The politics of knowledge in the AI age: moderating a panel at WSIS Forum 2026

The politics of knowledge in the AI age: moderating a panel at WSIS Forum 2026

On 9 July 2026, I had the pleasure of moderating a session at WSIS Forum 2026, in Room E at Palexpo, titled “The Politics of Knowledge in the AI Age: Empowering Human Agency through Standards, Human Rights, and the Role of Corporations,” co-organized by ITU, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Harvard Kennedy School Carr-Ryan Center. The session was public and recorded; the full webcast is available here.

The panel brought together João Brant, Secretary for Digital Policies at the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil, Isabel Ebert, Adviser and Co-Lead of the B-Tech Project at OHCHR, Joël Christoph, Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center, Jenna Omassi, Public Policy Manager for Global Institution Engagement at TikTok, and Jacobo Castellanos, Coordinator of the Technology, Threats, and Opportunities team at WITNESS.

The starting premise: AI is reshaping how knowledge is produced, distributed, and trusted. Technical standards, often perceived as neutral, actually function as governance infrastructure. They shape data flows, identity systems, content moderation, and algorithmic parameters, with direct consequences for rights such as freedom of expression, access to information, privacy, and freedom of thought.

João Brant opened on the economics of knowledge: the case for fair remuneration of the informational, cultural, and journalistic inputs that feed generative AI, the risks of a business model built around maximizing engagement, and Brazil’s shift toward a shared responsibility, due diligence based liability framework rather than blanket platform non-liability.

The big decisions about knowledge and freedom are no longer made only in courts and parliaments, but upstream, in technical choices.

Isabel Ebert argued that human agency and control must remain the central anchor of AI governance, and presented a new OHCHR/B-Tech work stream on AI product design and human rights due diligence, including a civil society validation component. Joël Christoph developed the concept of a “politics of knowledge” built around three contested decisions, what gets recorded, what gets trusted, and what gets found, arguing that technical standards often matter more than law itself because they are durable, they encode the interests of whoever is in the room when they are written, and they operate largely beneath normal democratic scrutiny.

Jenna Omassi walked through TikTok’s human rights governance: a cross-functional working group, community principles grounded in international human rights law, AI content labelling in place since 2023, a two million dollar AI literacy fund, and growing engagement in technical standard setting bodies such as C2PA. Jacobo Castellanos presented WITNESS’s work on content provenance, useful for authenticating images and protecting journalists and human rights defenders, while flagging the risk that the same traceability metadata can be turned into a surveillance tool under authoritarian governments. He noted that WITNESS had published a report the day before the session on exactly these surveillance risks tied to the C2PA standard, calling for stronger multi-stakeholder governance of that coalition.

Questions from the floor touched on how to bring the lived experience of AI harm victims into governance frameworks, how standards can account for oral knowledge traditions and unwritten languages, tensions between copyright and AI training pipelines, and how to support digital public goods like Wikipedia as a counterweight to increasingly concentrated private control of knowledge infrastructure.

The session produced several concrete recommendations: bring rights holders and affected communities, including AI harm victims and Global South and Global Majority actors, into the design stage of standards rather than consulting them after the fact, build contestability, explainability, and rights of appeal directly into standards, strengthen the governance of standards bodies such as C2PA as their outputs get incorporated into regulation, extend standardization efforts to underserved languages and oral traditions, and support digital public goods through public or multilateral funding. The session also reaffirmed the ongoing collaboration between ITU, OHCHR/B-Tech, and the Carr-Ryan Center to embed human rights review into standards development, work that continues as a follow-up to the WSIS+20 review.

Moderating this conversation was a good reminder of how much these different worlds, regulators, human rights advocates, platforms, and civil society, need a shared space to speak the same language. That is exactly the kind of bridge I try to build in my day to day work on ITU-T standards.