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Understanding and fighting disinformation in a democratic society |05 December 2022

Understanding and fighting disinformation in a democratic society

A partial view of participants attending the training

A group of participants in media-related fields attended a training last week on how to understand and build resilience against disinformation in a democratic society.

The two-day training by the Department of Information Communications Technology (DICT) in collaboration with the Cyber Resilience for Development, Cyber4Dev, was held under the theme ‘Understanding and Fighting Disinformation in a Democratic Society’ and took place at The Guy Morel Institute, Majoie.

Cyber4Dev is a European Union project designed to promote cyber-resilience and cybersecurity in order to protect public and private enterprises across the globe.

According to DICT, the training was to familiarise the participants, dealing with communication and dissemination of information on a daily basis, with the fundamental concepts and challenges related to information disorder, including disinformation, and address different top-level approaches for building resilience against disinformation while safeguarding the values and freedoms ingrained in democratic societies.

It was facilitated by two consultants from Cyber4Dev, Hannes Krause and Siim Kumpas. Estonian-born, Mr Krause is the coordinator for the Indian Ocean region in Cyber4Dev and his colleague, Siim Kumpas is lead expert in the East Stratcom Taskforce of European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU centre of expertise in the fight against disinformation.

Speaking to Seychelles NATION, Mr Krause said their organisation is working with different countries to improve their cyber resilience and they have been in the Indian Ocean region since 2019, working heavily with Mauritius to bring up its level of expertise, prior to focusing on Seychelles in 2022.

He said that digitalisation brings with it significant new opportunities for societies to operate faster and wiser, but the rapid emergence and development of digital technologies brings new challenges. One of those is the amount of and complexities related to information available to general public and the effect this brings to societies.

He said the situation was similar everywhere, “with democratic society struggling with this problem of too much information for every citizen and people are getting fewer and fewer opportunities to make a difference between high quality and low quality information and in the end how this will affect the democratic process”.

He said this was the main question for every country as well as the European Union which is mostly interested in having reliable partners across the globe and for every country to be on the same page and be more cyber resilient.

“First of all, partners who we can talk about cyber security, resolve cyber incidents but also to be sure that none of the countries outside of Europe would actually destroy democratic values for example in fighting disinformation or stepping up cyber security,” said Mr Krause.

The topics addressed during the two-day training include the concepts of information society and information disorder, misinformation and disinformation from the perspective of end-users, the role of social media platforms and digital service providers in the information disorder and countering disinformation.

“There is a growing need for the cybersecurity communities to understand the challenges presented by the information disorder from a conceptual perspective and be ready to involve other stakeholders across their societies in order to find sustainable solutions on different levels,” concluded Mr Krause.

It should be noted that while in Seychelles, Cyber4Dev has also held a training on how to set up a National Computer Emergency Response team for the country. The experts will be working remotely with the local stakeholders but are expected back in the country next year to monitor the progress.

 

Patsy Canaya

Photos by Louis Toussaint

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