IMS at IGF 2025: Placing people, human rights and journalism at the centre of digital spaces

How can we centre people, human rights and trustworthy, locally anchored journalism in our digital spaces?   

Last week, representatives from IMS and our partner organisations attended the Internet Governance Forum 2025 with this question at the forefront of our interactions with government officials, tech experts, donors, journalists, policy makers and regulators. 

It is no secret that the internet – and now AI – has caused massive disruptions to how journalism is distributed, how media outlets engage with audiences, how business revenue models work, how oppositional voices are repressed… the list goes on.  

The rapidly changing tech landscape, authoritarian regimes’ online manipulation of people and politics, and the opaque but powerful algorithms and AI technology that dominate our digital spaces and experiences have left us exhausted, reactive and scrambling to deal with the negative consequences at both the local and global level.   

In the media development field, it can seem like we now use the word ‘disinformation’ more than we use the word ‘information’. That we spend much of our time criticising tech companies and dominant social media platforms, while we fail to imagine any alternatives. Evidently, we need to focus some of our resources to counter practices that – intentionally or not – are eroding trust.  But equally important is the need to envision, build and experiment with new structures, platforms and collaborations.  

At IGF, we homed in on a few urgent issues:  

How journalism and alternative platforms can strengthen information integrity. 

At a well-visited IGF workshop, IMS brought together representatives from diverse spaces to strategise on how to build digital public interest infrastructure that decreases the harms and increases the benefits from tech platforms in the information ecosystem. 
 

Building alternative social platforms, that are human-centric and locally anchored. 

Under the title of Good Commons, IMS, Splice Media in Singapore and Jamii Africa in Tanzania have joined forces to seek out every corner of the world (wide web) for viable alternatives to big tech social media. The project invites everyone engaged in creating platforms that are genuinely trying to build strong online communities that encourage civic participation, user safety, and public interest information.

Check out the Good Commons website here: https://goodcommons.world/ 

This continues to be a work in progress. We would love to hear from you if you are building something, have ideas or know of other interesting projects.  

AI’s impact on journalism  

IMS hosted a gathering of the IGF Dynamic Coalition on the Sustainability of Journalism and News Media (DC-Journalism) for the launch of the coalition’s annual report. 

The report explores the theme of AI and Journalism through case studies, evidence and analysis. It discusses the use of AI by newsrooms in the Global South and the rising costs of AI and cloud services for investigative news outlets, among other issues. The report also features AI-related journalism support contributions and research studies by organisations such as IMS, Center for Journalism & Liberty, GFMD, WAN-IFRA and others. 

Read the report in full here: https://bit.ly/dcj2025 

These talks and collaborations did not start with IGF and will not end there. Through IMS’ tech programme, we will utilise our local media partners and our 20+ years of working with independent media around the world to hopefully build better, safer and more humane digital spaces.