Credits and Acknowledgments

The production of this report stems from the rich and stimulating exchanges that took place in Kuala Lumpur on November 20, 2025, during the GIJC25 pre-conference event “The Investigative Agenda for Tech.”

This day of discussion and brainstorming was made possible thanks to the outstanding program design by Lam Thuy Vo and the dedicated leadership of GIJN Spanish Editor and Digital Threats Project Director Andrea Azarba, who led the effort within GIJN. The event also benefited from the invaluable support of Francisca Skoknic, under the direction of GIJN Executive Director Emilia Díaz-Struck and GIJN Program Director Sandrine Rigaud. We are also deeply grateful to Pulitzer Center Executive Editor Marina Walker for her generous support.

Within GIJN, special thanks go to Amel Ghani, Maxime Domegni, and Alan Kawamara (GIJN team) for ensuring the smooth organization and coordination of the day and to Andrea Romanos and Eunice Au for generously sharing their experience in organizing GIJC pre-conferences. Additional thanks go to members of the GIJN editorial team, Laura Dixon, Alexa van Sickle, Joanna Demarco, and Reed Richardson, who helped produce and promote this project for the web. The main illustration was by Emil Hasnain.

We warmly thank the speakers and moderators — leading experts on technology and accountability from 22 countries- whose ideas, experience — and presentations significantly shaped and informed this report:

• Ethar Al-Azem, Journalist, ARIJ (Jordan)
• Luis Assardo, Journalist, RSF (Guatemala)
• Helena Bengtsson, Journalist, Gota Media (Sweden)
• Eva Belmonte, Reporter, Civio (Spain)
• Rigoberto Carvajal, Data Architect, CLIP (Costa Rica)
• Jelena Cosic, Training Manager, ICIJ (Serbia)
• Anuška Delić, Senior Reporter, OSTRO (Slovenia)
• Jyoti Dwivedi, Senior Reporter, India Today (India)
• Gabriel Geiger, Reporter, Lighthouse Reports (Greece)
• Manisha Ganguly, Investigative Journalist & Filmmaker (UK)
• Karen Hao, Reporter, Freelance (Hong Kong)
• Malek Khadhraoui, Director, Inkyfada (Tunisia)
• Allison Killing, Senior Reporter, Financial Times (UK)
• Purity Mukami, Data Journalist, Freelance (Kenya)
• Syed Nazakat, Founder, DataLEADS (India)
• Fabrizio Palumbo, Data Science Reporter, OsloMet (Norway)
• Paul Radu, Co-Founder, OCCRP (Romania)
• Nayeli Roldán, Investigative Reporter, Animal Político (Mexico)
• Nataliia Romanyshyn, Reporter, Texty (Ukraine)
• Athandiwe Saba, AI Newsroom Initiative Lead, Code for Africa (South Africa)
• Craig Silverman, Digital Reporter, The Indicator (Canada)
• John Scott Railton, Researcher, Citizen Lab (Canada)
• Natalia Viana, Executive Director, Agência Pública (Brazil)
• Leon Yin, Data Reporter, Bloomberg (USA)

The exchanges during the pre-conference were held under the Chatham House Rule. Names are cited in this report only when the information shared was already public or with the consent of the individuals concerned.

For some of the images used in this project, we have selected illustrations from Better Images of AI, which seeks to address the fact that “the images that are commonly used today often misrepresent the technology, reinforce harmful stereotypes and spread misleading cultural tropes.” In response, this project has pulled together more diverse, human-created images and commissioned original works by artists to “more realistically portray the technology and the people behind it and point towards its strengths, weaknesses, context and applications.”