2 yıl önce

Stratcom Summit 2021 kicks off in Turkey's Istanbul

The speakers at the conference’s 36 main sessions will include senior executives and officials from NATO, the UN and prominent government communicators from various countries.

Turkey has kicked off the Stratcom Summit 2021, an international gathering to address compelling policies, issues, challenges, and trends in the strategic communication ecosystem.

Delivering the event’s opening speech on Saturday, Turkish Communications Director Fahrettin Altun said the summit will host both experienced media and communications professionals and new media pioneers.

“New media and new information technologies have started to come to the fore with their negative features rather than their positive ones,” Altun said.

“On the other hand, successful attempts to establish legitimate and functional legal frameworks to regulate these new media and information technologies have not be put forward at the global level,” he added.

Altun warns of 'information wars'

Altun indicated that some states remain silent while others use tools of “social control and political censorship,” adding: “Both approaches threaten democratic systems and social, cultural and political polyphony.”

“After years of accusing many countries of ‘internet censorship,’ the day came when they witnessed their own heads of state being censored by these new media.”

During his speech Altun warned of “cyber anarchy” and “information wars,” he underlined that many states across the world establish “cyber armies.”

He said that one of the important dimensions of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's principle of "a fairer world" is closing the inequality gap between countries and societies in a cyber world.

"Just as the world is bigger than five, so is our cyber world is bigger than three or five social media companies," said Altun, referring to Erdogan’s slogan protesting the unrepresentative setup of the UN Security Council.

On the agenda

Hikmet Hajiyev, the assistant to Azerbaijan’s president, also spoke about communication of his nation’s victory in the 2020 Karabakh conflict, and Alex Stuart Aiken, UK executive director of government communications, spoke on "Strategic Communication 101."

Officials of many countries who direct their communication strategies – including Singapore, the UK, Estonia, Latvia, Chile, Kosovo, and Nigeria – will also share their experiences.

Digital transformation will also be discussed in sessions such as “Digital Strategies Reloading, Digital Newsmakers: Rediscovering Journalism,” “Data is the Message,” “The Future and Content Strategy of Video,” and “How Algorithms Shape Human Life.”

The speakers at the conference’s 36 main sessions will include senior executives and officials from NATO, the UN Development Program, UNICEF, the UN Environment Program as well as prominent government communicators from various countries, scholars, entrepreneurs, journalists, and world-renowned social media stars.

This weekend's two-day summit will feature 112 speakers from over 30 countries and an audience of over 3,000.

SOURCE: AA