World Telecommunication and Information Society Day

Trust , in this context, refers to  The confidence that people have in the sources and reliability of the information that they access , including official sources and information, and in the mechanisms that allow information to flow throughout the ecosystem. Resilience refers to   The ability of societies to handle disruptions or manipulative actions within the information ecosystem . Trust and resilience are vulnerable to actions driven by State and non-State actors who seek to exploit the information ecosystem for strategic, political or financial gain. These actions, at times widely coordinated, can result in a range of harms and jeopardize people’s ability to critically assess science and facts. Large technology companies hold significant power in the information ecosystem and exercise inordinate influence over the manner in which stakeholders, including other businesses, advertisers, news media and individual users, interact with and access information. Advances in ar...

  Efforts to strengthen information integrity are crucial to preserve and further advance the Sustainable Development Goals . Erosion of the integrity of the information ecosystem can worsen existing vulnerabilities in achieving the Goals, in particular for countries in the global South. Groups in situations of vulnerability and marginalization are disproportionately affected. The participation of greater numbers of women in the global workforce, for instance, is vital to achieve the Goals . However, in addition to discriminatory laws and policies that exist in many countries, gender-based hate speech, disinformation and violence are used to systematically subjugate women by silencing and pushing them out of the public sphere. This can have devastating and long-lasting consequences for women’s participation, suppressing women’s voices and fuelling self-censorship, causing professional and reputational damage and jeopardizing hard-won progress in gender equality. Efforts to expl...