Because of cyberattacks and fake news, we can already imagine the problem all democratic societies will face in future elections: how to limit lies when they threaten democracy?
Interpretation
The quote highlights the challenges democratic societies face due to misinformation and cyber threats during elections.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves discusses the significant obstacles that democratic societies will encounter in future elections, primarily stemming from cyberattacks and the proliferation of fake news. He emphasizes the urgent need to find solutions for limiting the spread of misinformation, which poses a serious threat to the integrity of democratic processes and the trust that citizens place in them.
In practice
In a political debate where candidates address the issue of misinformation.
When Estonia reestablished its sovereignty after a half century of successive thuggish, totalitarian, foreign occupations by the Soviets, the Nazis, and then again the Soviets, we knew we wanted to create a democratic country characterized by rule of law and respect for human rights.
Digital warfare, in the Clausewitz definition as 'the continuation of policy by other means,' reached Western public consciousness via my own country, Estonia, in 2007 when our governmental, banking, and news media servers were hit with 'distributed denial-of-service attacks,' which is when hackers overload servers until they shut down.
The only thing that was in my mind when we made that first phone call was, 'Is it going to work?' We had all these parts hand soldered together, engineers standing by with the soldering iron - just in case.
In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion.
When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web... Now even my cat has its own page.
Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.
Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
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