Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, was invited to be part of the Integrity, Safety, and Conflict Roundtable held at Facebook’s HQ in Menlo Park, from 17-18 September 2018. The Foundation has worked extensively with Silicon Valley social media giants, including Facebook, around countering content promoting terrorism online, leading up to the Tech Against Terrorism platform, a knowledge sharing platform launched in concert with the United Nations.
Sanjana’s participation at the roundtable builds on this work, including other advocacy and research for over five years, on the role, reach and relevance of the company’s social media and messaging services in countries or contexts where an enduring, endemic democratic deficit aids the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
The Foundation’s work in the Balkans in 2017, including mentoring teams and initiatives dealing with countering violent extremism, its work with initiatives like Resonant Voices, the experience of similar projects over many years in Myanmar around crisis information management (with UNESCO) and workshops on social media verification and countering hate speech, plus Sanjana’s own work in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Maldives and elsewhere, feeds into on-going discussions with Facebook around how the platform and company can realign its services to better support civil discourse, debate and content that doesn’t result in or seeks to inflame kinetic, real-world violence.