Ava Lee is a campaigner from the investigative, campaigning organisation Global Witness. For the last five years, she has built and led a team of investigators, researchers, advocates and comms specialists working to combat some of the biggest harms caused by Big Tech companies.

This has included exposing how Meta’s job advertising algorithm discriminates along gender lines, breaching equalities legislation, and a series of investigations that have demonstrated how companies including Meta, TikTok, X and Youtube are unprepared to deal with incitement to genocide and violence (in Myanmar and Ethiopia), and are equally unprepared to deal with serious electoral misinformation ahead of significant elections (including in the US, Brazil, Kenya, UK, South Africa, Ireland and India). For the last year, she has also headed up a climate disinformation unit - with work including exposing a bot network supporting Azerbaijan’s COP presidency. Her team’s work has been featured across all of the major wires and top-tier publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, AP, PA and AFP.

Annika Östergren Pofantis is a senior expert and case handler at the European Commission, specialising in online child protection under the Digital Services Act (DSA). In this role, she led the Commission’s work on the DSA Guidelines for the protection of minors. Prior to this, she spearheaded policy development in digital skills, notably as the coordinator of EU Code Week, a grassroots initiative promoting coding and computational thinking across Europe. She has also held roles in stakeholder engagement, strategic communication and policy areas including environment and statistics at the European Commission.