IDM Short Insights 56: 4 Key Takeaways From the Rapid Response Summit
On 27 May, IDM Research Associate Ninon Bouteloup attended the “Rapid Response European Summit for Information Integrity and Countering Disinformation: From Early Signals to Rapid Response”, organised by România Imună under the High Patronage of the President of Romania. This exceptional event brought together civil society organisations, tech companies, ministers, researchers, and representatives from the EEAS, with perspectives from Romania, France, Ukraine, Moldova, the UK, and the US. Listen or read Ninon’s four key takeaways from the day.
Transcript:
„Hello everyone, I am today at the Romanian Presidential Palace here in Bucharest. As you can see behind me for a special event, it is the Rapid Response Summit that is organized by Romania HIMUNA that is an opportunity for them to present their new initiative. Actually, they use digital technologies in order to better monitor and respond to FIMI spreads. So foreign information manipulation and interference, there is not only the remaining perspective here today, there is also Moldova, who was present with a representative from the Moldovan STRATCOM center.
And one key point from her intervention that I got is actually the importance of building cohesion, because this is thanks to a strong determination at the society level that we can actually push back. To do this, it is very important to know the vulnerabilities of your society and also to agree on what we would like to defend, the democratic values that we would like to defend. This is part of the cognitive security that we should include in our curricula at school.
The second point that I got from today is also the fact that we are no longer looking at the content of diinformation, at the what, but we are now looking at who. Who are the threat actors, at how? How do they spread these narratives, and at why? What are their goals? It’s very important and it also shows that now debunking and pre banking are no longer the solution alone, that they need also to include other actions such as, for instance, exposing and shaming threat actors.
This is related to my third Point that is that actually we need to move from a defensive approach to now an offensive approach. We need to impose cost on the threat actors so that it becomes more costly for them to act. For instance, by exposing an IP address, we force them to move somewhere else.
My last point is actually to build trust in the society and for this we need transparency. It has been mentioned the case of France and for instance, the Visionary initiative that has sometimes been called a Ministry of Truth. It’s very important that we communicate on our methodologies, on why by publishing report, so that we show that actually how our goal is not to harm freedom of expression, but rather to ensure that we live in free and fair societies.“
