„It’s not only about the big picture about us getting information from the Frontline what’s  happening in Ukraine, people living in Ukraine need valid information about everyday life what is going on and this is as crucial as food, as electricity, information is as important“, said Mika Beuster at at the International Online Conference „Ukraine and the World: Resisting Aggression, Defeating Authoritarianism“.

„We’ seen an unprecedented amount of fake news disinformation and propaganda from Russia that influence or threat to influence the elections in Germany and this is public knowledge which not only the German Security Forces warned about months before the election but which journalists discovered in good research and it’s broadly publicized exactly which groups with strong ties to the groups, the Russian military intelligence Service.

You can name the groups that try to influence the election with means of deep fakes artificial intelligence and best practice experience from the campaign in the United States from the presidential election it basically was a copy and paste operation of everything they’ve done in the Trump campaign they have done in Germany as well and go figure it – worked on so many levels.

The big picture is this disinformation campaign work because it’s so much it’s overwhelming and we journalists whose job is to identify disinformation and educate the public are just overwhelmed by the sheer mass of attempts to um make us um make us uncertain about what’s fact what’s fiction and this makes the jobs of journalists and so much more difficult and we lose the sight of the big picture what is the topic that we need to talk about and we heard it before.

I think we as journalists need to focus more on the topics that are relevant for a majority in society set the agenda back to those topics of course we need to talk about migration and how to

manage it would be it’s a very important topic but it’s not the only topic and it’s not the only topic that needs to be addressed we need to talk about the climate crisis and how it will affect all of us and of course how it’s linked to migration um and one last aspect is we talked a lot about security in the face of the Russian aggression towards Europe and not towards Ukraine. I think we’re all agree that uh Ukraine is just one part of Russian aggression that’s targeted to all of Europe to all of the West so to say we can put the West as a template here for all societies are democratic they’re free uh and want to decide their Fate on their own terms so we need to talk about comprehensive security we need of course to address the military aspects this is a separate topic but we need to address that a resilient Society is one that doesn’t only know how to defend itself militarily but also has a digital sovereignty so we need to regain our sovereignty on the information infrastructure.

So we need to have a platform a digital platform a digital uh social EUR European social network that that’s according to our terms so we’re independent from social networks in the Silicon Valley or in Beijing for that matter we need um stricter laws in the European Union uh that are enforced against everybody that tries to force us on our own terms so we need digital sovereignty in Europe.

This is the only way to secure infrastructure get our information across so as you told that that you as a platform as well as everybody else who has a media platform in Europe has their own means to get that information across independent from any national government.

Defending Ukraine with cannons with Fighters uh with soldiers as important as to defend Europe on the information battlefield what to say we need our own infrastructure and to enforce our own laws to defend our values“, said Beuster.

B. J.