The inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance marked the first time, as speakers noted, that every UN Member State had a seat at the table to discuss artificial intelligence opportunities and risks; bridging AI divides; ensuring AI is safe, secure and trustworthy; and protecting human rights.

António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, struck a somber note in his opening address. Calling artificial intelligence “an experiment…being run on our own societies – without a plan, and without consent,” he issued three warnings: its speed, which outstrips our institutions’ ability to govern; its power, “concentrated in a handful of companies, and in a handful of countries”; and truth:

A machine-enabled lie can now persuade as effectively as the truth – and authentic evidence can be dismissed as fake.
Further eroding the integrity of our information ecosystem and undermining trust.
A society that cannot agree on what is real cannot defend itself.

The preliminary report of the International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence was also released – a must-read for anyone wanting to understand “the state of AI”.

As Panel co-chair Maria Ressa explained, the report reflects consensus among its 40 independent members, based on the evidence. “Consensus,” she said, “means you move to the centre.” So, she added, “This is the floor of our concern, not the ceiling. And that is alarming enough.”

The report points to major gains in science, health, and education – alongside serious risks to information integrity, growing vulnerability, and increased abuse, especially against women, girls, journalists, and marginalized populations.

The two days were filled with speeches, many alternating state representatives with civil society voices. But “dialogue” – especially with those who hold power – seemed non-existent at this initial stage.

The Global Dialogue overlapped with the increasingly high-profile AI for Good Global Summit – a technology expo with staged areas for companies and organizations to showcase products and services or pitch problems that need solving. A sign of its growing popularity: for the first year it charged admission for most attendees, with a premium fee for the “Centre Stage” sessions.

Alongside impressive demonstrations of technology improving accessibility and scientific research, it was clear we remain captivated by humanoid robots – and that the allure of what we could do still overshadows what we should do. Its popularity and the claim of its organizers (International Telecommunications Union-ITU in partnership with other UN agencies, with the Swiss Government as co-convener) that it is “the United Nations’ leading platform on Artificial Intelligence” raises real questions about how it relates to – and where it is steering – the Global Dialogue.

The third event has had a longer, more inclusive history. The vision of the World Summit on the Information Society calls for a “people-centred, inclusive, and development-oriented Information Society,” and for over 20 years it has served as the primary multistakeholder forum for implementing communication and digital commitments. This is where community networks, human rights organizations, regulators, and private sector providers share sessions and plenaries – albeit alongside high-profile State sponsors.

No doubt because Geneva’s main conference centre, Palexpo, was fully booked by the Global Dialogue and AI for Good, the first two days of the 2026 WSIS Forum were held at ITU headquarters, down a construction-strewn road. The low-key setup – magnified by a confusing warren of hallways and meeting rooms – gave the impression that WSIS was the poor relation of digital governance.

The setting improved once the Forum moved to Palexpo for the rest of the week, but compared to the three halls buzzing with people (and robots) at AI for Good, the atmosphere stayed muted.

While the WSIS vision remains unfulfilled, it is still the platform that addresses the entire information society, including the digital environment. The Global Dialogue was full of speeches calling for meaningful community involvement, respect for human rights, equal access, and transparency; it is the WSIS Forum where actual efforts at community and multistakeholder cooperation are demonstrated as models for further action. It is far from a perfect, all-purpose governance and financing platform – but it is the most inclusive in focus and participation.

There is yet another significant platform coming up in a different time and place – the United Nations Internet Governance Forum – to be held in December in Nairobi, Kenya. Its 2026 theme is “Governing the Internet in the Age of Intelligence: Our Shared Responsibility.” Its mandate, linked to the WSIS process, is to bring diverse stakeholders together to shape digital public policy across both public and private sectors.

As the WACC delegation navigated these three meetings last week – and looks ahead to the IGF – we are left wondering where the most effective action on digital justice will actually happen.

Each forum has a role, and each needs WACC’s advocacy on equity, participation, and accountability. But the links between best practice, multistakeholder dialogue, public policy, and sustainable development have not yet been forged, and the still largely unregulated development of AI raises a hard question: which forum, or combination of forums, will have real impact?

Speaking at the WSIS Forum, Jennifer Chung, Chair of the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group, directly addressed the need for coordination, collaboration, and cohesion among these four platforms – essential to implementing the Global Digital Compact and to the power of multistakeholder cooperation.

Digital justice is needed more than ever, and WACC is committed to making sure the voices and experiences of those advocating for equity, participation, and accountability are heard loud and clear in every one of these forums. But that takes all of us.

Follow these processes. Read the reports. Speak up when your national delegation takes its seat at the Global Dialogue, raise questions about community involvement in the latest AI tech, and share our stories of how technological solutions work for all at WSIS and the IGF.

Most importantly, take action where you are. Digital justice is not only decided in Geneva or Nairobi – it is built in the communities where access, literacy, and safety are still out of reach.

Support your local community media. Champion digital literacy where you live. Push back against disinformation in your own networks. The forums will keep meeting. Whether they deliver justice depends on what we do between them.

Images: (clockwise from top) participants at WSIS, ITU/Pierre Albouy; speaker at the Global Governance on AI, ITU/Antoine Tardy; AI for Good Summit, ITU/D Woldu. All photos on ITU’s Flickr profile, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. 

The plot could easily have been from a Netflix dystopian thriller.

“The Russian Guy” approaches ordinary women and girls leading ordinary lives, one walking her child to school, another stocking supermarket shelves, and a young girl walking by.

“Hello. What’s your name? You look beautiful. Come with me.”

He has sex with them in his rental apartment. The entire encounter is captured on video through his Ray-Ban META smart glasses. He posts the videos on his private Telegram account and porn sites for paying followers, while shorter clips have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram. Rumors swirl that he is HIV positive. Evidence indicates that hundreds of women and young girls across Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa have fallen prey.

The spectrum of technology-facilitated gender-based violence has fanned out yet again into an even more grotesque form.

First, it was humans operating in the dark web. As the range of tech tools expanded, so did new ideas emerge on how to amplify violations against women and girls. Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, enabled image-editing to create non-consensual sexualized images of women. With “the Russian Guy,” otherwise known as “Yaytseslav,” AI-powered wearables in the form of eyewear with hidden cameras have raised the stakes. His prey were unaware that the blinking light at the corner of the frames was a recording camera paired to a smartphone.

The gender AI divide – inequalities between women and men related to access, use, development, and representation in AI technologies – one that is wider for less tech-savvy women, implies that the room for AI-amplified violations can only expand.

Yaytseslav’s case is also a cautionary tale on AI ethics and regulation. Despite public outrage in Ghana and Kenya and calls for his arrest, he remains active, posting content on social media.

The Cyber Security Authority in Ghana invoked Section 67 of the Cybersecurity Act, which criminalizes the non-consensual recording, publication, or distribution of intimate images or videos. By then, he had travelled to Kenya, where the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act 2018 provides similar grounds.

Legislation is of little value, however, when perpetrators can move freely between jurisdictions. The scale of Yaytseslav’s actions might have been reduced if comprehensive, regional and/or international AI regulatory frameworks had been in place to serve as a deterrent.

That the events are presently unfolding in the Silicon Savannah in Kenya, a country that is one of Africa’s frontier tech nations and one of the region’s top AI policymakers, is alarming.

Regulation must cover AI-amplified gendered violence, exclusion, exploitation and misogyny, beyond the often-touted economic benefits. Rather than a patchwork of dispersed national laws, standards must be harmonized across the region. They must be enforced by a powerful regulator able to stand up to the Global North’s big tech firms on all facets of technology.

Photo: Ground Pictures and People Images composition

But it was only during the Arab Spring that many came to realize that television wasn’t the only way of keeping people informed. Social media had become a prominent force in not only raising world-wide awareness in seconds but also bringing people together to protest almost anything.

Protests used to recruit members by circulating advertisements, such as pamphlets and radio announcements. After months of planning, the March on Washington became the pinnacle of rallies in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, when hundreds of thousands joined to protest for full employment and racial equality in the United States. Almost a decade of advocacy and resistance went by before the U.S. government decided to enact the anti-segregation legislation.

In today’s world, it takes a matter of seconds to raise awareness of issues around the world. From South Sudan to Serbia, 2019 has seen the majority of protest recruiting, organization and advocacy go digital. Expanding consciousness, both regionally and internationally, creates increased pressure for governments to concede to the demands of the masses.

In some countries, social media are the only way to make voices heard. In reference to the Serbian protests, actor Branislav Trifunović states that, “Social networks have remained the only possible way for the people to be told, truthfully, about what is happening. Broadcasters are, in one way or another, owned by the ruling party.”

However, governments are catching on. During the 2011 Egyptian uprisings, the government ordered an internet blackout to halt protestors from disseminating information and setting up demonstrations. In 2019 alone, Indonesia, Kashmir, Sri Lanka and South Sudan, among others, saw a complete internet blackout during their protests in order to prevent dissent and backlash.

As a result, people are turning to more encrypted mediums of communication. In April 2019, the government of Hong Kong proposed a bill allowing fugitives to be extradited to mainland China, causing millions to protest. After the bill was withdrawn, protesters shifted their focus to advocating for full democracy, civil liberties, and complete autonomy from China. According to the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong protestors have been forced to utilize encrypted messaging apps and peer-to-peer communication to ensure anonymity and avoid government detection and persecution.

Nevertheless, people shouldn’t have to find loopholes on the internet to ensure their voice and message are heard. The right to seek and disseminate information is a basic human right and should not be infringed by the government – especially to suppress individual opinions and democracy as a whole.

How governments across the world choose to deal with this will determine their genuine commitment to citizens’ fundamental human rights.

Photo above: John Ye/Shutterstock 

Ordinarily, the private life of an individual was not open to scrutiny, while public life was the concern of law and order and decency. In communication terms, privacy meant that only the addressee could open letters or telegrams and telephone operators would not listen in to conversations. Unauthorised disclosure could be sanctioned.

In “Privacy is the new wilderness we must protect” (openDemocracy 2 August 2019), Maciej Ceglowski calls for an updated concept of privacy as a public good if we are to save our rights as individuals in today’s digital world.

Ceglowski calls this ambient privacy – “the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.”

The digital surveillance system functions effectively and efficiently because it is automated. Computers monitor and sift, identifying key attributes, making connections and assessing probabilities. Commercial entities and security services use that data: the former to compile marketing trends and the latter to assess imminent culpability. China is using deep-learning systems to search in real time through video feeds capable of capturing millions of faces. State security is building an archive that will be used to identify suspicious behaviour in order to predict who will become an “unsafe” social actor.

In this context, Ceglowski argues:

“Our discourse around privacy needs to expand to address foundational questions about the role of automation: To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database? What does it mean to be manipulated from an early age by machine learning algorithms that adaptively learn to shape our behavior

The alternative is a world with no ambient privacy and little data protection, dominated by hostile governments and big corporations. It is the kind of dystopia that George Orwell identified in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in which “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

What shall we do to prevent it?

Photo above: SHENZHEN, CHINA: Facial recognition technology at street to identify jaywalkers and automatically issue them fines by text. Offenders faces are displayed on screens at crossings. Photo:  StreetVJ/Shutterstock

The military, law-enforcement agencies, and commercial corporations are exploiting facial recognition and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to collect personal data. Yet, the legal frameworks controlling how that data can be used have not kept pace with the technology.

In May 2019, San Francisco became the first US city to ban the use of facial recognition by its authorities. However, the city ordinance did not prevent private companies from using facial ID in ways that people find objectionable.

In July 2019, the first independent evaluation of the use of facial recognition by London’s Metropolitan police warned it is “highly possible” the system would be ruled unlawful if challenged in court.

As face recognition becomes more and more common, there are also growing concerns about the gender and racial bias embedded in many systems. Writing in “FaceApp Makes Today’s Privacy Laws Look Antiquated” (The Atlantic, 20 July 2019) Tiffany C. Li, a Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, puts the onus on tech companies themselves:

“Developers need to go further and build actual privacy protections into their apps. These can include notifications on how data (or photos) are being used, clear internal policies on data retention and deletion, and easy workflows for users to request data correction and deletion. Additionally, app providers and platforms such as Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook should build in more safeguards for third-party apps.”

All well and good, but misuse, misappropriation, and mistaken identity require legislation and regulation that includes better privacy laws that address the potential for harms inherent in these technologies. In Li’s opinion:

“To deal with privacy risks in the larger data ecosystem, we need to regulate how data brokers can use the personal information they obtain. We need safeguards against the practical harms that invasions of privacy can cause; that could mean, for example, limiting the use of facial-recognition algorithms for predictive policing. We also need laws that give individuals power over data they have not voluntarily submitted.”

In short, global corporations play by their own rules and require oversight. The problem is how to guarantee compliance.

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A free and independent media sector is one of the cornerstones of what it means for a country to be a liberal democracy. The emergence of the Internet was initially received with much optimism as there was an expectation that it would help democratize media systems, allowing “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.”[i].

Nevertheless, in recent years, there have been mounting concerns about the impact that Internet-based communication on democracies around the world. “Today, the contribution of free, pluralistic, independent and safe journalism to democracy is under unprecedented stress…there is growing disintermediation of news institutions: politicians use channels other than the media to reach audiences directly, and voters share content directly amongst themselves.”[ii].

These issues are inextricably linked to Internet Governance issues. “Far too few news organizations have been able to find a sustainable model for journalism online, which translates into less revenue and fewer journalists”[iii]. A key element of this equation is the global advertising market, which has seen as shift away from being dominated by media companies, and is now ruled by Internet companies such as Google and Facebook, which together have a market share of 63%- roughly USD $61.6 billion per year. At the same time, global newspaper advertising revenue is expected to decline by USD 23.8 billion a year by 2021.[iv]

It is time for the Internet Governance community to devote more energy to addressing some of these issues. This may include working towards the development of mechanisms for ad revenue sharing or investing in AI technologies that optimize the visibility of credible sources of news. Media viability will not be enhanced in the long run through philanthropic efforts, but rather through accountable and transparent mechanisms that prioritize democracy and human rights.

[i] Diamond, Larry (2010). “Liberation Technology” in Journal of Democracy, July 2010, Volume 21, Number 3. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Diamond-21-3.pdf

[ii] UNESCO (2018). Report on World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development 2017/2018. UNESCO: Paris. in Media for Democracy: Journalism and Elections in Times of Disinformation- Concept Note for World Press Freedom Day 2019. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/concept_note_en_wpfd_2019.pdf  

[iii] Oghia, Michael J. Governing Digital Convergence: An Issue Paper on Media Development and Internet Governance. Global Forum for Media Development. https://gfmd.info/internet-governance/

[iv] Oghia, Michael J. Governing Digital Convergence: An Issue Paper on Media Development and Internet Governance. Global Forum for Media Development. https://gfmd.info/internet-governance/