WSIS Action Line C9: Media - Towards Resilient Information Ecosystems in Times of Crisis: Rethinking ‘Preparedness’ in Digital Governance

Expanded Summary: WSIS Action Line C9 - Information Integrity and Crisis Communication in the Digital Age

#

Session Context and Framing

This panel session was convened as part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Action Line C9 review process, which concerns media and access to information. The moderator, Guilherme Canela de Souza Godoi of UNESCO, introduced the session as part of the WSIS Action Line C9 review process and set the scene by reflecting on how dramatically the media and information ecosystem has changed since the WSIS process began twenty years ago . At that time, governance discussions were largely focused on what is now called legacy media; today, the conversation encompasses a vastly more complex digital environment involving platforms, artificial intelligence, satellite infrastructure, and cross-border information flows . To manage time, the moderator introduced a light-hearted football card system - a yellow card signalling one minute remaining and a red card requiring the speaker to stop - a device that proved both effective and occasionally contested .

The moderator framed the session's central concern as the concept of "information integrity", which the United Nations introduced during the WSIS twenty-year review process running alongside the Global Digital Compact . This concept connects multiple previously siloed domains: the protection of those who produce information (journalists, scientists, artists), media and information literacy, the governance of digital platforms and AI, and the management of digital infrastructure and archives . The moderator observed that while there are genuine positive developments in digital access and the plurality of voices online , these gains are offset by mounting threats to trustworthy information, spanning vaccines, elections, climate change, and financial matters . He captured the structural paradox at the heart of the session with a striking observation: independent investigative journalism is "more important than ever and has less money than ever" , a situation he described as tragically ironic and not limited to journalists alone .

A particularly memorable framing device was the moderator's observation that information integrity may be the only issue on which "bad guys and good guys agree" - the former seeking to attack it, the latter to protect it - underscoring that its strategic importance is universally acknowledged even by adversaries . The session deliberately chose not to take stock of all developments across the action line, but instead to zoom in on one specific and underexplored dimension: the particular challenges of maintaining information integrity in crisis scenarios, whether armed conflict, natural disaster, or pandemic .

---

#

The Transformation of Crisis Communication: An Ecosystem Perspective

Professor Ingrid Volkmer of the University of Melbourne opened the substantive discussion by challenging the assumption that crisis communication is primarily about governments delivering national narratives to citizens. She argued that crisis communication now operates across digital and data ecosystems in which technologies take a central geopolitical role and can be weaponised, as can platforms . This means that governance can no longer be approached through siloed structures - regulating AI separately, addressing disinformation separately - but must treat the entire digital and data ecosystem as an integrated whole that is specifically activated and stressed during crises . She also drew attention to the emerging role of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites such as Starlink, noting that while they are new to this sphere, greater awareness of their role in specific crises is urgently needed . These data ecosystems, she argued, must be accountable and should not be treated as mere technical add-ons to crisis governance; they are, in fact, crucial for building crisis resilience in countries . Volkmer concluded that digital regulation in crisis constitutes an entirely new regulatory space, requiring new tools and approaches developed collaboratively by practitioners and academics .

Giulio Coppi, Senior Humanitarian Officer for AccessNow, extended this analysis by reframing the stakes of the conversation. He argued that the same technological communication layer now hosts not only information but also life-saving services, essential assets, and rights-enabling functionalities, representing a fundamentally transformed humanitarian space with multiple actors responding to different priorities and sometimes different ethical frameworks . He identified five key trends reshaping this space: increasing humanitarian needs combined with shrinking physical and digital access and funding, leading to greater isolation of local actors and dependence on remote communication tools ; the digitalisation of aid delivery, creating increasingly mediated relationships between aid organisations and communities ; the explosion of cloud computing, which entrenches dependence on big tech providers and worsens the extractive nature of aid data gathering ; the militarisation of commercial and civilian digital systems, enhancing vulnerability to cyber attacks, shutdowns, spyware, and surveillance ; and slow progress on protection standard development, resulting in insufficient data and evidence-based analysis to support digital-adapted protection strategies .

Coppi further highlighted a dimension that had received little attention in mainstream governance discussions: the risk to communities displaced by climate change or conflict who have turned to digital tools to preserve their culture, heritage, memory, and demographic documentation . If traditional humanitarian protection mandate holders do not recognise these as essential civilian assets worth protecting, digital transformation may paradoxically make such communities more vulnerable rather than ensuring their preservation . He also warned that the explosion of disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech in crisis situations - compounded by the normalised recourse to blanket internet shutdowns - corrals vulnerable people into untrusted information bubbles, and that AI, while not radically changing this dynamic, acts as "an accelerator in an explosive mix" . Coppi noted that signals of hope in humanitarian crisis communication come not from humanitarians - a self-critical acknowledgement - but from journalists and local digital rights activists filling the gap at great personal and professional cost with very limited support . His call to "reclaim the protected nature of our digital, civilian digital information and digital ecosystem, and of those individuals that are working to make it accessible, reliable, and safe for everyone in times of crisis" was one of the session's most direct normative statements.

---

#

Empirical Evidence: Regulatory Gaps Revealed by Survey Data

Professor Volkmer presented findings from a survey conducted in cooperation with UNESCO among two hundred regulatory experts across the world, designed to understand how governments manage crisis communication and what their perceptions of their own capacities are . The results were striking in their consistency. When asked whether new regulatory approaches include provisions for times of crisis, a majority of sixty-one per cent said no or did not know, a finding Volkmer described as reflecting a deeper absence of data governance infrastructure capable of supporting crisis response . A second question asked whether regulators address transnational infrastructures such as cloud computing services and satellites in crisis communication debates; again, a majority said no or did not know, underscoring a significant gap in attention to critical infrastructures . A third question on whether initiatives exist to protect privacy rights when citizens use digital data sources during crises found that seventy-one per cent reported no or did not know, representing what Volkmer called another urgent governance gap .

Beyond these specific findings, Volkmer reported that survey respondents expressed a broader uncertainty about technological roles, reflecting capacity gaps, organisational silos, unclear legal frameworks, and a lack of pre-existing partnerships with platforms and infrastructure providers . This points to a systemic rather than merely technical problem: the architecture of national governance itself may be inadequate for managing cross-border digital crises.

---

#

The Regulatory Perspective: South Africa's Experience

Dr Charles Lewis, Counsellor at the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), speaking online, offered a practitioner's perspective on the role of ICT regulators in crisis preparedness and response. He described South Africa's experience with a range of emergencies - floods, civil disturbances, fires, and COVID-19 - all of which resulted in loss of life, damage to infrastructure, and disruption of services . He outlined the international frameworks being developed in response, including ITU work in 2023, a SADC national emergency telecommunications plan published in 2024, and South Africa's own incipient Early Warning for All initiative .

Lewis argued that effective crisis communication requires attention to four pillars: preparedness (identifying and analysing risks, setting up structures and processes in advance) ; forecasting and monitoring (detecting and tracking emerging threats) ; communication and warning (reaching communities and individuals when disaster strikes) ; and readiness to respond, including testing systems before they are needed . He emphasised the importance of proper testing, noting that poorly managed tests - such as instances where citizens were woken in the middle of the night by alerts that were not intended to be sent - illustrate the risks of inadequate preparation. He emphasised that regulators must see themselves as "custodians of information resilience", needing to be flexible and capable of reacting and recovering quickly . Critically, he stressed that crisis communication must be people-focused, reaching communities in the languages they speak - a particular challenge in South Africa with eleven official languages - and must use a multiplicity of channels including SMS, mobile networks, and WhatsApp . His key priority for South Africa was translating existing theory and international guidance into properly institutionalised national structures, with clear roles and responsibilities established before the next disaster strikes .

---

#

Ukraine's Experience: Platform Accountability in Wartime

Maksym Dvorovyi, Senior Legal Counsel at the Digital Security Lab in Ukraine, provided the session's most direct testimony from an crisis context. He described how, in the eight years between 2014 and 2022, Ukraine undertook preparatory legislative steps to address Russian information threats, including restricting Russian-linked legacy media and blocking key Russian platforms such as VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Mail.ru, and Yandex . He argued that these steps had a measurable positive effect: when parts of Ukraine were occupied following the full-scale invasion in 2022, people in cities such as Kherson and Zaporizhia came out to protest the occupation, suggesting that Russian media influence had been at least partially limited . Ukraine also undertook a broader review of legislation aligned with EU accession processes, adding specific provisions to combat what it termed "aggressor states" .

However, Dvorovyi was candid about the limitations of these preparations, particularly regarding cooperation with private technology platforms. While many platforms initially coordinated with Ukrainian authorities in 2022 - banning accounts of prominent propaganda spreaders and taking actions that later influenced EU-level decisions - Dvorovyi acknowledged that while these EU-level actions were "quite questionable in the EU context", they were nonetheless helpful for the Ukrainian population. This cooperation gradually declined to almost nothing . By the time of the session, there was no significant willingness on the part of private companies to engage in dialogue with Ukrainian legislators, with platforms applying general global policies rather than tailoring them to crisis contexts . Telegram was singled out as a particularly problematic case: it possesses the largest news influence in Ukraine, allows anonymous sources to flourish, and never responded even during the acute phase of the full-scale invasion . Dvorovyi concluded that some platforms had simply chosen to be irresponsible, and that Ukraine currently has no mechanisms to hold them to any form of accountability .

The moderator drew a lesson from this testimony, recalling that when UNESCO began developing guidelines for platform governance, advocates of self-regulation had argued for keeping governance discussions focused on voluntary compliance - and the Ukrainian experience demonstrated the consequences when governance relies solely on goodwill . This framing reinforced the broader session argument that voluntary compliance frameworks are structurally insufficient in crisis contexts.

---

#

Platform Accountability, Digital Sovereignty, and the Case for Global Governance Frameworks

The question of platform accountability emerged as one of the session's central themes, with multiple speakers converging on the view that existing frameworks - national, regional, and voluntary - have proven inadequate. Coppi warned that without normative frameworks and regulatory intervention to embed humanitarian communication channels into policy discussions, the private sector will by default decide when communication is useful and when it is not, when it is a priority and when it is not, resulting in what he called "policy by third party" . He called for rights to be placed back at the centre of the communication environment and for systems to be protected through redundancy and rights-protected normative frameworks that will survive the first crisis .

In his closing remarks, Coppi introduced a conceptual challenge to the widely used but often vaguely defined concept of "digital sovereignty". He argued that digital sovereignty comes with responsibilities, and that any serious discussion of it must include a frank examination of what it means in terms of protecting people's rights in the digital space, particularly in times of crisis . This encompasses the right to connectivity, to receive and transmit news, to maintain contact with loved ones, to preserve cultural memory, and to keep civilian data flowing . He observed that much of the existing discussion has become stuck on the tension between the rights of individuals and the capacity of governments to shut down information flows, and that without a frank resolution of this tension through normative frameworks, the private sector will fill the vacuum .

This argument connected directly to the moderator's earlier observation that the cross-border nature of digital information ecosystems makes purely national governance approaches very difficult, in a way that was not the case when governance of broadcasting was the primary concern . Both the overall digital information environment and the human beings operating within it now function in a transnational space that national jurisdictions cannot adequately govern alone .

Dvorovyi, drawing on Ukraine's lived experience, called for a renewal of discussions about a global framework on platform governance focused on enhanced due diligence obligations and including specific sections on crisis governance . He acknowledged the complexity of this position, noting the potential for abuse by certain governments of any such regulation, but argued that this is the direction in which the international community must move, as all national approaches have not worked well . He also noted that generative AI must be included in this framework, as it is itself effectively becoming a platform . This call for a global framework was notable for coming from a practitioner in an war zone who had previously witnessed the failure of both national legislation and the EU's Digital Services Act to provide adequate protection for countries outside the EU's single market .

---

#

Audience Contributions: Local Journalism, Media Pluralism, and Post-Crisis Accountability

The session's closing minutes included a series of brief audience interventions that introduced important dimensions not fully addressed by the panel. A participant from Iran raised the concern that AI appears to be reducing media pluralism globally, a problem compounded in crisis contexts where information environments are already under severe pressure . The moderator connected this to the related issue of internet shutdowns during crises, which directly impact media pluralism and communities' access to diverse information sources .

An audience member called for local communicators and journalists not to be forgotten in crisis communication frameworks, noting that they are typically the first to stop working in crises due to lack of funds, threats, and censorship from both governments and foreign actors . This reinforced Coppi's earlier observation that signals of hope in humanitarian crisis communication come not from humanitarians but from journalists and local digital rights activists filling the gap at great personal and professional cost with very limited support .

Stephen Wyburn of the International Federation of Library Associations raised the largely overlooked dimension of preserving crisis communications for post-crisis learning and accountability, referencing the difficulty of COVID-19 inquiries in reconstructing what occurred . This intervention implicitly challenged the panel's focus on real-time crisis response and pointed to the need for data governance frameworks that also address archival preservation and institutional memory.

A freelance journalist in the audience offered a more critical perspective, arguing that crisis communication from government has nothing to do with journalism, that journalists are not supposed to replace official communication channels, and that governments and administrations consistently fail to develop worst-case scenario planning - citing the tsunami and COVID as examples . He also stated a preference for citizen journalism over what he termed "quality media" for understanding what is happening in crisis zones . While this challenged some of the panel's framing, it nonetheless reinforced the shared concern about the structural vulnerability of independent journalism and the inadequacy of official crisis communication systems.

An audience member also highlighted the Internet Governance Forum Policy Network working on norms, roles, and responsibilities in crisis communication within a multi-stakeholder framework as an workstream .

---

#

Conclusions and Forward-Looking Priorities

In the session's closing round, each speaker identified a key priority for future action. Professor Volkmer called for crisis protocols to pre-integrate all communication technologies - cloud, satellite, and AI - as core components of building national crisis resilience, and for early partnerships with platforms and infrastructure providers to be established before crises occur rather than negotiated during them . She implicitly connected this to Dvorovyi's testimony about Ukraine, suggesting that had such arrangements been in place in advance, the post-crisis scramble to establish cooperation might have been avoided. She also emphasised the need for international cooperation, given that national regulatory structures may no longer be sufficient when dealing with crisis .

Coppi reiterated his call for digital sovereignty to be accompanied by clear rights responsibilities, and for normative frameworks to be developed that embed humanitarian communication channels into policy discussions, protect systems through redundancy, and ensure that rights-based approaches survive the first crisis . Lewis called for South Africa to translate existing international guidance into properly institutionalised national structures, with clear roles and responsibilities housed within the South Africa Regulators Forum, and for systems to be tested before they are needed . Dvorovyi called for the design of legal frameworks that will make platforms significantly more accountable, arguing that all national approaches have not worked well and that a global framework with enhanced due diligence obligations and crisis governance provisions is the necessary direction of travel .

The moderator closed by pointing towards two concrete next steps: the forthcoming launch of the UNESCO-commissioned report based on Professor Volkmer's survey, which participants were encouraged to engage with as a basis for continued work ; and a follow-up event being organised in Nairobi, with the moderator noting that the IGF format might allow for deeper engagement on these issues of norms, roles, and responsibilities in crisis communication within a multi-stakeholder framework . The session concluded with a broad consensus that the diagnosis of the problem is well-established - inadequate regulatory frameworks, platform unaccountability, under-resourced local journalists, and the absence of rights-based normative frameworks for crisis communication - but that the international community faces significant and unresolved questions about the appropriate mechanisms for addressing it, particularly regarding the design of global platform governance frameworks that balance accountability with safeguards against governmental overreach.