This year’s Digital Citizen Summit (DCS) saw a deep dive into the intractable online (mis)information landscape. It sought to unravel the complex strands of policy, practice, and social reality in order to develop an in-depth and thorough understanding of the complexity of an information landscape. DCS 2019 brought together subject-matter experts, academics, policy-makers, lawyers, technologists, and members of the civil society in order to facilitate learning, knowledge-sharing, and sharing of collective experience in order to identify the next steps towards developing holistic solutions to meet the intensifying challenges confronting society and citizens through the phenomenon of misinformation.
This year’s DCS looked at misinformation through three pillars: policy, practice, and social reality. It started with an enquiry into the entanglement between Technological Challenges, Fundamental Rights and Legal Responses anchored by a discussion between law enforcement officials, technologists, public policy professionals, legal scholars, and human rights lawyers.
This was followed by looking at Media and Information Literacy as a non-regulatory and citizen-centric approach to look at misinformation led by the Media and Information Literacy Expert Network. This was contextualized within the experience and knowledge sharing within members of civil society organizations, journalists, fact-checkers, and administration.
The event was strengthened not only by the strength of its panelists and speakers but also by the diversity of the house which included participation from a range of nationalities from Democratic Republic of the Congo to Yemen.
One of the major outcomes of the DCS 2019 was the recognition of the need to sensitize not just individuals but also organizations to become critical consumers of information. Facilitative co-design of policy that factors in the voices of a diverse range of stakeholders are crucial in making these inclusive in their incidence and impact.