Presentation of YOUthDIG Messages 2023

19 June 2023 | 16:30 - 17:00 EEST | Main auditorium | |
Consolidated programme 2023 overview / Presentation of YOU^thDIG Messages

Video record

https://youtu.be/WFmcMM9y47c?t=24277

Transcript

Provided by: Caption First, Inc., P.O. Box 3066, Monument, CO 80132, Phone: +001-719-481-9835, www.captionfirst.com

This text, document, or file is based on live transcription. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This text, document, or file is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: It is with great joy that for this next session to introduce YOUthDIG. For this, I would like to invite the YOUthDIG org team to come and join me on stage. The youth dialogue on Internet Governance –

[Applause]

– brings together young people from European areas to talk about the future of the Internet. During YOUthDIG they have the opportunity to learn more about Internet Governance processes and how to actively participate in EuroDIG. The YOUthDIG org team, they always consists of a new team created from former participants from the year’s prior. So I am very pleased to introduce to you YOUthDIG from 2022, and another from 22 and another from 2018.

Please. The floor is yours.

>> So hello, everyone. It is with great pleasure that I’m joining you here and also with our fellows from YOUthDIG. YOUthDIG is not just an event, YOUthDIG is a cohort, a group of people, and it is a collaborative work happening since April oner their side and since last year on our side. It is with this emphasis that I would like to underline that it is not just an introduction to the Internet Governance sphere, but also for many of us it was an opportunity for us to leverage also our backgrounds. We had sessions along four months that were virtual, so that we could get together, meet each other, initially obviously we all come from different backgrounds and cohorts. It is always extremely interesting to understand what is our motivation and I definitely invite you all to engage with all of the participants because they are very much diverse and I also do the same appeal to the participants themselves to reach out to the other participants in the room from EuroDIG itself.

There is a diversity of sessions from Internet Governance as an introduction in the beginning, but also spanning to the current topic on artificial intelligence, and also on misinformation as it was said earlier and a very big diversity of topics that also covered the City of Tampere and the infrastructure behind it, the five flagships behind the technologies that are being applied to the city at this moment.

Obviously it is with great pleasure that I was a part of this organization and that there were a lot more things that we want to cover. I would guess that now we will talk about the social component which is also a very strong element of this team. Once again, thank you so much.

[Applause]

>> Hey, everyone. I was YOUthDIG fellow last year. Now I’m a member of org team and partially that is thanks to the integral part and important aspect of YOUthDIG, this is socials. Since this refers to the part of the – I thank all of the brilliant speakers onsite and online speakers who were and are leading amazing sessions for all of our EuroDIG fellows.

About socials, socials is one of the important parts of YOUthDIG. Socials hold immense significance for us, for the org team since our YOUthDIG fellows are coming from different professions representing the multistakeholder but also coming from different parts of Europe spanning from Portugal to Azerbaijan and from the U.K. to Greece so we try to create a space where they can exchange not just their professional opinions but also engage in cultural exchange that at the end of the day is manifesting itself in, like, messages that will be presented today by our YOUthDIG fellows.

Socials also encompass games, some games are related to Internet and others are light hearted games aimed to create atmosphere of joy and atmosphere to enable our YOUthDIG fellows to relax.

To keep it brief, I would say that our ultimate goal is to enable our YOUthDIG fellows to become not just a good colleagues, but good Friends.

Thank you.

[Applause]

>> Hey, everyone. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. YOUthDIGers! So it is a pleasure to be introducing the youth messages themselves, we employ the special method, syntigration, and I wanted to say a few words before I give the floor to the youth participants representing their messages, because the method we used, it maximizes the common, the group knowledge and intelligence because we use non-clerical method, the system to say to basically allow the communication to flow across the team and allow the participants to engage freely because it did employ not only system thinking as a method, but different communication channels and sciences.

So participants really engaged in different way, in different roles actively and passively thinking on this and also reflecting on the ideas before meeting here in Tampere.

One important note, also to mention, it is that in contrast to the other methods, syntigration, it doesn’t give content input from the facilitators, so basically is means that all messages you hear, all comes from the youth participants themselves.

Without further ado, I give the floor to our dear youth participants.

[Applause]

>> Thank you everyone for the warm applause. I come from Portugal. It is a great honor to be here representing the other YOUthDIG fellows and dare I say my Friends convening the youth messages that we all build during the past few days to you.

So to start with, a very hot topic, I must say, creating a brighter future with AI, safety and prosperity for all.

We have a bunch of messages that I would like to convey. So first of all, the E.U. took object a leadership role in AI research and development with a particular focus on ensuring the safety and ethical use of AI technologies.

It may pose risk to society, in order to mitigate this risk, the European Union should infest and support AI alignment and AI development research equally and various bodies should ensure that high-risk AI systems are supplemented by human involvement to prevent single points of failure.

In regards to the E.U. AI act, which is currently a very hot topic as well, we believe that legislators must implement explicit regulations on using hey risk AI systems for research purposes to ensure that the AI act does not hinder ongoing and future research on AI, and legislatures should include stipulations so that AI providers must consider the impact of applications on the individual and societal level, legislators need to explicitly, unambiguously define what constitutes the subliminal links and better regulation and foundational models and general purpose AI systems.

Additionally, we call for the teaching of AI, the potential uses, limitations, ethical implications both in formal and lifelong education in order to counteract the lack of comprehensive understanding of the potential applications and limitations of AI.

Finally, the governmental bodies and Civil Society need to advocate for AI to be regarded as a common good, emphasizing the importance of inclusive access, fairness and societal benefits into the development and deployment of AI systems.

>> So we move on to the second topic, which is bridging the divides, building a conscientious digital ecosystem. So as you can figure out, it is a lot about inclusion but it is going beyond that. So one of the things that we discussed, where we want to see, the European states to take action, it is the reduction of mining of critical raw materials. Alternatives should be materials recovering and eWaste recycling, all this would prevent ecosystem degradation and Human Rights violations.

The way we source currently is not sustainable and we have to change that.

Secondly, we want to call for enhancing the digital skills of children by strengthening the systematic education of caregivers and educators. So that children can take advantage of all of the tools that are out there. There are so many great ones, but also that they are aware of the risks and we can mitigate them so that they don’t become potential downfalls down the line.

Third, we urge all relevant stakeholders to collaboratively prioritize the inclusion of marginalized voices in the decision making process.

This aims at creating an inclusive digital landscape in Europe, and with inclusive we mean people with different backgrounds, the race, gender, sexuality, different ability, it’s, like, all coming together, including them in the way that we can – yeah, participate online.

Lastly – no, not lastly. Sorry.

Another aspect of this inclusion, it is rural area, we currently have a lot of areas that are not very well connected and we have to urge governments to increase Internet infrastructure spending to build up this Internet infrastructure to reduce Internet fragmentation and also to allow people in those rural regions to participate and, therefore, get the talent that’s out there and into our online space.

Then now the last of this topic on inclusion, we need a set of cohesive standards towards increased interoperability. So currently there is this danger of vender lock in, we can’t get out and commercial applications, and that is, yeah – this is encouraging excessive market concentration and risks monopolies. Here, increased interoperability, making it all better in terms of that we can have different people come in and counteract the Internet fragmentation currently going on.

>> Now for the third topic, which is current challenges of data governance. Firstly, since migration databases may pose risk to data protection and discrimination assuming that non-European citizens may be a potential threat, we state that NGOs need access to and training on safe by design data warehouses to safeguard the data of migrants and it should reduce the four-year period granted by the E.U. providing for the large migration database to allow for the safeguards in the AI act. In data privacy in healthcare, E.U. Member States must collaborate with European institutions to protect individual rights and obligations regarding the collection and handling of health data under the GDPR and European Union must ensure consistency and uniformity when accepting proposals for the European health data space to ensure cross-border access to efficient healthcare. Thirdly, for private company data governance, we state that the governmental bodies should provide small companies with affordable, accessible mechanisms for data governance capacity building, and companies should adhere to internal regulatory frameworks and improve codes of conduct to enhance the capability, transparency and compliance with the European data protection regulations.

Finally, we believe that all individuals have digital rights that should be respected, safeguarded and promoted. Therefore we state that national governments must integrate the European declaration of digital rights and principles into regulations at the E.U. national level and legislative bodies across the European Union should participate in multistakeholder initiatives within and between Member States to foster credibility and respect for digital rights.

>> Now to the last topic, no back doors and the future of IG, towards a cooperative and evidence-based Internet governance, so we call the international community to create enforcement he can mechanisms to hold governments to account for their commitments contained in the DFI declaration of the Internet. It is important that those treaties, agreements are actually implemented and enforced, and not just like nice words.

Second, all stakeholders involved in regulation or the development of the Internet should conduct thorough impact assessments. This is intended to identify the effects of their activities on the Internet and the user experience and should prevent Internet fragmentation while simultaneously protecting cybersecurity and privacy.

We call on the states and the E.U. to systematically engage the technical community with regards to cybersecurity consideration throughout the entirety of the policymaking cycle.

Do not break encryption, we cannot stress this enough. There are no –

[Applause]

Second, no backdoors. There are no good backdoors, just let it be. We don’t need a vulnerability management process, we need a disclosure and a patching process.

We cannot risk that all of us are at risk of having our privacy and cybersecurity impaired just because law enforcement or intelligence agencies want to have access to a minority of potentially dangerous people.

Fourth, we call on governments to create a framework forceps able online activism. Not only in the current war in Ukraine has activism became a big topic, it always has been there, unlike in the analogue world, it is sometimes unclear what is acceptable and what isn’t. We need a framework to clearly define what can we do, what is allowed, what is crossing a line.

Lastly, and from all of the messages that we have here, this is by far the most important one, EuroDIG, all of you, must ensure that all past and future messages of the youth, the youth messages, are addressed by the respective stakeholders. And ensure that the youth is systematically involved throughout decision making processes. We don’t want to be just pushed away as the youth with quirk ideas, we’re an integral part of the user basis of the Internet, we’re digital native, we bring a lot of interesting and valuable perspectives that deserve to be heard and deserve to be implemented also down the line when it comes to decision, when it comes to policies.

With all that, we want to close our messages from the youth, we are all here, we are happy to engage, come up to us, this row here and the three rows on this side, yeah, perfect.

[Applause]

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much. We really appreciate that you came here to present YOUthDIG, and of course thank you to YOUthDIGers for all of the amazing items you have pulled through with the amazing discussions, your insight from the cultures and backgrounds you come from, the entire pandemic European region, the issues you have raised in your communities that you now bring to this international forum. We look forward as a community to welcome you because we want to have these discussions with you.

For those of you in the community who would like to meet a YOUthDIGer, they’re walking around with the badge, with the YOUthDIG sticker on it. For the YOUthDIGers, there are members in our community who said we want to meet YOUthDIG, so there are other members in the community not one of you that are wearing a YOUthDIG sticker, and if you’re not wearing a YOUthDIG sticker, you’re welcome to come and get one.