RightsCon: ADC discusses political advertising on social media and facial recognition technologies
The Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (Association for Civil Rights – ADC) attended a new edition of RightsCon, an annual summit where more than a thousand experts from all around the world meet to discuss the challenges faced by human rights in the digital sphere. On this occasion, the organization debated on election ad spending in social media and facial recognition software.
The event was held between June 5 and 8 in Costa Rica and embraced an audience participating from all around the world. The more than 600 sessions addressed a variety of issues ranging from the digital economy to content governance and collaborative journalism.
ADC’s first intervention was on June 6, when we organized the session on election campaign advertising in social media, titled Ads and Latin American elections: our experience with Facebook. ADC project assistants Manuela Giménez Bautista, Milena Álvarez, and Giovanny Córdova Trujillo, together with full-stack software developers Leonardo Vaquel and Carlos Cuoco, from Camba, shared the lessons learned from the PubliElectoral project over the last five years.
Afterward, the audience was divided into groups with guideline questions for debate, so as to exchange ideas on the topic. Does your country have a specific regulation restricting advertising time during the election campaign?; Are ads allowed on the days immediately preceding the elections?; Do candidates and parties use social media for their campaigns? were some of the questions discussed, among others.
Closing the session, which was held in a hybrid mode, Cambá’s development team delineated the mechanisms of the PubliElectoral software tool.
Finally, on June 10, ADC attended the panel Banning facial recognition technology: a civil society mobilization in the Global South, discussing the deployment of these biometric systems for purposes of public security in less developed countries. During the meeting, project leader Eduardo Ferreyra reviewed ADC’s most recent study on the issue of facial recognition for surveillance in the public sphere, with a special focus on our microsite, Con Mi Cara No (Not With My Face).
Closing his presentation, Ferreyra shared the Protest Guide that ADC released at the end of 2021, a manual aiming to raise awareness of the tech devices that security forces could use to monitor and identify people in a protest.
