South Africa’s G20 presidency shouldn’t drop the baton passed by Brazil on this crucial issue that underpins good governance.
As leaders of the world’s major economies prepare for the November G20 Johannesburg Summit, champions of South Africa’s journalism industry are working to ensure that information integrity and media freedom are not overlooked.
The two issues are inextricably linked, argue Media Monitoring Africa and the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef). Together, the two organisations are spearheading Media20 (M20) in the lead-up to the G20 talks, to highlight the issues.
The United Nations (UN) Global Principles for Information Integrity put freedom of expression, accuracy, reliability and an independent, free and pluralistic media centre-stage.
M20 highlights the blind spots in the new artificial intelligence (AI) landscape – especially how citizens receive news and fact-based information online. It warns that “current trends foresee an increase in low-quality and false information, with increasing AI ‘hallucinations’ and deceptive deepfakes being produced and circulated”.
Traditional journalism is considered an antidote to such falsehoods as “it debunks lies and exposes information operations”, say M20 campaigners. It also “contributes reliable news and informed comment into the public information ecosystem”. Yet traditional journalism is under threat,…