Asia Pacific yIGF 2026: Theme & Topics

Panel Discussion – Connectivity in Crisis: How Resilient Is Asia-Pacific’s Communication Infrastructure?

Are our communications resilient enough in times of crisis?

The Asia-Pacific frequently faces natural disasters that disrupt communications infrastructure. In 2024, Cyclone Remal put around 10,000 mobile towers out of service in Bangladesh. In 2022, the volcanic eruption and tsunami in Tonga severed the country’s main international submarine cable, severely constraining connectivity for weeks. More recently, flash floods in Nepal’s Rasuwa district destroyed bridges, roads, communication towers and hydropower infrastructure, cutting off communications and leaving communities out of contact for extended periods, while also hindering relief and recovery efforts and contributing to loss of lives. Similarly, the Nepal earthquake exposed severe multilingual communication gaps for vulnerable linguistic minorities. In such emergencies, how do we ensure that people can stay connected and access critical information?

Communication resilience depends on many interconnected systems and actors: telecommunications networks, broadcasting, electricity, Internet infrastructure, satellite services, platforms, public authorities and local communities. Different parts of this ecosystem face different risks and responsibilities, while failures in one area can quickly affect others.

This session will bring together stakeholders involved in planning, governing and operating communication systems to compare approaches to resilience, identify lessons across different parts of the ecosystem, and consider who needs to be involved in preparing for future crises.

Meetup with Industry Experts – The Role of AI in Crisis Communication and Misinformation Management

When disaster strikes, information moves as fast as the danger itself and increasingly, so does the misinformation that follows it. During the July 2025 Pacific tsunami alert, AI-generated videos of coastlines being swallowed by waves spread across social media within minutes, while a separate AI chatbot embedded in a major platform wrongly told users the alert had been cancelled. Two different AI systems, two different failures, one generating convincing fake disaster footage, the other misinforming the people who turned to it for facts. Meanwhile, it's AI-driven content moderation that platforms lean on to catch and contain exactly this kind of content. This is the paradox at the heart of crisis response i.e. AI sits on every side of the misinformation problem as the tool that creates it, the tool people mistakenly trust, and the tool relied on to catch it.

In a crisis, speed changes everything. A rumor that's merely annoying in normal times can cost lives when it delays an evacuation, misdirects rescuers, or makes people doubt a genuine warning.

This session brings youth face-to-face with practitioners working at this fault line, unpacking how AI tools are being used, and misused, in natural disasters and public-safety emergencies. Crucially, we will explore the active role of youth in these processes under shifting social media laws. We examine how youth can move from passive consumers to active partners alongside authorities where the margin for error is measured in minutes, not days.

IGF 2026 Youth Track Workshop – AI Content Moderation for Social Media: Roles, Responsibilities and the Regulation of AI in Content Moderation

This session builds on the IGF Youth Track’s recent work—from AI and information integrity in 2024 to age verification and social media regulation in 2025. While previous sessions addressed who can access platforms and under what conditions, this session focuses on what happens after users are on those platforms.

Across the globe, social media platforms are increasingly relying on AI systems to detect, prioritise, remove, and recommend content at an unprecedented scale. There are now 5.79 billion social media user identities worldwide, growing at roughly 9.3 new users every second, and moderation has scaled to match. The EU's DSA Transparency Database alone logged over 10.6 billion content moderation decisions from 165 platforms in a single 180-day window, of which 50% were fully automated. Meta reports that around 95% of the hate speech it removes from Facebook and Instagram is detected proactively by AI rather than through user reports. While these tools promise faster responses to harmful content, they also raise significant concerns around freedom of expression, transparency, accountability, and the representation of diverse languages and cultures.

The challenge is particularly evident in issues such as misinformation and the amplification of harmful or discriminatory content. At the same time, moderation systems often struggle to understand local context, cultural nuances and minority languages, resulting in both over-moderation and under-moderation that can disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. Of the roughly 5 billion people using the internet, 75% are in the Global South, which is home to 90% of the world's 7,000-plus languages and for many of these languages, major platforms have few or no moderation tools at all.

AI-driven content moderation increasingly shapes what users see, and languages and dialects underrepresented in AI training data are disproportionately affected by inaccurate decisions. This gap is not evenly distributed globally, and it maps onto who those users actually are. The scale of the mismatch is documented. Internal company documents revealed in 2021 showed that 87% of Facebook's global budget for classifying misinformation was directed at the United States, which accounted for around 10% of its daily users, and that the platform had no screening algorithms for misinformation in Burmese or hate speech in Oromo or Amharic. In India, its largest market, automated detection covered only five of the country's 22 official languages.

This imbalance is also hard to see from the outside. Platforms do report on these systems, but the reporting does not go far enough to show the gap. The Digital Services Act asks large platforms to publish how many moderation staff they have for each official EU language, and there is no equivalent requirement for the languages of the Global South. What platforms disclose otherwise is one global accuracy figure. Meta reports enforcement precision of over 90% on Facebook and over 87% on Instagram, with no breakdown by language, so worse performance in low-resource languages never shows up in the headline number. This session looks at that gap, the linguistic gap in AI-driven moderation.

As governments and platforms explore new approaches to online safety and platform governance, the distribution of roles and responsibilities across users, platforms and policymakers becomes increasingly urgent.

For this session, content moderation refers specifically to the detection of content and the actions that follow, whether removal, restriction or algorithmic promotion on social media platforms.

APAC Youth Leaders Dialogue – What Changes Now? 

It has been almost a year since youth were formally recognized as stakeholders in the outcome document of the High-Level Meeting of the UN General Assembly on the Overall Review of the Implementation of the Outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society (A/RES/80/173).

This session brings together young leaders across the Asia-Pacific to reflect on what this recognition has meant in practice and what needs to happen next.

Through reflections and interactive discussions, participants will explore meaningful youth participation, digital inclusion, meaningful connectivity, and the role of AI in shaping how young people engage with digital spaces and policy. Moving beyond representation, the dialogue asks whether young people have real influence in shaping decisions and digital futures and what barriers still stand in the way.

The session will conclude with concrete commitments for the year ahead, focusing on how institutions and young people can work together to make youth participation more inclusive, influential, and impactful across the Asia-Pacific.