Qatar stressed the necessity to confront the use of media and social media for spreading hatred and incitement, particularly the exacerbation of Islamophobia.
This came in a statement made by HE the Third Secretary at the Permanent Mission of Qatar to the UN Sheikh Jassim bin Abdulaziz al-Thani, before the meeting of the Fourth Committee of the 78th session of the UN General Assembly on the article 53: Information Matters, at the headquarters of the UN in New York.
He said that attention should be paid to a serious emerging issue, which is the credibility of inaccurate and misleading information, news, and information, an issue whose graveness is increasing against the backdrop of the rapid progress in modern technologies such as artificial intelligence. He called on the international community to make more collective efforts, exchange experiences, and take the necessary technical, legislative, and regulatory measures to anticipate and prevent the risk of this problem.
He pointed out that obtaining accurate and reliable information is of great importance to countries, organisations, and individuals, noting that the UN Department of Global Communications and the network of UN Information Centres have a pivotal role in raising awareness, educating, and communicating with partners from various sectors, which contributes to the success of the United Nations' efforts and promoting its credibility and reputation. He noted that the effectiveness of this significant role requires that the work of the administration and centres be characterised by transparency, objectivity, accuracy and impartiality.
He pointed out the role played by the special media programme on the Palestine issue of the UN Department of Global Communication as part of the department's responsibility to shed light on one of the oldest issues that the UN is dealing with.
He stressed the need to achieve parity between official languages in the work of the UN Department of Public Information and the General Secretariat in general. He pointed out that this helps in communicating effectively with everyone, especially in developing countries, adding that while significant progress has been achieved in the Arabic section of the UN website, there is still a need for further improvements and the allocation of the necessary resources.
He added that the valuable information contained in previous documents in the UN archives is important to member states and their people, and therefore must be preserved as the institutional memory of the UN and as a common heritage of humanity. He stressed the great importance of the project to digitise historical documents and records of the UN, which has made tangible progress in digitising documents and their increased accessibility via the Internet as a result of the joint efforts of the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management and the Department of Global Communications.
He pointed out that Qatar supported this project, which contributed to the analysis of documents issued since 1945 and the improvement of a huge number of documents by including additional metadata to make their content more searchable and accessible, as well as allowing their reuse for other purposes within digital repositories. He noted that Qatar provided support for the first phase of the digitisation project with a total of $5mn and renewed support for the second phase with a total of $2.5mn.
He expressed Qatar's appreciation for the Department of Global Information and the entities in the UN concerned with delivering useful information in a way that reflects positively on the UN's performance of its tasks and is in the interest of the organisation and member states.
