18 Nov 2024 MD 2024/4 Editorial

At the beginning of 2024, Media Development took the theme Towards Democratic Governance of Digital Society. Its editorial claimed that a digital era that is genuinely democratic depends on “Societies in which everyone can freely create, access, utilise, share and disseminate information and knowledge, so that individuals, communities and peoples are empowered to improve their quality of life and to achieve their full potential.” Such a vision is not new, and in fact these very words go back two decades to the WSIS Civil Society Declaration of 2003.

In September 2024, the UN’s much-heralded “Summit of the Future” endorsed its Pact for the Future and two annexes: the Global Digital Compact, dealing with closing digital divides and regulating artificial intelligence (AI), and the Declaration on Future Generations, calling for national and international decision-making to focus on ensuring peaceful, inclusive, and just societies.

The Pact for the Future pledged “to ensure that the United Nations and other key multilateral institutions can deliver a better future for people and planet, enabling us to fulfil our existing commitments while rising to new and emerging challenges and opportunities.”

It underlined that, “efforts to redress injustice and to reduce inequalities within and between countries to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies cannot succeed unless we step up our efforts to promote tolerance, embrace diversity and combat all forms of discrimination, including racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and all their abhorrent and contemporary forms and manifestations.”

The Pact also reaffirmed “our commitment to the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, to accelerating our efforts to achieve gender equality, women’s participation and the empowerment of all women and girls in all domains and to eliminating all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls.”

However, as Al Jazeera pointed out (24 September 2024), “As is often the case with UN resolutions and pledges, the Pact for the Future is packed with lofty goals and commitments but is thin on actual, realistic steps that the body can take to implement its own vision.”

While the relevance of digital technologies was stressed (the subject of the Global Digital Compact), communication rights, independent media, and information integrity were largely conspicuous by their absence from the 56-page document. Media are referred to in the context of protecting journalists in conflict situations, but otherwise it was as if media ecologies had no political, economic or social impact.

The Global Digital Compact itself has the following objectives:

Close all digital divides and accelerate progress across the Sustainable Development Goals.

Expand inclusion in and benefits from the digital economy for all.

Foster an inclusive, open, safe and secure digital space that respects, protects and promote human rights.

Advance responsible, equitable and interoperable data governance approaches.

Enhance international governance of artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.

Significant revisions to the text by some countries led to a watered down final version of what is an “Annex” to the Pact for the Future. Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami identify some of the gender disparities in their piece in this issue of Media Development. And civil society organisations are now planning to intervene at the UN World Summit on the Information Society+20 High-Level Event, 7-11 July 2025 in Geneva, as the global forum for influencing future actions.

It is difficult to underestimate the significance of both Summits for democratic freedoms worldwide. Civil society expectations of positive intentions, outcomes, and actions are running high. For most, they constitute “A unique opportunity to place global digital cooperation – working towards both global and contextual responses – at the top of political agendas to address the persistent and emerging challenges in the digital age, including the environmental crisis … to ensure that the lessons learned from years of multistakeholder engagement feed into future governance processes and set the parameters for safeguarding inclusive dialogue, transparency and accountability.”¹

And yet there is confusion. What is all the fuss about? What are communication rights? What are digital communication rights? How do they differ from non-digital communication rights? The issues are complex, multidimensional, and vary widely according to local communication ecosystems, infrastructures, regulatory practices, and governance regimes.

Many international, regional, and national organisations spent months working to clarify the issues at stake and to secure a place for civil society’s views and demands in both the UN’s Pact for the Future and its Global Digital Compact. Such is the complexity that WACC commissioned a background paper – published here – providing context as well as setting out ways to create “an environment of critical, competent, and creative interaction among individuals, as well as among diverse communities, cultures, ethnic groups, and nationalities, fostering peace and mutual understanding.”

The authors define “a holistic vision for a progressive digital society, encompassing basic, normative principles, on issues like ownership of platforms, data, and AI, and community-centric and owned digital platforms and structures. ”

Trust in media

At the heart of the Pact for the Future and its Global Digital Compact lies trust. Can people have faith in the systems that underlie global governance, digital connectivity, big data, and the governments and agencies whose task it is to regulate them fairly and transparently?

Intimately related to the issue of trust in the media is the use of digital technologies in news gathering and publishing, and especially independent media as sources of accurate and reliable information. In this respect, three articles in this issue of Media Development explore media coverage of conflict and the notion that respected Western media outlets must be unbiased simply because of their liberal stance and democratic track record.

In his article, Daya Thussu identifies “the double standards shown by US-dominated Western news organizations in covering conflict situations where vital geopolitical and economic interests are involved and how professional standards of journalism are subservient to relaying an acceptable narrative.”

In their article, Robert A. Hackett and Farrukh Chishtie analyse coverage of the war in Ukraine by The Economist to argue in favour of “more comprehensive analyses of conflict from diverse perspectives” and against inherent “ideological and geo-cultural biases”. And Kiran Hassan notes the transformation of Al Jazeera “from a news network ‘for and by the Arabs’ into a global news network attracting credibility and trust.”

Public debate around the World Summit on the Information Society+20 process has emphasised the nexus between digital technologies, AI, and trust in the news. In the public mind, transparency and ethical standards rank high and, as underlined in the paper by Clemencia Rodriguez et al, “democratic and inclusive regulatory frameworks must be designed to govern our media, digital platforms, data, and AI… at global, regional, and national levels.” Without such frameworks, we shall be back to square one.

Note

1. WSIS+20: Reimagining horizons of dignity, equity and justice for our digital future. Global Information Watch 2024 Special Edition, Introduction, p.8. Association for Progressive Communications (APC); IT for Change, WACC Global, and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).