion. We cannot outsource the responsibility that affects everybody. Right? So, I think the individual has a role to play. countries and governments have a role to play. Us as PR people client-side agency side independent. We have a big influence on both government and society and people, and we need to play our roles bigger. We need to be so mainstream, that we are thought leaders not only in communication, but boring aspects that matter whether it’s diversity, sustainability and all of that. We need to be the ones driving the conversation where it matters.
Jodie
I think that’s really interesting because a lot of the conversation, certainly in the last couple of years has really been about this is the responsibility of the social media companies. You know, it’s up to them to deal with this problem that they’ve created. But from both what you said, and you learned from your presentation, it seems to me that there is a much greater role that those people who, if you like brokers who are potentially responsible, have responsibility for buying advertising advising clients can use that power differently. Do you think people are doing that? Or is it still really the dirty arts or some people would say,
Elena
Hopefully not, but I’d like to take a slightly, But I’d like to take a slightly bigger perspective, if we’re looking at what is happening with digital and social media. And if you look, I don’t know 100 years ago when more than 100 years ago, when broadcast media, television and radio were just appearing. In the beginning, there were no laws, there were no standards. It took time and it took effort to create regulations, legislation, practices, principles, how information should be transmitted.
And it was a matter of content creation. It was a matter of platforms, which is media. So, what I’m trying to say is that there is a road that the world needs to walk, it’ll take some time, but it is again a matter of practice and principles. And when it comes to public relations firms, I believe in practice what you preach, we’re advising our clients to collect data, to tell the truth, to tell it well, but to tell the truth and this is something that we need to practice ourselves as well.
Jodie
Patrick, I want to ask you about the direction of travel that we’re seeing. So, the internet was described in its first sort of decade as the wild something of the Wild West. And we relied largely on companies to set their own terms of service and everything else and relatedly governments have got their heads around the fact that they might want to get involved. Just from where you sit. What-is-What are you seeing as the direction of travel for governments? Is it much more around creating a framework for self-regulation? Or is it much more direct intervention around the kind of content we might see on the internet?
Patrick
God, I think it’s important to put in a little bit of a societal development background as well. Because when the internet started and evolved, I think we were also in the expectation that this would be the forum, an open forum where people could share information, receive information, but also impart information. And that was an open global dialogue where we could get information freely and ensure that ideas could flow. Our societal development is different. That is that right now, we see that there are a lot of impediments to freedom of expression and that we see that in a number of countries, we see the reversal of not promoting the human rights values, but more impeding those human rights. So that’s societal development and I think the fact of looking at the Internet only in positive ways, has limited our comprehension of what people would do with it. They have been given such a tool. And I think it’s important not only for individuals but also for just stepping out of our conference on cybercrime, which is not 20 years old or a cybercrime convention. And there’s a lot of practice there. There’s a lot of intended harm in it. So, we need to on the one side current of course, on the roles and responsibilities of internet intermediaries, definitely, but we need to set some guidelines and those guidelines can be recommendations from the States or towards the states, also to the internet companies, to the internet intermediaries, to the media world, and also to the individuals and I think we need to work on all those levels. I think we actually go beyond ethical standards; we have to ensure that there is a framework that is to be respected. Not only to protect the individual, but also to protect the companies that are dealing with it and to protect at the same time, maybe the citizens from governmental intervention.
Jodie
Thank you. I have a quick question for you before we open it out, which is how you balance sort of media literacy, so people understanding what trustworthy news looks like, which is the knowledge piece with kind of how we, whether we should and how we kind of badge that information so I know there’s a number of initiatives where people are really trying to sort of say, you know, this, this organisation might have signed up to a set of principles or it’s part of the trust project or it’s part of the initiative. How, how do we balance between the welcome media literacy and these kinds of sort of shortcuts so that people can know what trustworthy information might look like or without necessarily having to have all of those tools at hand?
Sally
Right, and thank you, horrible. So you pointed out sort of the flip side of what we do which is all sides of the media literacy side of our news sites do show these trust indicators and if they pass the process of vetting, if they go ahead and pass our compliance check and work with us then they can show this trust Mark badge on their sites that shows that they are part of the trust project. But our approach is a little different. And I think this gets to your question about balance. It really is about presenting this information so that the public can make informed choices. So, if you look at the eight trust indicators, some people may be more interested in ownership. And others may be more interested in ethics, or some may be more concerned about well, is this news or opinion and how can I tell the difference? So what we what we’re aiming to do is not providing it is a shortcut and it does help people quickly discern, I feel it’s are more important to engage the public and becoming part of the solution and in essence, so not being just unwitting victims are sort of feeling like they’re being pulled along in the space that is a couple of my fellow panelists have said, really step up and be a part of the information ecosystem and be a part of making it what they want to be and what they need. And that means accountability on the part of news organisations, and it means public relations professionals stepping in, and it means the public doing their role as well.
Jodie
Thanks, Sally. So, we have a little bit of time for questions for our panelists. I think there is a microphone yes at the back then please put your hand up if you have a question. There’s a lady here.
Q&A
Hi, thank you very much. for that. It’s really interesting. I wondered if any of the panelists were aware of initiatives to teach this in schools. Because obviously, once we’re adults, we’ve learned behaviors quite difficult to unlearn the question earlier, do we share misinformation online? And it strikes me that there needs to be a really comprehensive programme of education in schools so that kids grow up with this knowledge?
Ayeni
That’s fantastic. I’ve been preaching that and that communication from this point of view should be taught at all educational levels, whether you end up becoming a communicator or not you actually do communicate in your daily lives. And if we all consume news and impact news on a low value, then we need to be literate. Not only in Joplin out to read and write but also being able to distinguish and, and, and differentiate and being educated enough to then be able to see all of the WhatsApp is going to get worse. We are going to play catch up. The internet is entering a decentralised zone. We’re talking about web 3.0. So I think governments need to play their role. But I don’t see government employment in America and Europe struggling. I don’t see governments in Africa succeeding. So I’m banking on society, understanding how important this is, and factoring in the tools and things that can actually make each one of us do better into our we are raised and how we run our businesses and lives and that then means that you’ve been trained, you’re aware is like crime, you know, it’s a crime to still, right. It’s clear. So, we need to get to a level where we’ve been trained to understand this thing and approach it in that way. It doesn’t mean everybody will align. But then it means you know, clearly, that what you’re doing is wrong. But now there’s a lot of excuses, because a lot of otherwise intelligent and educated people cannot distinguish or differentiate between what’s fake, what’s real or not, and it’s going to get worse.
Q&A
Are there any initiatives in Nigeria when the government is teaching that to people?
Ayeni
I don’t know of any. I stand to be corrected.
Elena
Well, as a mother of two children under five I see how quickly even they don’t have any screen time but they just didn’t screen sometimes their parents hands, but they just see how quickly they I think the new generations will have such different early starts in life with the new technology that we might need to keep to teach the nurseries, not in schools. But from my experience the ethical standards have been talking about how we’ve been teaching them in Russia to students. As a part of our programme. We cover major universities. We started with students studying public relations, but then went into journalism faculties etc. And we see how it really makes a difference. So, early education is probably the only way to go in the current, so quickly developing world.
Jodie
Patrick, is that something that the Council of Europe has done much work on in teaching these skills in schools?
Patrick
Definitely, yes. Definitely. We have been working quite a lot on media literacy to education, but not only in schools. I mean, in schools, there’s quite a number of experiences and I don’t know how this is going to be shared with the room but I did put a link in the chat of the hybrid part of the meeting, where we had written a gallery view of around 6070 initiatives that have been taking place with children, but not only I think it’s a lifelong education element. And for example, we are also right now working on media literacy for the elderly, because difficulty has been a hard example with the COVID situation and the isolation of certain persons, that they were more targeted. With fake information with fake websites with ransomware, etc. So, it’s not only a question of teaching the children, it’s also teaching all generations, especially the older generation as well.
Jodie
Yeah, targeted unlikely to share I believe, Sally, very quickly from you, and then I’ll take a couple more questions from the audience before we wrap up.
Sally
Or thank you and I would agree with what Patrick said. It’s across generations and so we find that these trust indicators our teachers just love them because it’s a simple set of eight and with Arizona State University using them, we have our own folks in Brazil that are using it for training. I would like to see more regardless of who the Economist Educational Foundation is using in Europe. So, this is where I think again, public relations professionals really can come into play because people look to their own companies for leadership in this area, that info dynamics, so helping individuals teach their children, working with schools, these are all things that through all of our context each of us can do.
Jodie
So, I think the lesson that I take away from this is “it’s all on us.” I would love to continue this conversation and take more questions from the audience, but I think we’re at time, so I just like you to join me in thanking our fantastic panelists. And thank you very much for your attention.