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News & Events Event Reports

Fifth Global Summit: Digital Literacy — The Role of Cities in Preventing and Responding to Online Harms

Publication Date:
21/12/2024
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Cape TownCity-Led Preventiondigital literacyFifth Global SummitoNLINE HARMS

— 11 minutes reading time

Introduction

On 3 – 5 December 2024, the Strong Cities Network held its Fifth Global Summit in Cape Town (South Africa), bringing together more than 140 participants, including 60 mayors and governors, as well as city officials, practitioners and partners from more than 90 cities and 40 countries around the world. The Summit included mayoral conversations, thematic parallel sessions and tabletop exercises – providing city officials from diverse contexts with opportunities to share and learn from city-led innovations and approaches to prevent and respond to hate, extremism and polarisation, and maintain social cohesion amid global crises.

The Summit agenda included a parallel session on digital literacy and the role of cities in preventing and responding to online harms. Discussions highlighted the challenges that disinformation, hate speech, extremist content and cyber security threats pose to cities globally, fuelled and/or exacerbated by global crises. While this session was focused on the online ecosystem, speakers reinforced the link between the online and offline ecosystems, emphasising the impact that the latter has on the former.

Featured Speakers

Key Takeaways

Digital Literacy and Online Harms

Yusuf Siraj, Co-Founder of the Foundation for a Path Forward, opened the session with a presentation on digital literacy and online harms. He explained how the majority of the world’s population is online and on social media, leaving them vulnerable to a range of online harms and problematic content. He then outlined the range of harms cities and individuals may face and the role that digital literacy initiatives could play in combatting them.

Following the presentation, four panellists discussed how these harms are manifesting in their cities and how they have endeavoured to address them. 

A Wide Range of Online Harms

In his presentation, Yusuf outlined a wide range of online harms and some of the characteristics of online spaces, social media in particular, that can exacerbate them. These include mis-, dis- and malinformation, as well as targeted hate campaigns, extremist propaganda, foreign interference and cyber-attacks. Online harms, he said, result in a range of individual and society-wide consequences ranging from truth decay, loss of faith in government institutions and actors, a breakdown of social cohesion, rising polarisation, radicalisation to extremism and violence and threats to national security. Some aspects of social media amplify these harms. For example, he shared how much of the content curation online is dictated by algorithms meant to curate a more personalised experience for each user. They are designed to keep users online for as long as possible and tend to select emotionally charged content that drives division and overemphasises fringe and extreme opinions.

In Canada, like much of the world, politicians at all levels are facing rising levels of online hate, abuse and threats. Tariq explained that the majority of the 300 elected officials in the province of British Columbia have reported receiving online harassment that targeted them and often their families. He stressed the need to remember the individual consequences public figures face from this kind of abuse and to ensure they can access the necessary support, both for their physical security and their psychological well-being. Adding on this point, Benedetto Zacchiroli, President of the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism (ECCAR), urged local governments to reach out to communities that have been affected by online hate and disinformation and provide support.

Every single elected official said that they were subject to online harassment … threatening their lives and their family’s lives. And many of those elected officials sought mental health support because of the level of vitriol that they experienced online, and how it translates in the real world.

Tariq Tyab, Co-Founder, Foundation for a Path Forward (Canada)

Cities are also at risk as nefarious actors are increasingly targeting local governments with a range of cyber security threats, including ransomware, in which hackers steal information and disable critical systems, holding them hostage unless a ransom is paid. While these attacks have serious financial consequences, Rory Hoskins, Mayor of Forest Park (Illinois, USA), emphasised the potential fallout when a city is unable to deliver key services. These incidents threaten to undermine trust in local government and can irrevocably damage the city’s relationship with its residents.

The Online and Offline are Closely Linked

Online threats can, at times, feel remote when compared to offline risks. Yusuf noted that this perceived detachment can make them more difficult to address, a point Benedetto echoed when he urged actors at all levels and sectors to look at the online and offline through the same lens. He stressed the cyclical relationship between online and offline realities and the serious real-world consequences that the former can have on the latter. He emphasised that the way “to tackle [online harms] from a local and municipal perspective is to consider the online exactly the same way as the offline, acknowledging that virtual communities are real communities”.

Benedetto noted that this approach could be more challenging for older generations who are accustomed to building relationships in real life, but for younger people, online relationships and communities can be as significant as those they form offline. To bridge this generational divide, local governments need to work with young people to understand how they are using digital technologies and the unique kinds of threats they may be facing compared with older residents, who often suffer different vulnerabilities than young digital natives. 

Just as the online shapes the offline, Navneet Ballah, Executive Director of Manavi, an organisation based in Hoboken (New Jersey, USA) working to end all forms of violence in the South Asian community, reminded panellists that so too can the offline shape the online. Navneet emphasised the importance of bringing people together within the city and building strong and more cohesive bonds as a way to help build resilience to online harms and mitigate the polarising fallout. 

Digital Literacy: Part of the Solution

Yusuf explained that the sheer scale of the content shared on social media poses a serious logistical challenge for content moderation. For emphasis, he noted that every minute, 350,000 tweets are posted on X, one million videos are watched on TikTok and six million posts are shared on Facebook. The constant deluge of content means that disinformation, hate and extremist content can reach millions of people before it is removed, if it is removed at all. For example, when the Christchurch terrorist live-streamed his attack in 2019, the video was shared over 1.5 million times before platforms could remove it.

Speakers cautioned how content moderation alone will not resolve the challenges presented by the swath of online harms people face every day. In addition to working with social media companies, they encouraged cities to bolster their residents’ resilience to online harms through digital literacy training. Yusuf defined digital literacy as “the ability to find, evaluate, use, share, and create information responsibly online”, bolstering “critical thinking and ethical judgment to navigate misinformation and hate speech”. He went on to explain that digital literacy empowers users directly by reducing their vulnerability to harmful narratives and provides societal-wide benefits by supporting social cohesion and mobilising residents to help identify and combat online hate and extremism. 

In Maputo (Mozambique), Councillor Duvane explained how the local government has focused on enhancing digital literacy and digital citizenship among young people, including by incorporating digital literacy programmes in schools as part of students’ formal education, as well as outside of schools, in partnership with community actors. He said that one challenge they are facing in scaling up this programme is the lack of the necessary access to computers.

When designing and implementing digital literacy programmes, participants underscored the importance of remembering that different groups and generations experience the Internet differently and thus likely need different kinds of support. Although young people are typically the primary target for digital literacy training, older adults are also at risk from online harms and are often more susceptible to disinformation or online scamming than young people. With this in mind, the Foundation for a Path Forward has designed a Silver Surfers digital literacy curriculum specifically for elderly Internet users to strengthen their capacity to better navigate the online space and identify potential harms before they are victimised.

To ensure digital literacy programmes are appropriate for their target audience and cover the varied and unique vulnerabilities a group may be facing, panellists emphasised the importance of pursuing a whole-of-society approach that includes a wide range of public and private-sector partners at the local, regional and national levels.

Digital literacy training is only possible if governments – both at national and local levels – commit resources on a strategic and consistent basis. Benedetto emphasised that ad hoc programmes will not be enough; there needs to be a strong policy foundation that provides a budget and strategic structure that can be rolled out at the national level. As an example, Italy introduced a law in 2017 that mandates budget allocation for public communication, with Benedetto suggesting that something similar will be necessary to approach this challenge effectively.  

Specialised Training for Local Governments

To adequately respond to online threats, speakers highlighted how a city must first understand the threat landscape. Gaining this understanding can present a challenge for local governments as it requires a range of knowledge and skills that smaller cities may lack. In addition to pursuing basic digital literacy for staff and city residents, local governments also need to understand and monitor and understand the information ecosystem – including online hate and extremism and anticipate cyber-attacks that threaten to impede their ability to govern, including by undermining their legitimacy.

This challenge can be particularly daunting for small towns like Forest Park (Illinois, USA), a village of 14,000 residents. Mayor Hoskins explained that with a staff of 20, the local government lacks the technical expertise to safeguard the city digitally. While they work with consultants who provide IT and cybersecurity support, he emphasised that local government staff still need training to identify potential threats, like fishing or scam emails, that can result in the kinds of ransomware attacks that have shut down cities across the US and globally. These attacks are not only costly in monetary terms; when local government is locked out of their systems for any period, they cannot deliver key services and risk losing the trust of their residents. To help mitigate this risk, Mayor Hoskins has instituted training to strengthen his team’s digital literacy and other relevant skills to reduce his city’s vulnerability.  

Next Steps

Throughout the Summit, cities of all sizes and in all geographies pointed to online harms as a growing concern and encouraged Strong Cities to focus more attention on this challenge and develop tools to help cities address it. Strong Cities will continue working with cities to understand the online threats they are facing and how they are manifesting. Strong Cities will also continue to identify and disseminate practices that are proving effective for preventing and responding to these challenges and provide dedicated spaces to and develop resources that explore them in greater detail.

Further Resources

Recent Strong Cities policy briefs and resources:

Additional reading:

Donors & Partners

The Fifth Global Summit was made possible with generous support from the European Union, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, Public Safety Canada, the US Department of State and the City of Cape Town. 

The views expressed in this session report do not necessarily reflect those of all Strong Cities Network members, the Management Unit or Summit sponsors and partners. 

Contact Information 

For more information about the Fifth Global Summit or the Strong Cities Network, please contact [email protected].

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