Mr. Rogier Huizenga:

I thank the committee for inviting the Inter-Parliamentary Union, IPU, to this meeting and for giving us an opportunity to follow the debate as it is happening. I would like to use my time to share with the committee some of the challenges that we see from the perspective of our organisation for parliaments being mobilised around the topic that is under discussion today and some of the opportunities.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Inter-Parliamentary Union, it is the world organisation of national parliaments. There are 179 parliaments in the world that are members of the organisation. With the exception of one, all of the parliaments that are represented here are members of the organisation. As an international organisation we are grappling with this question. In terms of challenges, we see that parliamentarians are not well equipped to deal with it effectively. I am speaking from purely from a global perspective. They have a lack of understanding of the technical issues that are at stake.

They are also finding it very difficult to situate the debate between what needs to be done at the national level and what is happening at the international level. In addition, as was said earlier, there is a lack of clarity for them as to the governance structure which is dealing with this question at international level. There is also a challenge for them in getting access to the right information. What I really appreciate is seeing a variety of Members of Parliament represented here in the room. That said, they are obviously from advanced countries so they have some similarities when it comes to their own national context. Maybe also, because they are from advanced countries, they can more easily access representatives of tech companies because I would doubt if high-level representatives of the major tech companies would come before national parliaments far away from the West.

There is also the reality that we see in our discussions at the IPU about differences - legal differences and philosophical differences - around some of these major questions between countries but also between continents. Even today, obviously we have two sides of the pond being represented. Also, I guess there are fundamental differences between how freedom of expression is seen and what the limits are. We all know that hate speech is not necessarily criminalised in the United States. In addition, there are issues with regard to the financing of political campaigns. In the United States, spending is pitched whereas, in Europe, the tradition is more one of using public funds to finance public campaigns.

We come from different realities and this is just the western world. So what we are also facing in our discussions within the organisation is that there is a real variety of organisations and bringing everyone together is very difficult. Where do we find common ground? In trying to adopt a shared vision both of the problems but also the solutions.

We have seen that there is a growing sense, which was stated in the course of this morning, is that the business model is the real heart of the problem and that is something that needs to be tackled. Now, also within the IPU, there is discussion around that. I really like the statement that was made this morning around human rights and personal data. Of course, if we could reset the clock and start again things could possibly look differently now. Is that realistic? Short of a radical reform, there is discussion within the organisation to push for increased transparency of the work of the tech companies, particularly when it comes to the algorithm amplification and political ads. There is also a lot of debate on making a distinction between illegal versus harmful content. Also, to see the issue as something slightly larger than misinformation and see it really as something that concerns society, as a whole, in the sense that we are faced by what has been termed "junk news" rather than fake news, which requires us all to move and come together to promote better civic education, to help promote civil discourse and help the people, at large, to be better able to recognise fake news.