We are extremely excited to announce that our Executive Director Yvette Alberdingk Thijm will be joining other top minds in European data protection at the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Europe Data Protection Congress from November 28-29 in Brussels.

Yvette will be giving an exclusive keynote address.

This year’s programme is designed to answer the pressing question of this new phase: ‘How do I move forward?’

The conference is a great space to come to learn about guidance in the GDPR era and hear success stories from peers, and delegates from all around the world.

Join us on Tuesday, November 20, from 3-5 p.m. for a special training on how to use video as evidence in court to fight for indigenous rights.

This training is part of the World Indigenous Law Conference that brings together lawyers, judges, academics, Knowledge Keepers, policy experts, community leadership, community advocates, and students to talk about the implementation of Indigenous Law into western contemporary legal systems and highlight Indigenous Laws that already exist in Indigenous communities and Nations.

The training will take place at the Waterfront Ballroom at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

For more on our Video as Evidence work, click here.

At a time when the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the processes of creating media, managing what we see, and moderating content is becoming increasingly important, WITNESS is glad to be joining the Partnership on AI. We look forward to engaging with others in the Partnership on AI (PAI)to address critical challenges around key focus areas of our Tech Advocacy work including misinformation and disinformation, content moderation, privacy, and facial recognition and deepfakes/synthetic media. There’s a critical opportunity now to ensure that AI is used in a rights-protecting and rights-enhancing way, to ensure that marginalized voices are part of the process of development and implementation and that ethical considerations about when AI is used are front-and-center. WITNESS will be co-chairing the new Working Group on Social and Societal Influence, which is beginning with a focus on AI and media.

From the PAI website:

We are excited to announce that we have added 10 new organizations to the growing Partnership on AI community. The latest cohort of new members represents a diverse range of sectors, including media and telecommunications businesses, as well as civil rights organizations, academia, and research institutes.

These new members will bring valuable new perspectives. For example, the addition of media organizations will be crucial at a time when AI-enabled techniques in synthetic news and imagery may pose challenges to what people see and believe, but also may help to authenticate and verify information.

PAI is also committed to ensuring geographic diversity in exploring AI’s hard questions, and as a result, the latest group of new members includes organizations from Australia, Canada, Italy, South Korea, United Kingdom, and the United States, allowing us to bring together important viewpoints from around the world.

The following organizations join the Partnership on AI in November 2018:

Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Innovation (3A) Institute
American Psychological Association
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
DataKind
The New York Times
OPTIC Network
PolicyLink
Samsung Electronics
The Vision and Image Processing Lab at University of Waterloo
WITNESS

Partnership on AI Executive Director Terah Lyon, said “We are proud to welcome a diverse new group of organizations and perspectives to the Partnership on AI, and I look forward to seeing the impact of their contributions. Technology is a series of decisions made by humans, and by involving more viewpoints and perspectives in the AI debate we will be able to improve the quality of those decisions.”

Matthew Postgate, Chief Product and Technology Officer at the BBC, said: “I am delighted that the BBC has joined the Partnership on AI. The use of machine learning and data enabled services offer incredible opportunities for the BBC and our audience, but also present serious challenges for society. We will only realise the benefits and solve the challenges by coming together with other media and technology organisations in the interests of citizens. Partnership on AI and its member base provide the platform to do just that, and I am committed to ensuring the BBC plays an active part.”

Nick Rockwell, Chief Technology Officer at the New York Times, said: “Our mission at The New York Times is to help people better understand the world, so it is imperative that we understand and participate in the ways technology is changing our lives. At The Times, we already use artificial intelligence in many ways to deepen our readers engagement with our journalism, always in accordance with ethical guidelines and our commitment to our reader’s privacy, so we are both deeply excited and deeply concerned about the power of artificial intelligence to impact society. We are excited to join the Partnership on AI to continue to deepen our understanding, and to help shape the future of this technology for good.”

Jake Porway, Founder and Executive Director at DataKind, said: “We couldn’t be more aligned to the Partnership on AI’s cause as our mission at DataKind is virtually synonymous — to create a world in which data science and AI are used ethically and capably in the service of humanity. There’s huge potential to reach this goal together, and we’re particularly excited to play the role of connector between the many technology companies in the group committed to making positive social change and the needs on the ground that they could support.”

The new cohort of members will participate in the Partnership’s existing Working Groups and will join new projects and work beginning with the Partnership’s upcoming All Partners Meeting.

The Partnership on AI exists to study and formulate best practices on AI, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to provide a platform for open collaboration between all those involved in, and affected by, the development and deployment of AI technologies.

To succeed in this mission, we need deep involvement from diverse voices and viewpoints that represent a wide range of audiences, geographies, and interests.

We welcome questions from organizations interested in learning more about membership. To contact us, please see the forms available here.

Bolsonaro had been getting an illegal helping hand from a group of businessmen who were bankrolling a campaign to bombard WhatsApp users with fake news about the opposition candidate.

Researchers have found that fake news stories and rumors spread quickly via person-to-person and group messages on the app, using its features in culturally specific ways or taking advantage of third-party workarounds to add extra layers of utility — and creating new avenues of potential abuse in the process.

Our Senior Program Manager Priscila Neri recently sat down with NBC News to talk about how WhatsApp became linked to mob violence and fake news. Read the article here.

“One of the best ways of fighting your deportation case, or making a claim for asylum, or for being able to stay in the country is to actually have documentation of what happens when ICE shows up at your door or when ICE tries to arrest you or pick you up,” Palika said. “More times than not Ice violates their own policies or some constitutional law.”

The article also spoke about our recent training on the border in Texas and how she taught three small communities on how to prepare for any interactions with ICE and Border Patrol officials.

Read the entire article here.

The event will feature presentations and discussion on topics such as:

• active open media standardization projects
• seeking consensus in audiovisual preservation strategy
• examination of open media use in film and video digitization
• validation and conformance checking of audiovisual formats
• integration of open source tools into archival workflow
• examples of cross-community collaboration and skill-sharing
• developments in open media

If you can’t make it to the conference, make sure to sign up as a “remote participant” and catch the livestream! You can register for the livestream here and find more details of the conference here.

Participants will engage with specific examples and walk away with practical guidance on how to navigate difficult ethical choices in their own work.

This workshop is part of the Brooklyn Media Maker Weekend, which is a free, three-day event that will celebrate community media and help you up your TV, film, and podcast game.

More information here.

Join WITNESS Senior Program Manager Priscila Neri and a panel of experts on October 18 in New York City as they lead a seminar to provide a toolkit so that beginners can learn, and video experts can brush up on, what’s involved. It will offer technology tips and provide links to useful tools; discuss how video journalism differs from print, including ethical responsibilities; and show the power of video in changing the narrative.

Other panelists include:

Erica Anderson, Erica Anderson, lead for U.S. partnerships with News Lab at Google. She will talk about the tools that Google provides to verify the authenticity of videos that journalists use from third parties.

Sara Obeidat, a co-producer at Rain Media working on films for FRONTLINE, including Inside Yemen, Separated and The Pension Gamble, which will be coming out in October. She also is the Enterprise Fellow at FRONTLINE.

The moderator will be OPC Secretary Paula Dwyer of Bloomberg News.

You can RSVP here.

In the episode titled, “Harm,” Jackie talks about how it is possible to turn from a bystander into a witness whose presence can then be of some use even if they don’t step in. The podcast also features other guests such as documentary maker Lauren Pond and psychologist Dr. Lasana Harris.

You can listen to the episode here.

Disinformation, the intentional use of false or misleading information for political purposes, is increasingly recognized as a threat to democracy worldwide. Many observers argue that this challenge has been exacerbated by social media and a declining environment for independent news outlets. Now, new advances in technology—including but not limited to “deepfakes” and other forms of synthetic media—threaten to supercharge the disinformation crisis.

WITNESS Program Director Sam Gregory, along with four other deepfakes leading experts sat down with the National Endowment for Democracy to talk about these threats and the role they play in the disinformation landscape.

“The most serious ramification of deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media is that they further damage people’s trust in our shared information sphere and contribute to the move of our default response from trust to mistrust,” Sam told NED.

To read the entire interview, click here.

For more on our work on deepfakes, click here.