ADVOCATING FOR WOMEN
Italy’s Boldrini talks tough
Laura Boldrini, president of Italy’s Chambre of Deputies, breezed into her boutique hotel in Old Montreal on Saturday followed by an entourage of elegantly dressed Italian diplomats and assistants.
She wore her newly acquired “Je parle féministe” sweatshirt.
“I didn’t know there would be a photographer,” she said, slightly embarrassed. “I could get you other photos of me, if you like.”
But the sweatshirt was a signpost for the conversation that would follow with Boldrini — a journalistturned-refugee advocate-turned politician — taking on fake news and Facebook, Harvey Weinstein and the (continuing) fight for women’s rights.
“Fake news is like drops of poison that we drink every day with water and in the end we get sick and we don’t even realize it,” Boldrini began. “It pollutes public debate and it’s dangerous to democracy.”
It wasn’t difficult to find examples. Fake news was more popular than real news during the U.S. election campaign, Boldrini said, and often spilled into the real world.
To wit, the story of Hillary Clinton running a pedophilia ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., which saw one real reader actually investigate on his own, firing three shots with his real gun.
Across the Atlantic, the campaign for Brexit was influenced by fabricated stories of the wild savings that would follow if Brits chose to leave Europe — 350 million pounds per week — along with the regular fake stories depicting immigrants as those who steal our jobs, cost the country a fortune, commit crimes and rape our women, none of which stand up to the light of crime and economic statistics. As a former spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Boldrini knows how these stories affect public perception and policy, in Italy and elsewhere.
On Friday, she was at McGill’s Faculty of Law to give a speech on “Greater European integration to face global challenges: the reception of migrants and refugees.”
She wants more Europe, not less, she said.
So what to do about fake news? Boldrini, who used to work for RAI, Italy’s public broadcaster, but now enjoys her role as the left-leaning, though non-partisan, president of the chamber of deputies, is launching a program to teach high school students how to recognize fake news and conspiracy theories instead of spreading them.
To be rolled out at 8,000 schools across the country starting Oct. 31, it is the first program of its kind in Europe. (The Quebec federation of professional journalists (FPJQ) is working on a similar course here.)
Boldrini acknowledges the role of Facebook and other companies and agencies in getting the program going.
On Thursday, Facebook Canada launched a similar “digital news literacy” campaign in partnership with MediaSmarts, and ahead of the next federal election, will be training political candidates and their staff to guard against security threats. It will also reportedly launch a crisis hotline for politicians or others to report possible hacks.
But Boldrini has a lot to say about what Facebook isn’t doing, to stop hate speech spreading through its network, so the i-Generation wouldn’t have to filter it out.
It should be shutting down the 300 pages that are sympathetic toward Nazism and Fascism, she said, one of several requests she made in her letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
It should be setting up an operations office in Italy, where 30 million people — half the population — are on Facebook. And it should be shutting down hate speech toward women.
Last Nov. 25, Boldrini decided to expose her own trolls to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
She posted on Twitter and Facebook some of the comments she received — with the names of the people who sent them.
“Boldrini you are a whore,” “why hasn’t anyone killed this terrorist???” read two of the least obscene of the comments, which she placed under the caption “Is this freedom of expression?”
“For me the web is the new frontier for violence against women,” Boldrini explained Saturday, adding women are the primary targets of hate speech in Italy, before immigrants or sexual minorities.
“These are comments I receive every day. And since they don’t even bother to change their names, I reposted them. But Facebook could have shut down my page for infringing (the commenters’) privacy … They need to be more proactive at countering hate speech and violence and that would help them earn some credibility.”
Facebook and other social media hold tremendous opportunity, Boldrini said. In the wake of widespread allegations of sexual harassment and assaults by Weinstein — and here in Quebec by Éric Salvail and Gilbert Rozon — the #metoo hashtag is spreading in Italy as it is in Canada, as a protest and sign of solidarity #ancheio.
She points out one of Weinstein’s accusers is Italian actor Asia Argento. But the climate is such in Italy that after being one of the first to denounce Weinstein for assaulting her 20 years ago, Argento is being blamed for not coming forward sooner or “whining” about what happened. She has moved to Berlin.
We didn’t have time to discuss the allegations against former Italian prime minister Sylvio Berlusconi and his infamous bunga bunga parties, or against Donald Trump.
Boldrini, who met with incumbent mayor Denis Coderre on Saturday morning, was off to another interview later in the afternoon, and spent Monday in Ottawa with several ministers, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Trudeau came to the Chambre of Deputies and said he was a feminist,” Boldrini said, remembering her new, black sweatshirt, a gift from the ambassador. “It’s important that we continue to advocate for women’s rights. We have those rights on paper but we have to make sure they are implemented.”
Fake news is like drops of poison that we drink every day with water and in the end we get sick and we don’t even realize it.