Thank you very much, and let me thank you also for inviting me here. It is an honour both for me and for the centre of excellence.
In the limited time, allow me to address only two very brief points: one, what the hybrid CoE is and what we are trying to do to help our participating states to counter the threat of disinformation; and two, what the best practices are in countering disinformation that we have identified.
The centre of excellence is an international organization for EU member states and NATO allied countries, so Canada is a member as well. Until recently, we had a second colleague from the Canadian government here. Currently, we have 35 participating states, so out of the group of EU NATO countries, we are missing only the last one.
Our mission is to strengthen the participating states' security by providing expertise and training for countering hybrid threats. In order to achieve these goals, we have different products, you could say. We publish reports. We organize events like conferences, seminars and workshops. We run tailored products like training and exercises. We have these products also in the disinformation file, which is my responsibility.
Recently we published a report on the role of humour in countering disinformation. We published a report on the Ukrainian countermeasures against Russian disinformation, because Ukraine is the country that has the most experience with Russian disinformation. We published a report on the impact and success of disinformation campaigns, because we saw that this is a topic that our participating states frequently struggle with: How can we estimate what the impact is, what the effect is of the work that the information aggressors are doing?
We also run a workshop for practitioners in countering disinformation. Every year, we gather the people from our participating states in Helsinki and have them exchange best practices, lessons learned, what works, what doesn't work, what the gaps are and what more needs to be done. We are also designing a brand new disinformation exercise where we would try to bring the knowledge to the capitals to do some capacity building there, train 30, 40, 50 people in a country on countering disinformation.
I'll move to the second topic, regarding what are the best practices we have identified. Let me kick it off with the observation that I believe it is necessary to implement many countermeasures simultaneously. Some people seem to think that one countermeasure will solve the whole problem. Some people think that about media literacy. Some people think that about strategic communication. I even registered people who are working just on mocking disinformers and saying that this is the only tool we need and nothing else is necessary. I don't believe it's true. I think we need to apply more countermeasures, because each of them will solve only a part of the problem. If we want to solve the whole problem, we need more countermeasures. Whole-of-society problems require whole-of-society solutions.
In the group of countermeasures, we identified four bigger groups. I call it four lines of defence. First, it's about detecting and documenting what is happening in the disinformation space. It sounds primitive, but unfortunately we still don't have a full idea, especially about the quantitative aspects. How many disinformation channels are there? How many messages per day do they spread? How many people do they persuade? Imagine if you were fighting the COVID pandemic without knowing how many people got the virus, how many people were vaccinated, how many people died. It would be almost impossible. Unfortunately, we are in this situation with disinformation. It's very difficult to design adequate solutions when we don't have this data.
The second line is about raising awareness. Whereas in the first line we are trying to get more data, in the second line we are trying to spread this information among more audiences. Here I believe the number of actors is really key, because each of them has only a very limited audience. The audiences nowadays are significantly more fragmented than they were 10 or 15 years ago, and therefore we need more actors who will be addressing the fragmented audiences that we have nowadays.
The third line is about trying to repair the systemic weaknesses in the information ecosystem. This is where media literacy comes in. This is where strategic communication comes in, in order to prevent the distrust of the population towards their institutions, which is a weakness that the disinformers are very often exploiting. This is also where the pressure on social media companies comes in, because the social media environment, unfortunately, is still a weakness that gets exploited by the information aggressors.
Finally—