Individual blog post 1

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Although I have thoroughly enjoyed just about every activity we’ve done on the dialogue, the one that stands out the most was the first visit we had to the EEAS in Brussels. During this visit, we had several talented guest speakers discuss what the EEAS is and their personal role in its proper function. During this we discussed the concept of disinformation/misinformation. This has been the most intriguing thing I’ve learned since arriving a week ago because of how prominent it was discussed to be. Although I have certainly heard about fake news being discussed in the realm of politics, as well as deep fakes made by AI, my understanding of the severity of the issue was astonishingly inaccurate. Several of the key points the third speaker emphasized were concepts that I hadn’t even fathomed. It is clearly quite a large and present issue that democratic societies are more vulnerable to the misinformation produced by non-democratic states, due to their lack of information filtration in comparison with states such as Russia or China. One of the statistics he mentioned was that there have been 16,000 known cases of pro-kremlin disinformation catalogued since 2015. We were also taught the distinction between disinformation and misinformation to be dependent on the intentions, where disinformation is objectively false or misleading information spread with the intent of causing harm, whereas the negative impact from misinformation occurs by accident. The message that I personally took away from this speaker was that information integrity and manipulation is an incredibly harmful act that even though in some cases may not be illegal, it is almost a proxy war. To conclude, I was absolutely blown away by the necessary amount of time and effort that goes into fighting this spread of false information, as well as how impactful it can be. I think this is such an important topic that people need to be further educated on in order to be critical thinkers and make better decisions.