22 Jan 2025Davos
Sasha Havlicek discusses ‘Truth vs Myth in Elections’ at WEF’s annual meeting
ISD CEO and co-founder Sasha Havlicek joined the World Economic Forum for its 55th Annual Meeting ‘Collaboration for the Intelligent Age,’ which took place from 20-24 January in Davos, Switzerland. During the event, she led the session “Truth vs Myth in Elections,” developed in collaboration with POLITICO, focusing on lessons from the 2024 election year, the evolution of information manipulation, and its impact on public trust in democracy. Additionally, she chaired a workshop titled “The Rise of Networked Influence” with panelists Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Richard Edelman, and Ndidi Nwuneli. While at the forum, Sasha also contributed to the Global Digital Safety Coalition‘s ongoing efforts, leading a workstream focused on digital literacy interventions to tackle critical online safety challenges.
As one of the five speakers in the ‘Truth vs Myth in Elections’ session on Wednesday, Sasha discussed the feared impact of AI on elections, noting that it wasn’t a single AI system that directly disrupted the elections. Instead, she pointed to a significant decline in public trust. Sasha also highlighted lower-level disruptions, emphasising the importance of not overlooking the numerous threats to election officials, ballot boxes and the broader election process, including intimidation, doxing, bomb threats and other disruptions.
Sasha further discussed how disinformation has become a highly politicised issue, noting that the conversation should extend beyond identifying purposefully spread disinformation to include deceptive and manipulative activities like botnets and fake accounts that falsely inflate popularity and deceive users. These activities are often invisible to the average user, yet platforms’ algorithms amplify this “curated speech environment” — something Sasha has long warned about — to drive engagement and profit in an attention economy that prioritises extreme views over moderate ones. She explained that democracies must address the impacts of disinformation, pointing to policies like the EU’s Digital Services Act, which aims to promote greater transparency for researchers.
Final list of panellists:
- Sasha Havlicek – Chief Executive Officer, Institute for Strategic Dialogue
- Almar Latour – Chief Executive Officer; Publisher, Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company
- John Harris – Founding Editor, Politico
- Clara Chappaz, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, France
- Dorin Recean – Prime Minister of Moldova, Office of the Prime Minister of Moldova
ISD CEO Sasha Havlicek speaking in the Truth vs Myth in Elections session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, on Jan 22, 2025, at Kurpark Village – Aspen 4. Stakeholder Dialogue. Copyright: World Economic Forum / Faruk Pinjo