News and Events

13 Nov WITNESS joins open letter urging EU to stop plans that could weaken digital rights protections

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

This week, WITNESS joined 127 civil society organizations, trade unions, and public interest advocates in signing an open letter urging the European Commission to halt plans that could weaken core digital rights protections in Europe. The proposal, known as the Digital Omnibus or Digital Package on Simplification, seeks to review and “streamline” existing EU digital laws, but could in fact roll back essential safeguards for privacy and accountability online. Among the laws at risk are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which ensures people have control over their personal data, the ePrivacy framework, which protects online communications from intrusive tracking, and the AI Act, the EU’s first major law to regulate artificial intelligence and prevent harmful or discriminatory uses of the technology. As highlighted in WITNESS’ recent submission to the European Commission, simplification efforts should not come at the expense of human rights. WITNESS stands with partners across Europe in calling on the Commission to strengthen, not dismantle, these hard-won protections, ensuring that technology serves people, not power. The letter’s content is the following:  The EU must uphold hard-won protections for digital human rights  We 127 civil society organisations, trade unions and defenders of the public interest write to emphasise

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31 Oct Fortifying Community Truth: WITNESS Strengthens Local Journalism in East Africa

News and Events | WITNESS

In early October, WITNESS held the Fortifying Community Truth (FCT) project in Nairobi, Kenya, a three-day workshop that brought together 12 investigative journalists from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The gathering aimed to strengthen participants’ capacity to document, verify, and preserve audiovisual evidence in ways that defend their communities’ truths against denial and disinformation. The FCT initiative seeks to build the resilience of underrepresented communities by equipping local journalists and human rights defenders with the tools and skills to verify, analyze, and archive evidence that reflects their lived realities. The workshop in Nairobi offered an intensive, hands-on introduction to new video-based strategies, including geospatial analysis, data wrangling, open-source verification, and archiving. The goal was simple yet vital: to strengthen participants’ ability to source, gather, catalog, verify, and securely store evidence so it cannot be easily dismissed or denied. Selected from a pool of more than 50 applicants, each cohort member stood out for the clarity, creativity, and community focus of their project ideas. Their work tackles some of the region’s most pressing issues: Environmental injustice – from irresponsible mining to urban pollution State violence and gender-based violence, particularly around water bodies such as Lake Victoria

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European Parliament

30 Oct Navigating Human Rights in the EU AI Act: WITNESS’s Call for Thoughtful Transparency

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

In September, the European Commission began implementing Article 50 of the EU AI Act, the EU’s first comprehensive law regulating artificial intelligence, by launching a public consultation to draft guidelines and a Code of Practice (CoP) on AI transparency. The outcome will shape how AI tools, from chatbots and generative media to emotion-recognition, biometric categorization and deepfake technologies, inform users when they are interacting with or viewing AI-generated content. In its official submission, WITNESS called on the Commission to ensure that the forthcoming Transparency CoP reflects the complex, multimodal nature of generative AI and its impact on accessibility, privacy, and the potential for misuse by governments. For more than two decades, WITNESS has helped communities use video and technology to defend human rights. Over the past eight years, the organization has observed how artificial intelligence can both empower truth and amplify disinformation. WITNESS works to ensure that policies for transparency and disclosure around real and synthetic content are grounded in human rights and respond to the needs of critical frontline information actors like journalists and human rights defenders. Since 2020, WITNESS has also been actively involved in Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), shaping authenticity and provenance infrastructure so

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31 Jul The EU GPAI Code of Practice: Progress Made, But the Real Test Lies Ahead

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

The European Commission published the final version of the General Purpose AI Code of Practice on July 10th. The code, which providers of GPAI models will be signing on a voluntary basis, is responsible for establishing measures that providers can follow in order to achieve higher compliance with the AI Act’s rules for GPAI. While the AI Act rules will enter into application on August 2nd, 2025, the Commission has also established a 2 year grace period for models that are already on the market. At WITNESS, our priority has been to ensure the Code of Practice upholds transparency in a way that facilitates AI detection and content authenticity, preserves the information environment, and includes robust rights protections. The published version of the CoP ended up covering three main subjects: (a) Transparency, (b) Copyright and (c) Safety and Security.  “The final version of the Code of Practice represents a welcome and more balanced version of the interests at stake than the previous drafts,” said Bruna Martins dos Santos, Policy and Advocacy Manager at WITNESS, “We continue to be concerned that the interests of the private sector were prioritised over civil society’s requests to strengthen fundamental rights protections. We look forward

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10 Jul New Global Benchmark Sets Standard for Truly Effective AI Detection in the Age of Deepfakes

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

WITNESS launches TRIED Benchmark to promote the development of AI detection tools that support the preservation of truth and authenticity in the era of evolving synthetic media. WITNESS today announces the release of its new report, TRIED: Truly Innovative and Effective AI Detection Benchmark, a groundbreaking framework to evaluate and improve AI detection tools amid the rising threat of generative AI and deceptive synthetic media. Based on case submissions from WITNESS’ Deepfake Rapid Response Force’s (DRRF), the expertise of its AI detection specialists, as well as global consultations with journalists, fact-checkers and leading technologists, WITNESS endeavours to shape the AI detection space for effectiveness and innovation.  “We’re in the middle of great leaps in the realism of AI generation, with tools like Google’s Veo. However, detection tools for deceptive AI have not kept pace and are not in the hands of those who need them most. We must ensure that tools are built that meet the needs of those on the frontlines of truth globally,” said Sam Gregory, Executive Director at WITNESS, “low-quality or faulty detection that doesn’t work globally, and that is not easily explainable to the public, makes it easy to deny the real, and share AI falsehoods”

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