Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea, condemned fake news and misinformation based on digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI) as threats to democracy, while other leaders in attendance at an international conference accused Russia and China of conducting hostile propaganda campaigns.
On Monday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol denounced fake news and disinformation based on artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technology as dangers to democracy, while other officials present at a global conference charged China and Russia with waging hostile propaganda efforts.
Speaking at the beginning of the Seoul Summit for Democracy, Yoon stated that nations had a responsibility to exchange knowledge and insights in order to use technology and artificial intelligence to advance democracy.
In addition to violating people’s rights to privacy and human freedom, fake news and misinformation powered by digital technology and artificial intelligence also endanger democratic processes, according to Yoon.
The third Summit for Democracy conference is being held in South Korea at the invitation of US President Joe Biden. The goal of the meeting is to examine strategies for halting democratic backsliding and the dwindling of rights and freedoms.
Over thirty countries, including Ghana, the United States, and Costa Rica, will be represented at the three-day summit. The primary agenda items scheduled to be discussed are digital dangers to democracy and how technology may support democracy and universal human rights.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken opened a new tab during the summit, saying, “As authoritarian and repressive regimes deploy technologies to undermine democracy and human rights, we need to ensure that technology sustains and supports democratic values and norms.”
Later, Blinken used the term “extraordinary election year” to draw attention to the dangers of misleading information and misinformation spreading online. Additionally, he restated the claims made by Washington that China and Russia are responsible for international efforts to manipulate information.
Additionally, a few European officials charged Russia with utilizing AI to carry out disinformation campaigns.
Robert Kupiecki, undersecretary of state at Poland’s foreign ministry, said, “The only thing more gruesome than the Russian actions during their ongoing invasion of Ukraine is the disgusting web of lies spun by Russian propaganda, accelerated by social media, deep fake techniques, and omnipresent bots.”
It was described as “typical bias and double standard to allege that the pro-China contents and reports are ‘disinformation’, and to call the anti-China ones ‘true information'” by a spokesman for China’s embassy in Washington.
In a recent display of power, North Korea sent multiple short-range ballistic missiles into the sea for the first time in two months, just hours before the summit began.
Additionally, the meeting began just after Russian President Vladimir Putin was proclaimed the winner of Sunday’s historic post-Soviet landslide in a presidential contest.
As a result, Putin, who came to power in 1999, will begin a new six-year term that, if he serves out, will surpass Josef Stalin’s record of being Russia’s longest-serving head of state in more than 200 years.
Reacting to the election, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council remarked that it was “obviously neither free nor fair given how Mr. Putin has imprisoned political opponents and prevented others from running against him.”.
Putin told reporters he thought the election in Russia was democratic and that the anti-opposition rallies led by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who passed away in an Arctic jail last month, had no bearing on the result of the vote.
Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister of Britain, is also attending the democracy summit. He stated that there are several risks to democracy, such as populists who embrace falsehoods, cyberattackers who disrupt campaigns, and “autocrats holding sham elections.”
According to Blinken, Washington is going to publish the first set of guidelines for tech companies to help stop online attacks on human rights defenders.
Furthermore, he said at the summit that six more nations, including South Korea and Japan, were joining an American-led campaign against the improper use of commercial spyware to monitor human rights defenders or journalists.
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