The POINT 12 Conference will talk about journalism in Palestine, “foreign agent laws”, regulating Big Tech and the EU and US elections

On June 24th and 25th at the “Dom mladih” in Sarajevo, the POINT 12 Conference will bring together numerous activists, journalists, representatives of the academic community and civil society from all over the world. Similarly to the previous editions of the conference, this year the participants will address various topics related to democracy, political accountability, media, fact-checking, use of new technologies and many others.

The program of the POINT 12 conference has been published and is available here.

Some of the topics that are going to be discussed this year include the state of journalism in Palestine, elections in the USA and European Union, the state of fact-checking worldwide, undemocratic tendencies shown through the adoption of “foreign agent laws” in various countries, European media and social media regulations (DSA/DMA/CoP/AI Act), the use of artificial intelligence, and many more. Conference participants will have the opportunity to discuss these issues with numerous distinguished speakers worldwide.

Katie Sanders, the editor-in-chief of PolitiFact and Peter Jones from Reporters Without Borders, will talk about perspectives and expectations ahead of the US presidential elections, where current president Joe Biden and recently convicted ex-president Donald Trump are contenders. We will also discuss the results of the upcoming EU elections during what will likely be the first post-election panel in Europe, which will happen shortly after the elections on June 6-9.

Fact-checkers have been at the forefront of fighting disinformation for years now, and have been the subject of various hostilities, attacks and debates, thus creating a lot of questions about the current state and near future of the movement. To discuss this, POINT 12 will gather the leaders of the fact-checking movement from North and South America, Europe, and Africa – Angie Drobnic Holan from the International Fact-Checking Network, Tai Nalon from Aos Fatos, Doreen Wainainah from PesaCheck, and Tijana Cvjeticanin from CA “Why not”.

Prominent activists and media professionals from Georgia, Belarus, Egypt and BiH will discuss how much democracy is threatened by the new global trend of enacting the so-called “foreign agent laws” that have been passed in many countries in the world, using the Russian model of the law.

Craig Silverman, a reporter at ProPublica and an award-winning journalist, will discuss the monetization of disinformation through online platforms. Andy Carvin, research director and managing editor at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council Technology Programs, will speak about the weaponization of fact-checking tropes as a disinformation tactic.

The POINT Conference is organized by the CA “Why not” in partnership with the ACTION SEE and SEE Check networks, and is supported by the European Union (EU), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Balkan Trust for Democracy (BTD), the Open Society Foundation Western Balkans (OSF), the Kingdom of the Netherlands through the Antidisinformation Hub project and the SustainMedia project implemented by GIZ, Internews and DW Akademie.

The POINT Conference is organized by the CA “Why not” in partnership with the ACTION SEE and SEE Check networks and is supported by the European Union (EU), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Balkan Trust for Democracy (BTD), the Open Society Foundation Western Balkans (OSF), the Kingdom of the Netherlands through the Antidisinformation Hub project and the SustainMedia project implemented by GIZ, Internews and DW Akademie.