Opening the event, Rebecca Harms, a German politician, member of the European Parliament, co-chair of the EURONEST Parliamentary Assembly remarked that such a discussion had already taken place several years ago. Both today as at the time, the issue of informational security and cybersecurity remains an extremely burning problem. During today's discussion, the emphasis will be placed on the fight against fake news.
In her report, Samantha Bradshaw, a Researcher in the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University, a Senior Fellow at the Canadian International Council, emphasized that the use of information manipulations is not just another news technology. While the use of broadcasting for manipulation is a usual mechanism, resorting to social media is gaining momentum to build-up powerful impacts upon target audiences. To this end, more and more new technologies are being used, and a state should work ahead and invest in strengthening its information security sphere, she stressed.
In turn, Margo Gontar, a co-founder of StopFake.org, observed that the four-year experience of the Russian hybrid aggression Ukraine has garnered should be used to build a defense strategy. The main purpose of spreading misinformation by the Russian Federation is not to convince, not to make believe in something, but to disorientate. An example of such technologies may be the situation with MH17 when its own evidence and its own version are widely propagated. The main objective is to disorient and make it impossible to ascertain the perpetrators of this crash.
In the course of the discussion, the experts deliberated ways of counteracting the potential and actual threats of the information aggression Russia radiates, as well as the importance of conducting public awareness campaigns with the young at schools and universities in order to ensure that the younger generation is well trained and is able to identify would-be manipulative technologies from the Russian Federation, and in social networks, in particular.