Journalists and leaders unite at Johannesburg’s M20 Summit
The South African National Editor's Forum (Sanef) has announced that global leaders, media, policymakers, and civil society are today convening in Johannesburg for the M20 Summit.
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Joint programme
The M20 initiative, an independent joint programme of Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) and Sanef, will host the M20 Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa on 1st and 2nd of September 2025. The Summit will bring together journalists, policymakers, academics, and civil society with the aim of placing media, information integrity and the role of journalism at the centre of the G20 agenda.
The Summit will provide a platform to unpack the critical challenges affecting the media and information integrity ecosystems today. These include, but are not limited to, climate change dis-information, artificial intelligence and deepfakes, journalist safety, media viability, and cyber misogyny.
The Summit programme will explore the policy briefs compiled by the M20 team and partner organisations, as well as feature leading voices from the sector through high-level panels and dialogues. As the world faces rising authoritarianism, shrinking media freedom and freedom of expression, and an information disorder fuelled by algorithms and digital platforms, the M20 Summit is a call to action.
A Johannesburg M20 Declaration is being drawn up as a result of a collaborative global discussion in advance of the Summit that calls upon media and partners, and then upon G20 leaders, to take urgent steps to respond to the information integrity crisis, its causes and its impacts.
Goals
It affirms that information integrity is essential to sustaining democracy and advancing the G20’s 2025 goals of international solidarity, equality and sustainable development.
The draft declaration states that our call is an injunction to everyone to do more to protect press freedom, support the role of journalism, and a human rights-based media ecosystem in its contribution to the public good. It calls for media to commit to reinforcing the highest standards of journalism ethics, to act as a counterbalance to attacks against information integrity, and to uncover disinformation campaigns, including AI mistakes and deepfakes, and provide access to reliable information to the public.
The draft declaration urges G20 leaders to recognise that severe threats to trust and the digital economy arise when information integrity is damaged by coordinated disinformation campaigns, AI errors, biases, and undisclosed deepfakes. It also calls for shared solutions to the “perfect storm” of the challenges ranging across information integrity, media capture and capitulation, journalists’ safety and targeted attacks, media viability, platforms and AI, children’s and young people’s rights and the climate emergency.
The declaration text will be finalised at the Summit and presented to delegates for endorsement and transmission to the G20 platforms.
While registration for the Summit is closed, the proceedings can be viewed live on SABC Plus.