Thread by @owenblacker

Next at #ORGcon: @NiNanjira: is the Internet helping disadvantaged groups or cementing the power of the powerful?

Half the world's population is still offline, disproportionately women. Women 50% less likely to be online and 35–50% less likely > #ORGcon

< to be politically active online even if they are. Partly because of the cost of access & devices. For the Web to be for everyone > #ORGcon

< as @timberners_lee said at the Olympics in 2012, we need to address these disparities. React: rights, education, access, content, targets

The legacy of the Web is a failure if we can't combat these inequalities. We need to encourage content available in other languages too

In March, the Web turned 28. TimBL raised concerns about privacy, political advertising. @NiNanjira talks about how the Web was weaponised >

< in the recent Kenyan elections. Internet penetration is around 89% there. Politicians started talking about being connected but> #ORGcon

< propaganda quickly started coming to play. "Fake news" is not a new phenomenon in Kenyan elections. 1 key difference then was Kenyans >

< were not shocked. 90% of Kenyans reported having seen intentionally-false information online during the elections. Encouraging, though, >

< was the pushback — with people actively fighting back against the propaganda and shaping the media narrative. On political advertising >

< some of the companies like Cambridge Analytica we know from the US Elections have also been mentioned in the context of Kenyan elections

While the US Senate debates foreign interference, @NiNanjira asks who Kenyans would go to for that oversight. Any search for politics >

< would come up with clearly partisan information. With 50% voting for the first-time, this means lots of people are perceiving the Web as >

< being polarised and worthless. But the Web is also a place for securing rights. Just this afternoon, a Kenyan health minister's proposal>

< to limit the amount Kenyans can access the health service was announced—and then overturned within 4 hours due to public pressure #ORGcon

We need to ensure our governments recognise that the Internet is an important public good, underpinned with sound public policy #ORGcon

As digital rights activists we need not just to be reactive and antagonistic—we need to help contribute to a healthy civic discourse #ORGcon

On Q of poor people's access to the Net, private companies will always leave gaps unfilled; this is what govts need to help with #ORGcon

Talked about transparency of political advertising.
Q: The difference btwn the Web and Internet is important. Led to conv #NetNeutrality

A handful of times @NiNanjira has mentioned the importance of people being able to be creators, as well as consumers online #ORGcon

Q asked about One Laptop Per Child initiative. This was an expensive failure in Kenya, as the offline infrastructure wasn't there. #ORGcon

In Costa Rica a telco levy was used to subsidise connectivity for poor families, which had a direct impact on the digital gender gap #ORGcon

"We can't innovate our way out of bad public policy."
Q: working with disadvantaged families, geography doesn't change the problems of >

< being led down the rabbit warren as soon as people hey online. @NiNanjira mentioned digital literacy needs to be baked into our education

We need to make sure adult literacy programs include help with digital literacy, for example. Anna we must make sure the group's we're >

< trying to help are involved in the solutions we're trying to create. The naïve "just build an app" answer won't help people

Q: How do we help drive public policy in a positive direction.
A: @audreyt is a unique example of someone from our community doing that>

< but we can also take advantage of govts' digital ignorance and help inform positively.
A useful part of forming policy in the >

< Global South of being able to sneak #NetNeutrality into telecoms reform, so that it's there for our future self-defence. And we have to >

< counter the "Facebook is the Internet" narrative, so govts know that some strings are not a good thing.

Summary: we need to innovate, but we can't ignore the role of policy

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