Inside Geneva
Inside Geneva is a podcast about global politics, humanitarian issues, and international aid, hosted by journalist Imogen Foulkes. It is produced by SWI swissinfo.ch, a multilingual international public service media company from Switzerland.
Inside Geneva
Democratic rights and freedoms at a crossroads?
The world is changing fast. Are democracy and human rights under threat? Our Inside Geneva podcast takes a deep dive.
“Donald Trump is unravelling the constitution, where I believe we could describe this as a coup d'état,” says human rights lawyer Reed Brody.
What happens when Big Tech gets involved in politics?
“It is fine for Instagram or TikTok to realise that I am into biking and then try to sell me bikes. That’s fine. That’s a product. Manipulate me to sell me that. But that’s not fine with political ideas,” continues Alberto Fernandez Gibaja, Head of Digitalisation and Democracy at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA).
What about free speech?
“For the first time in my life, I am listening to Americans on the radio and TV, talking to the press and refusing to use their names because they are afraid of retaliation,” says Brody.
Is it still possible to have a democratic, fact-based debate?
“For those of us who believe that we share a reality based on facts and science, we are on the losing side,” says Fernandez Gibaja.
Are we losing the fundamental freedoms set out in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva to find out.
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Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang
This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogen Foulkes, and this is a production from Swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland. In today's programme, a quiet street in Boston, the scene of the latest Trump government crackdown, plainclothes, immigration officers surround a Turkish graduate student.
Speaker 1:Donald Trump is unraveling the Constitution, where I believe we could describe this as a coup d'etat. I think we're living a very, very dangerous moment in the United States and, as an American, I think it's obviously even more important to be talking about that.
Speaker 3:After months of backing Donald Trump online and on the campaign trail, Elon Musk is set to play a key role in the incoming administration. It is fine for Instagram or for TikTok to realize that I am into biking and then try to sell me bikes. That's fine. That's a product. Manipulate me to sell me that. That has happened throughout history. But that's not fine with political ideas.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Imogen Fowkes, and in today's programme we've got two in-depth interviews for you where we'll take a deep dive into the many challenges to democracy and human rights. We'll hear first from Reid Brodie, long-time human rights lawyer, who is now on the UN Human Rights Council's group of experts on Nicaragua. He'll bring us key insights into how Daniel Ortega's Santinista government slipped into authoritarianism, but he'll also tell us about his concerns for his own country, the United States.
Speaker 1:For the first time in my life, I am listening on the radio, on TV, to Americans talking to the press and refusing to use their names because they are afraid of retaliation. That's the kind of thing that happens in Russia, that happens in Nicaragua.
Speaker 2:And then later in the program we'll talk to Alberto Fernandez-Kibaja, head of digitalization and democracy at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Some of our listeners may remember we talked to him just last year about the many elections taking place in 2024 and whether social media or even artificial intelligence could be a threat to the democratic process. Today we catch up with Alberto again and ask him to take stock.
Speaker 3:Social media is probably more of like a long dripping effect that keeps eroding one of the fundamental tenets of democracy, which is having a shared reality. Once you don't have a shared reality, it becomes relatively easy to weaponise that part of society that is losing touch with reality. Once you don't have a shared reality, it becomes relatively easy to weaponize that part of society that is losing touch with reality. And then, for those of us who believe that we share a reality, and a reality based on facts and science, we are in the losing side.
Speaker 2:Alberto Fernandez-Gibaja there coming up in the second half of the program. But first let's talk to Reid Brodie, long-time human rights defender and currently scrutinising alleged violations in Nicaragua on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council. But, as he told me, his interest in Nicaragua goes back decades and began with a very different perspective.
Speaker 1:In the 1980s people of my generation. We were very interested in the Sandinista revolution that had overthrown decades of US-backed dictatorship in Nicaragua and was trying to build a new society, the literacy campaigns, health care for the poor. And so I went to Nicaragua with a friend of mine whose brother was a parish priest, in a little village in northern Nicaragua, and people started telling us these stories about how the US financed and backed former remnants of Samosa's, the dictator's National Guard, and were coming in and in this village had been attacked. And people I met, people whose family members had been killed before their eyes and they like don't people in your country know what's going on here? You've got to go back and do something. And I felt for the first time.
Speaker 1:I was not a human rights lawyer, I was working at the New York State Attorney General's office, but I just felt Nicaragua and I spent five months going around the war zones in Nicaragua interviewing victims of Contra attacks and witnesses to people whose houses had been burned down, people whose villages had been attacked, teachers, healthcare workers, women who had been raped. It was my first experience doing this kind of thing. I didn't know, I'd never studied international law and when I came back to Washington with hundreds of testimonies, affidavits. I came back just as President Reagan was describing the Contras as the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers and was seeking additional military assistance to the Contras. I mean, my report was on the front page of the New York Times and it concentrated enough minds in a divided Congress actually to deny Reagan the assistance he wanted.
Speaker 2:Let's fast forward a little bit, because the United States the things that went on in the 70s and 80s, its role in Latin America, are fairly well documented, not least by you, and we know that grave, grave human rights abuses took place in the US interest of theoretically keeping left-wing politicians out of their backyard. That's how I think it was described at the time. And you're right that some of these governments were fettered by Europeans, by North Americans, thinking as you said, free education, free healthcare. They're doing a good job. But fast forward 40 years. The Sandinista government has not turned out so great and ironically, now, after having investigated violations which were intended to destabilize that government, now you're on a UN panel looking at violations committed by that Sandinista government. How does that feel in terms of your irony factor?
Speaker 1:Well, first I should say that it's not all of the Sandinistas. Most of the people who were comrades in arms of Daniel Ortega, most of the people who fought in the revolution and are around, most of the people who are in the government are now in the opposition. So we're really looking at, in particular, daniel Ortega, who you know. They lost elections in 1990. The war-weary people of Nicaragua voted them out. It looked like multi-party democracy was going to flourish, but Ortega then purged the Sandinista movement. He made deals with right-wing politicians. He came back into office in 2007, 17 years later, and has not given up power since.
Speaker 1:I have to say I mean for me there's this poetic arc to my career that you know. It's why no satisfaction to see what has happened Over the last 17 years that Daniel Altair has been back in power. His wife has gotten more and more power and now this new constitution that was enacted just a few weeks ago actually creates a male co-president and a female co-president and a female co-president. So this man who had fought against a family dictatorship, now has actually put into the Constitution a family dictatorship. That also they have the power to name their vice presidents, and people are suspecting that they will name their children. So I think it's certainly there are many cautionary tales here that I personally have learned and that we all need to think about.
Speaker 1:But you know, I feel like I haven't changed. My goals are the same. My work is still based on principle. I mean, at the time I didn't, 40 years ago I'd never heard of the Geneva Conventions. When I was doing this, I'd never heard of war crimes and stuff I talked about atrocities and abuses. And now, of course, I'm much more tooled to do all the things that I'm doing and of course, we have a big team. Then I was really on my own doing this and now, with our UN fact-finding mission, or group of experts as it's called, we have a whole staff based in Panama that is doing most of the actually the legwork.
Speaker 2:Your report does detail, you know, graft, corruption, nepotism, suppression of opposition, repression of civil society. In response, nicaragua have left the Human Rights Council. The US beat them to the exit because the United States has left as well. So I mean, I'm wondering, given the kind of atmosphere there seems to be about might-making right rather than right-making right, if you like, can reports like yours do any good anymore?
Speaker 1:I think that you know, obviously that's an important question that we ask ourselves and we try to look at how a report can make a difference. And our report is really I mean the press release is titled An Appeal to the International Community To do something. You know we don't expect the Nicaraguan government I mean the Nicaraguan government has never responded to our requests. I mean, like most of the UN commissions of inquiry, we don't actually get to go to the country. The Nicaraguan government has never even bothered to respond to our letters. But what we're saying is look, here are the people who are involved Today. You know that opens them up to individual targeted sanctions, of which many countries have already sanctioned people in Nicaragua. The situation in Nicaragua has not gotten better since we've been reporting. But people rely on the reports. It gives succor to the opposition. They see their names, they see what they have endured being reported as fact by the United Nations, and I think there are many side benefits to what we do.
Speaker 2:You talked about what's been happening in Nicaragua, that the president, the vice president, man and wife have consolidated power to themselves. They're kind of dismantling the checks and balances, the separation of powers. You're American. Are you concerned for your own country that something similar is happening? I mean you used to work here in Geneva at the International Commission of Jurists. You've written extensivelyetat. That's happening where powers that do not belong to the president are being arrogated by Congress. Is not being spent Agencies that were established by Congress are being dismantled.
Speaker 1:The civil service protections are being undermined. I think we're living a very, very dangerous moment in the United States and, as an American, I think it's obviously even more important, because of the power of the United States, to be talking about that. Unfortunately, we're seeing the free speech tradition be trampled on in the United States. This weekend, the man who was leading the protests on the Columbia University campus in favor of Palestinian rights was arrested pending deportation. A man with a green card, married to an American citizen.
Speaker 1:A US attorney for the District of Columbia wrote to Georgetown Law School requesting information about their policies on diversity, equity and inclusion and saying the federal government is not going to hire law students who come from schools that preach or practice diversity equity. I mean these are major attacks on free speech. So it's not only the traditions that are different. I mean these are major attacks on free speech, so it's not only the traditions that are different. I mean today we are seeing that people.
Speaker 1:For the first time in my life, I am listening on the radio, on TV, to Americans talking to the press and refusing to use their names because they are afraid of retaliation. That's the kind of thing that happens in Russia, that happens in Nicaragua, People who are afraid that if they, you know they've been fired from their government jobs or whatever, but they're actually afraid to give their names because of retaliation. Students and I think this is particularly dealing with Middle East issues often, where a college student, a law student, would be really very brave to stand up for Palestinian rights today because of the effect that will have on their lives and their careers. But, more generally, people who stand up to what is going on are afraid today.
Speaker 2:They're afraid to give their names, they're afraid to speak out guardrails that came in, most of them after the Second World War for a very good reason. This never again moment People's faith in those things. People tend to be a bit irritated by them. How can we get back a kind of faith and respect that actually to prevent real barbarism we need these things? How can we inspire people? I mean, you spent your life defending human rights. How can we re-inspire people?
Speaker 1:Well, I think, education in many ways, I think also the human rights movement, has lost touch with people. Many people in Europe and the United States do not see themselves as beneficiaries of the human rights movement.
Speaker 2:But they are.
Speaker 1:But of course they are, I mean people are saying you know social media and the horrible results of algorithms and atomization of people, the reducing of the public space where people come together. I mean, I look at what my son and his friends are listening to and watching and I realize that there's no common debate anymore. I mean, in the old days you had, for better or for worse, you had only a few stations on TV. You had dialogue. Now people you know in the United States in particular is a very divided country in which the people progressives live in the United States in particular is a very divided country in which the people progressives live in cities, they read certain newspapers, they watch certain TVs and conservatives live in other places.
Speaker 1:Physically we're separated, mentally we're separated. We come together in different places and the algorithms weaponize that in a sense. And I'm worried that there's a reality that's being created by the media and obviously at a certain point in the US, as the state is totally dismantled, we're going to see some very serious soon. We're going to see really bad stuff happen and it'd be interesting to see whether the government continues to blame it on what happened before. Whether we have martial law, I would not exclude. I mean, the guardrails have come off and I'm very scared of where we're headed.
Speaker 2:Read Brodie there with a worrying take on what's happening in the United States right now.
Speaker 1:Please raise your right hand and repeat after me I.
Speaker 3:Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and the CEOs of Apple and Google, who have all been invited to sit right up on the platform where Trump will be sworn in.
Speaker 2:Now many of us will remember the tech giants lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, jeff Bezos of Amazon and, of course, elon Musk, who has been handed enormous power by the president. Last year, we devoted a whole episode of Inside Geneva to how much big tech, whether it's social media or artificial intelligence, might influence the democratic process. Alberto Fernandez-Gibaja of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance joined us then and today he's back. So how did we do in that big election year of 2024?
Speaker 3:I will say, even if it doesn't look like it, I think we did pretty well. 2024 had around 60 elections it depends how you count and when it comes to the role that social media and digital technologies play in the elections, I think we did pretty well, especially considering that we started the year saying we started 2024 saying it's going to be a disasterificial. Intelligence is going to be a game changer. It will disrupt every single election that is coming and largely that didn't happen. We are still in the face of understanding exactly why it didn't happen, trying to also grasp if there is something we are missing, if there is something that we didn't see and did happen. But in general, I think that aspect of the elections was fine. What maybe wasn't that good were some of the results of these elections. But I don't think we can draw a very causality line between the results of those elections, the policies of the people that got elected and the way social media and digital technologies and artificial intelligence influenced those elections.
Speaker 2:Let's look at. All eyes are on, actually, the United States, which had an election at the end of last year. Pretty clear result a democratic election, but nevertheless we did also see a combination of the world's richest man, Elon Musk, financially supporting a particular party, the Republicans, and also spreading policies or attitudes that he supports on the media platform that he owns, ex-formerly Twitter. Now, obviously, we can't say this changed the result of the election in the United States, but people are worried that that kind of thing is happening.
Speaker 3:You're right. I don't think we can say that changed the results of the elections, and I think this is something that we need to have a lot of clarity on this. So far, we don't really have a case in which we can say digital technologies changed the results of the elections. Without digital technologies, the result would have been different. Let's say, without social media let's be concrete without the weaponization of social media communications, the results will have been different.
Speaker 3:It is obvious that it influenced a lot, but I think we tend to focus on the very short term, on like the campaign trail and the last couple of months, and the effect of social media is probably more of like a long dripping effect that keeps eroding, for me, one of the fundamental tenets of democracy, which is having a shared reality.
Speaker 3:If people don't share a reality, we can disagree on the solution, but we need to agree on what is real and what is not, and that effect is very long term.
Speaker 3:So I think one of the lessons is that probably the reason why this type of politics and I read recently somebody that speaks about demanufacturing, consent that approach to politics is successful because we have come through many years of eroding the grasp on reality of a significant percentage of the population, not only in the United States, globally, only in the United States, globally. And once you don't have a shared reality, then it becomes relatively easy to weaponize that part of society that is losing touch with reality. And then the battle is not about I want to solve the problem doing this thing or this other thing. The battle is about what the reality is. It's a battle between two realities. For those of us who believe that we share a reality and a reality based on facts and science, we are in the losing side, because it's very difficult to speak about the problems of society with somebody that doesn't seem to be living in the same planet, doesn't seem to be sharing your own physical time and space. We don't know what to do about that.
Speaker 2:Well, let's take one specific example. We had, or we have now, tensions between Europe and the United States, a wide gulf of misunderstanding and dislike certainly, it seems, from the United States towards Europe. Now we had the Vice President, jd Vance, come to Europe and say that Europe did not have free speech. I was in the United States in October of last year and a few American people said oh, I feel so sorry for you, you don't have free speech. I mean, how do you challenge this? Is this really a thing that people believe, or is it something that's being pushed by big tech so that they can have unfettered access? Because we know that Europe is the one continent which is trying to establish some guardrails in safety around social media, around AI.
Speaker 3:I think it's also important to understand that there is a difference between the concept of freedom of speech that the US has and the European Union or Europe in general has. I would say the one in Europe is a little bit more restrictive, without saying that it restricts freedom of speech, but it's a little bit more based on protecting certain groups. We have a history in Europe of going too far and letting certain political groups start pushing certain narratives that ended up in basically one of the most horrific actions of the human being in our history. So there is a different understanding of the concept in our history. So there is a different understanding of the concept. I do think people believe it because if your information diet is online bubbles of ultra-conservative influencers, fox News, elon Musk and all that bubble you probably keep hearing that there is censorship, that all the legislation in Europe is about censoring voices, that all the laws that are there are about trying to silence and muscle those that are different, or that they're trying to raise their voice and speak from the people. This is a very classic populist strategy, so they probably believe that. It is also true that they probably don't have a lot of alternative views on how things work in Europe or in other parts of the world. I mean this will probably apply anywhere else. And the companies, I mean I don't know, but I will say maybe strategically, seeing what they have been doing recently, maybe strategically they're not going to be the ones standing up for Europe and European legislation and say, look, the legislation follows human rights and it protects freedom of speech. What I think is a very important aspect is that the conservative, the Republican Party today and the current administration in the United States started a few years ago like a front attack on any attempt to make our digital ecosystems healthier, and they won. Basically, we have to admit they actually won. They managed to shift the opinion of all the population, or a big part of the population, from we need to put some protections in the way digital communications or information moves around social media towards any protection that you place is censorship, and they have managed to do that, and they have managed to convince a lot of people about that. They managed to close the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was probably the best research center in the world when it comes to the role of content moderation policies, the role of algorithms and basically how information on the internet influenced the world and they say it's a censorship complex. The internet influenced the world and they say it's a censorship complex. What they're actually saying, what they're actually trying to do, is we don't want those because we benefit from this. This is the way we mobilize our population, our voters. We bring them to an alternative reality.
Speaker 3:Are you worried? I'm extremely worried, I think. I mean, I think it changed country by country. It might be that the American population was a little bit more primed for this, but I think this is bound to happen everywhere else in the world. And I don't know if all countries are protected, not even the European Union. It's necessarily protected and we have seen already. It's necessarily protected and we have seen already. So it's more of a warning rather than an exception.
Speaker 3:We have already seen this happening in other countries. We have already seen people losing touch with reality because their information diet becomes a few political influencers, becomes a few political influencers, certain social media accounts, and they just fall into a rabbit hole where everything makes sense, where their capacity to make sense of the world is sharp, by these people. So it's not that everybody needs to read the New York Times or the Guardian or watch the BBC that kind of like source of information that is trustable. But when your only information comes from political influencers who are just making a buck, just making money, and to make money they need to say something, every time a little bit worse than the previous thing, so the algorithm keeps them popping up in your time feed and so on, they're just making money when that's the only diet. Those plus TV channels that have one objective, which is again mobilize these people, I mean it is very difficult to find that. It is very, very difficult.
Speaker 2:You sound quite pessimistic and concerned. What can we actually do?
Speaker 3:There are things that we can do. The first one is for political parties and candidates that are that truly believe in democracy, that truly believe that democracy should be just a body of ideas. They should realize that there is nothing wrong with moral clarity. If you get into those games, you're going to lose. There will always be one more radical person that will weaponize people and twist reality. So if you are a rational actor in the political game, you need to draw a line and you need to ally with those that are actually on your side in terms of I want to convince people with arguments and ideas and facts. Exactly that's the most important. We need to do that. The second thing that we need to do and this is going to sound very counterintuitive is address TV. The TV remains the main vector of disinformation. People, a lot of people. The moment they see an idea on TV, it's like see, that has to be true. It's on TV the moment TV tries to bring two opinions, and then it's like TV tries to bring two opinions, and then it's like here is a scientist with 25 years of experience researching vaccines and here is a no one that has a popular YouTube channel. You can't do that. You can't do that. You need to protect information integrity on TV, Because, even though youth people have a problem on how they get information, the main group of people that are moving on an alternative reality is actually the 55 plus, so TV is extremely important.
Speaker 3:We do need to educate kids in schools, but that's going to take a long time, and we need proper accountability regimes for social media platforms, and those accountability regimes should focus on content ranking algorithms and on monetization. For me, those are the two aspects we still haven't managed to grasp how to address. It is fine for Instagram or for TikTok to realize that I am into biking and then try to sell me bikes. That's fine. And if I get into bike influencers, then they will feed me with more bikes and more publicity about bikes and so on. That's fine. That's a product Manipulate me to sell me that. That has happened throughout history. But that's not fine with political ideas, and we need to push tech platforms to understand that it's actually not even in their interest to do that.
Speaker 3:Most of their revenue comes from products, from selling clothes, trips, houses, but not from selling political ideas. So we need to understand and to research ways to make sure that the algorithm fits you with healthy, fact-based political content. That's not going to be easy, that's very difficult, but it's actually. We haven't even tried. So even if we don't get it 100% right, if it's only 80% right, that's going to be an 80% improvement of what we have today.
Speaker 2:And that brings us to the end of this episode of Inside Geneva. My thanks to Reid Brody and Alberto Fernandez-Gibaja for their time and their perspectives. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Do drop us a line at insidegeneva, at swissinfoch, with your thoughts, questions or even ideas for new programmes Coming up over the next few weeks. We're planning to look at the UN Human Rights Commissioner's concerns about toxic masculinity. Is it a problem? And if it is, what can or should the UN and governments be doing about it? And we'll be hearing from Generation South. Young people from the Global South give us their views on the biggest challenges facing the planet and what we should be doing to solve them. Do join us next time on Inside Geneva. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss Info production. You can subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our previous episodes how the International Red Cross unites prisoners of war with their families, or why survivors of human rights violations turn to the UN in Geneva for justice. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for justice. I'm.
Speaker 3:Imogen folks. Thanks again for listening.
