Turkey this weekend hosts the Stratcom Summit 2021, an international gathering to address compelling policies, issues, challenges, and trends of the strategic communication ecosystem.
The two-day summit will feature 112 speakers from over 30 countries and an audience of over 3,000. Topics to be discussed at the summit included strategic communication, public diplomacy, digital diplomacy, the metaverse, nation branding, disinformation, new media, open intelligence, new communication technologies and trends, strategic marketing, and political communication.
Delivering the event’s opening speech, Turkish Communications Director Fahrettin Altun said the summit will host both experienced media and communications professionals and new media pioneers.
“We will be together at Stratcom for two days, talking about both our concerns and hopes,” he told the summit.
He said the notion of “post-truth” has become a buzzword, cropping up more and more over the last decade.
“New media and new information technologies have started to come to the fore with their negative features rather than their positive ones,” he said.
“On the other hand, successful attempts to establish legitimate and functional legal frameworks to regulate these new media and information technologies have not to be put forward at the global level,” he added.
He decried how “endless ambitions and desire for profits of global media and communication companies” sow “anarchy and chaos,” something that is not easy to deal with.
He said some states remain silent while others use tools of “social control and political censorship,” adding: “Both approaches threaten democratic systems and social, cultural and political polyphony.”
“After years of accusing many countries of ‘internet censorship,’ the day came when they witnessed their own heads of state being censored by these new media,” Altun said.
