Conference "Information manipulation: understanding and acting to preserve democracy" - Introductory remarks by Martin Ajdari
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Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Bénédicte, dear students of the Lycée Gustave Eiffel in Rueil Malmaison,
dear friends,
I'm delighted to welcome you to Arcom - at Daum'n - for this conference on the fight agains information manipulation. It's a real pleasure to see high-school students, journalists, experts and Arcom members (I see them more often) gathered to discuss this increasingly important subject. Each of you has a role to play in diffusing information and fighting against its manipulation.
I'll be very brief to leave room for debate and discussion with the audience.
We are meeting today in a context where information has never been so abundant, so accessible, and yet so fragile, contested and sometimes dubious.
Disinformation is not a new phenomenon, but its scale, speed of spread and consequences for the functioning of our democracies make it a greater threat, against a backdrop of increasingly polarized debates.
At the same time, the decline in local journalism - highlighted by a recent study by Reporters Without Borders, which sounds the alarm about the state of the local press - is creating fertile ground for manipulation.
Against this backdrop of increasing manipulation and dropping information, Arcom's mission is to act on several levels.
In the audiovisual media, our historical field of action, we ensure that information is honest, rigorous and independent, as demonstrated by the legal sanctions we took when the human origin of climate change was disputed without contradiction on air.
On-line, as part of the mission we derive from the RSN, our aim is obviously not to flush out every piece of "false information", which would be neither democratically desirable nor materially possible.
But we do seek to identify what characterizes the intentional and artificial manipulation of information, and the resulting disruption of democratic debate. This manipulation can take a number of forms, all of which can be cumulative:
- That of coordinated behavior - such as foreign interference - aimed at creating disorder in the debate and undermining trust;
- Inauthentic and unauthorized use of digital technology, such as the creation of fake accounts, or the massive use of automatic tools and bots to manipulate the population in one direction or another, or simply to make money from the buzz;
- Or that of flaws in the very workings of the platforms' notice algorithms - still too opaque today, even for researchers who in principle have the right to access them. Algorithms that can influence us individually and collectively without us even being aware of it.
In conjunction with this conference, Arcom is today publishing two contributions on this major subject:
- a study on the permeability of the French to misinformation, which shows that we are all ultimately vulnerable, beyond the differences that may appear according to age, level of education or propensity to inform ourselves.
- and a report on the manipulation of information on online platforms, which highlights the need to step up our action through the collective mobilization of all players - civil society, researchers and the public sector, which I welcome - and by strengthening the rules.
While we produce knowledge, we also seek to share it as widely as possible. This is one of the reasons why, every year, we take an active part in initiatives such as Press and Media Week, which began yesterday, and to which this event contributes, because media education and digital citizenship are the first line of defence against disinformation: it's by being better prepared and better trained, youngsters and oldsters alike (a category in which I increasingly fall), that we can better protect our democracy.
Arcom is making a major contribution to this, represented by the members of the college who will be visiting schools this week, by the events organized by its regional delegations, and by the regular production of teaching resources for media education, developed in close collaboration with the French Ministry of Education and CLEMI. The best fight agains misinformation is quality information, and educating everyone to spot, understand and show it.
That's what this conference is all about, and I'd particularly like to salute, in addition to Bénédicte Lesage, a member of the Arcom college and a pillar of our action in the service of media education, our three speakers:
- Grégoire Darcy, who will show us how vulnerability to misinformation is linked to isolation and a lack of social ties
- Stéphane Vernay, deputy editor-in-chief and political editorialist at Ouest France, who will show us how a local daily like Ouest France aims to recreate this link, through its relationship with the news and its audiences.
- Finally, Marie Picard, director of Radio Grenouille, a community radio station in the Réseau Radio Campus network, will show us that we can go even further, to contribute to the education of all our fellow citizens, including adults, thanks to the action of ambitious and determined local radio stations.
Through events such as today's, our ambition is to contribute to collective progress, to enable the citizens of today and tomorrow to navigate with discernment in the information space, to make the most of its richness to fuel our emancipation and our freedom, which make our democracy come alive.
This will be achieved through our future exchanges.
Thank you all very much.
Introductory remarks by Martin Ajdari
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- in french