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Our IGF 2021 workshops

December 7, 2021 @ 8:00 am December 8, 2021 @ 9:20 am Central European Time

Prostasia Foundation is hosting or co-hosting two workshops at the 2021 Internet Governance Forum in Katowice, Poland and online. Register for the IGF now to attend either or both workshops.

Networked trust: encryption choices to a reliable Internet

Understanding that encryption’s main qualities offer a set of basic technical apparatus to build a collective sense of security and resilience on the online ecosystem, the workshop will tackle contemporary conflicts towards encryption policies in order to address if and how they possibly affect a broader sense of trust on the Internet. The debate primarily considers that the variety of “encryption workarounds” – such as traditional backdoors, client-side scanning solutions, or the government hacking of encrypted systems – come from different national investigative needs and sociopolitical backgrounds, but they are all related to possible transborder side effects on underlying social and technical chains of trust that depend on the reliability of cybersecurity. With two rounds of questions regarding how to ensure a safe digital space and policies concerning international standards, the workshop aims to draw international co-relations between encryption policies that are being proposed in different regions, their reasons, and if and how they have the potential of impacting a collective sense of trust (considering end-users, civil society, platforms, and states) in communication platforms and personal data flows. By gathering a cross-continental and multistakeholder composition, the panel seeks a necessary discussion about the governance of cybersecurity with a focus on the challenging encryption trade-offs.

Best practices for consent and safety in adult content distribution

Update: this session was cancelled in response to the social media attacks against Prostasia Foundation that began in late August. Read more in our September newsletter.

This session addresses the dual challenges of preventing the online distribution of sexual content that was produced or shared non-consensually, while at the same time protecting the labor and speech rights of sex workers. The COVID-19 crisis has shed light on the exclusion and marginalization of sex workers, with a surge in the number of digital sex workers selling audio-video content that have arisen over the past year and a half of the pandemic. During the same period, under pressure from anti-pornography lobby groups, online platforms and financial intermediaries have unilaterally imposed significant new restrictions on the distribution of such content, framing these as a necessary response to the presence of non-consensual content. This has exposed an apparent conflict between the rights of children and adult survivors to be protected from image-based abuse, and the labor and speech rights of sex workers and other marginalized communities.

This session will address and attempt to reconcile this conflict by bringing together impacted stakeholders to participate in a multi-stakeholder dialogue on this topic with the goal of developing and sharing best practices. Existing dialogues and media coverage on this topic have been dominated by a sex-negative agenda that marginalizes and excludes key stakeholders, such as sex workers and LGBTQ+ content creators, whose sexual expression and communities are most at risk of censorship.

We plan a series of events to include these stakeholders in developing a set of best practice standards to prevent the distribution, and expedite the identification and removal, of non-consensual content, while remaining mindful of the civil and human rights of consensual content creators from these marginalized groups. Sex workers, abuse survivors, and LGBTQ+ content creators have a mutual interest in ensuring legitimate content is not integrated with abusive, non-consensual material when it is distributed online, while also opposing disproportionate restrictions on lawful content on the Internet. The IGF offers a unique venue to elevate the voices of these excluded stakeholders to find solutions through an inclusive, human rights-centered process.