At the conference “Digital Democracy 2025: Innovation, Inclusion, and Transparency in Future Elections,” organized by UNDP Ecuador together with the Electoral Contentious Tribunal (TCE), the National Electoral Council (CNE), and the Institute for Democracy in Quito, OBSERVACOM presented recommendations to address electoral disinformation. These included establishing algorithmic transparency obligations for large platforms and empowering electoral bodies to audit and demand transparency in political advertisements.
On September 29 and 30, electoral authorities, international organizations, academia, and civil society gathered in Quito for the international conference “Digital Democracy 2025: Innovation, Inclusion, and Transparency in Future Elections, ” organized by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Ecuador, together with the Electoral Litigation Tribunal (TCE), the National Electoral Council (CNE), and the Institute of Democracy.
The objective of the event was to discuss the challenges and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence and new technologies in electoral processes. Gustavo Gómez, executive director of OBSERVACOM, participated in the discussion “Citizen Participation and Elections in the Digital Age: Technology, Rights, and Inclusion,” where he presented recommendations for addressing the challenges of electoral disinformation.
In his remarks, Gómez warned that the internet ecosystem is heavily concentrated in a few platforms, giving them unprecedented power in shaping the digital public space. In Ecuador, he noted, 95.45% of people use the Google search engine (StatCounter, August 2025), meaning that a single player dominates the gateway to online information.
This concentration translates into a control over the circulation and visibility of ideas and information through recommendation and curation algorithms. He explained that these decisions largely respond to business logic, which is not always in line with the public interest or the plurality of ideas. They also amplify disinformation, while also potentially rendering invisible the voices of historically marginalized groups, excluding them from public debate.
Faced with this scenario, Gómez proposed several measures, such as establishing an obligation for algorithmic transparency for large digital platforms, given their impact on the amplification of disinformation during election periods.
He also emphasized that disinformation on a large scale is financed, making it essential to follow the money trail. In this regard, he stressed that electoral bodies must have effective powers and sanctioning capacity to audit digital political advertising, demand verifiable information on advertisers, amounts, and targeting, and enforce transparency obligations on political advertising platforms.
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