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Internet Day brought many important topics to the limelight

The Estonian Internet Foundation thanks all the participants - we were happy to see that the interest for the event was high and the event venue Poco Lab was filled with great ideas and thoughts. The event was also streamed via YouTube that has over two hundred views. Therefore, we can say that the event was successful and we hope to see the same amount of interest in our future events.

The day started off with a provocative discussion about the election influencing. The topic was prompted by the European Parliament elections coming up in June. With that in mind, many parties and organisations are looking into the data and techniques how to sway people's decision to one or another way. All of this is driven by data, but also with communication and reputation building. In addition, influencing is now something that is done by both liberal and conservative organisations. Therefore, everyone is influenced by it in some ways.

We also looked into the future of Internet and in which way we want to create it. Together with social media and media innovation experts we examined the nature of the Internet and social media in todays' world. Many companies have put a lot of effort to the optimisation of their content in order to stand out in the search engines. On the other hand, it has become extremely hard for a regular person to know, if the content they are seeing is true or not. This leads us to a dangerous situation where so-called experts can make you think that everything they are saying is right and create a possibility to be harmful. On the other hand, we have to keep in mind the freedom of speech. Therefore, building a trustful and reliable solution is hard and requires including different opinions.

The last panel discussion focused on the many benefits of AI technologies. As many of us agree, AI is the future and it is hard to find a field that is not affected by it. The more and faster companies apply it to the processes and activities, the more beneficial it becomes. However, we see a slight problem in implementing the AI solution in a public sector and industrial companies. In addition, we face a challenge to train the necessary workforce and offer options for relearning. According to the experts, the best way to take advantage of the AI is to start using it as soon as possible at work, but also in everyday life. The more experience we have with the different tools, the more we are prepared in the future.

For the first time in the Internet Day history, we included in the programme two introductions of the projects that were supported by the Estonian Internet Foundation in 2023. Both of the projects focused on the youth and cyber security and introduced their activities and results. We are happy to see that the impact of these projects was high and are happy to invest in the sustainability of local Internet community. 

We thank everyone who took part of the event and hope to see you next year!

See the recording of the event below (in Estonian) and a selection of the pictures.