MediaNama invites you to apply for a curated #NAMApolicy open house discussion on ‘Fake News & Online Content Regulation’, at India Habitat Centre in Delhi, at 4 PM on the 21st of February 2018. Please click here to apply. At the recent IGF in Geneva, David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur for Free Speech and Expression said that “It’s an undeniable fact that when you talk about content, regulation is coming”. At the heart of this issue is the challenge that Fake News and its spread poses for democracies, and just as importantly, the impact that it might have on the protection for platforms as intermediaries, that have allowed them to scale in an unprecedented manner. We need to find solutions to Fake News to also help protect that large, connected platforms enable. A little over a year ago, we held a fairly intense discussion on Fake News, looking into definitions, the impact on the democratic processes, understanding administrative challenges with managing with, and finding out the sources of Fake News, and then finding solutions to these issues. Do check: Videos/Coverage. We’ve also looked into how the spread of rumours leads to Internet Shutdowns, and the need for counter-speech from administration. Since then, though, the approach that platforms like Facebook are taking is to de-prioritise the dissemination of news, and thus can potentially also play censors. This time, we want to focus more on solutions, and: Articulation of issues: what are the types of Fake News, and what are the…
