Change Makers The Internet today has become a vast arena of entertainment and leisure, as opposed to being a tool for meaningful engagement. I know people who really do great work in terms of political action and short TikTok videos. I have mixed views on this. I don't think that you can understand socio-political context through a mere 60-second video or even a five-minute video. But some other people can tell you that these snippets serve as valuable entry points for people who don't know much about politics or who are just starting to ask questions. It's not a black-and-white situation. It's just a question of whether we can utilise such platforms not just for initial engagement but as gateways leading to broader mobilisation, change, and securing greater freedoms. How can we build trust, promote partnership, and enhance regional collaboration among different African stakeholders in the Internet governance ecosystem, including governments, inter-governmental bodies, civil society, industry, media, and academia? On trust and safety, I think there are two things here. The first is that oftentimes questions of safety are instrumentalized by governments to censor and repress people and to violate their human rights. For example, “fake news” legislation appears to have a sensible goal, which is to protect users from online manipulation. But what's actually happening is that these are very clumsy and obtusely written laws that do not protect people's safety. In fact, they just prevent people from sharing content that state authorities deem unpalatable or not good or violating some sort of perceived moral, harm, etc. A great example here could be a case where somebody publishes a campaign for gay pride, and the government censors that because they think it's misinformation, or according to the fake news law, it is fake news. So that's obviously a violation of people's critical rights and fundamental human rights to express who they are and have a campaign. Second, oftentimes, there's this triangle of relationships between users, companies, and governments. When it comes to questions of trust and safety, at least in Africa, we criticise companies a lot. But, in some cases, we have more of a possibility of talking to a representative of a company than we do a representative of a government. Or there's better trust sometimes because there's so much distrust between activists and their governments that ultimately we take an alternate route by going to the companies and saying, “Hey, look, you need to change your community guidelines or policies to make sure that users are safe.” Imagine a scenario where an ethnic cleansing is on the brink of eruption at the border of two neighbouring countries In such cases, it is unlikely that advocates would approach a government to say “Hey, please watch the information that's travelling on this platform”. This is because some governments are literally pushing this conflict in many instances, so they want it to happen. Instead, advocates often turn to the companies managing digital platforms and they say, “Hey, listen, be aware, be cognizant of the fact that this is happening in this region, and if you don't do something about the information travelling through these channels, then people there may lose their lives”. 46 A CIPESA Series