Report Launch/Photo: Erick Dau
On Wednesday (19/03), the International Observatory on Information and Democracy (OI&D), an initiative of the Forum on Information and Democracy, launched in Brazil its first global assessment report entitled Information Ecosystems and Democracy in Crisis: A Global Synthesis of the State of Knowledge on Media, AI and Data Governance.
The report is the result of a year and a half of research and provides an in-depth analysis of power asymmetries in the global information ecosystem and their impacts on democracy, exploring topics such as media, artificial intelligence and data governance.
In Brazil, the launch event for the report was organized by UFRJ and discussed the Brazilian chapter entitled "Power asymmetries in the global information ecosystem and their significance for Brazil and Latin America". The director of the Laboratory of Internet and Social Network Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (NetLab UFRJ), Marie Santini, moderated the debate between Camille Grenier (Forum on Information and Democracy), Luca Belli (FGV-Rio and OI&D), Natalia Zuazo (SALTO and OI&D) and Nina Santos (Secom).
“The report concludes that there is little data on this problem. And this is due to the fact that the companies that operate digital platforms, social networks, these companies are increasingly less transparent. They do not allow researchers to collect data,” says Marie Santini.