Prime Minister Rama attended today the conference “Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference: Albania and the Enlargement Context,” organized by the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.

Representatives of European institutions, allied countries, state institutions, the media, civil society and the technology sector came together to discuss one of the most pressing challenges currently facing European democracies and security: foreign information manipulation and interference.

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Prime Minister Edi Rama: Thank you so much for being here and especially heartfelt thank you to all of them who traveled to be here with us. Usually when people open conferences like this, protocol demands a standard line. It is a great pleasure and a distinct honor to welcome you all to Tirana.

I will not start that way today, not because you are not welcome, you are very warmly so, but because we are not gathered here for a polite exchange of diplomatic pleasantries. We are here because of a rather uncomfortable convergence of the moment we live in, the geography we inhabit, and the silent, corrosive pressure being applied to our democratic institutions every single day.

At first glance, this conference is about algorithms, digital platforms and information ecosystems. I believe it is about something much more fundamental we are obliged to deal with when we address these topics. Because it is about democracy, it is about public trust and ultimately, it is about whether free societies possess the strategic clarity to defend the open spaces they built.

For centuries and millennia, nations defended their sovereignty, people defended their sovereignty, tribes defended their sovereignty by guarding physical borders. Today, we must defend something invisible, yet every bit as vital. The space where our citizens form opinions, exercise judgments and make their own free choices. The geography of national security has fundamentally changed.

Power is no longer measured solely by the size of armies or the reach of traditional military hardware. And this is something I obsessively go back to in every conversation we have with our allies and partners when it comes to defense spending, when it comes to ramping up our military, when it comes to making our armies stronger by the day. Because power is increasingly measured also by something else: the ability to alter perception, weaponize societal divisions and erode trust in democratic institutions. And history has taught us something very clear about what we have to deal with today.

More than 3,000 years ago, not far from here, where we met today, Homer told the story of Troy. Troy did not fall, because it had a weak army. Troy did not fall because its walls were too weak to withstand the siege. Troy did not fall because it has no border security. It fell because the threat entered disguised as something harmless.

The Trojan horse, and this is the name of a virus, remains history’s ultimate lesson. The greatest danger is rarely the one storming your gates. It is more the one invited inside because it looks harmless. It is the one we praise in the name of freedom of opinion. It is the one we protect in the name of freedom of speech. It is the one that we are always reluctant to deal with properly even when it shows its true colors. Because for us it is a matter of democracy and a matter of freedom. And so, we have come to a moment when we have completely lost it by accepting freedom of reach as an extension of the freedom of speech.

And foreign information manipulation and interference never arrive wearing a uniform. It arrives as a daily content, as outrage, as a viral trend, as a deepfake video of a celebrity or a politician, as a link forwarded in WhatsApp group by our uncle, who genuinely believes he’s sharing some disturbing truth. It speaks our native language; it exploits our anxieties and targets exactly our open debates. And that is precisely why it is so effective and why we look so doomed to fail in front of it. Today manipulation travels at the speed of an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence and deployed at big scale.

Bottom line is you no longer need an army to destabilize a country. And look at what is happening across Europe today. Attacks do not necessarily begin with anyone crossing physical borders. They begin with silent strikes against data, digital infrastructure, public perception, when we are awake, when we are asleep. Just a few weeks ago, a neighboring country let’s say not far from here, not exactly neighbor, Romania, suffered a massive cyber-attack that froze their entire national land registry system. Citizens could not access titles, economic transactions ground to a halt, and public services were paralyzed. And only months prior to it, that same nation faced an unprecedented cognitive assault aimed at distorting its democratic election through coordinated digital manipulation. And these are not isolated phenomena. A cyber-attack on a state database and a coordinated influence campaign against an election come from the exact same playbook. We know something about it when it comes to cyber-attack. And cybersecurity protects our servers and critical infrastructure.

And today I am very proud to say that because of having been very aggressively attacked, we have responded by building one of the strongest cyber defenses in Europe today, relying on a new generation of defense based on artificial intelligence. But cyber security alone is not enough, because if we protect infrastructure, of our own digital nervous system of the state, the minds of our citizens remain unprotected, vulnerable to systematic manipulation every time they unlock their phones. And this brings me here directly to where we sit today.

The thing with democracy is that democracy is about cracks in the open. Democracy in its essence, it’s not about hiding cracks, it’s about dealing with cracks and dealing openly. And exactly this openness is its vulnerability towards the enemies of democracy that find a crack, the path to get in, like the Trojan horse.

And you are very aware, I guess, about the so-called Flamingo Revolution. A stunning example of how a crack that of course was not created by our enemies became a path to get in and to exploit it with a very large-scale operation of trolls and avatars.

So, as we advance decisively through the final stage of our European Union accession negotiations, it is fundamental to strengthen our resilience against hybrid threats, which is not a bureaucratic exercise, but it is a very important step towards building a resilient society while not undermining its own democratic values and its own democratic way of living.

So, to not take more of your time, I just want to bring you all to the map where all the countries that are in this same process of getting closer to the EU and aiming to become EU members are. So, from the Western Balkans to Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia. The closer a country gets to the European Union, the harder foreign actors strike through this way of sneaking inside and attacking, attacking, attacking.

So, we are the frontline. And we experience hybrid pressure and targeted disinformation campaigns directly as we speak. So, we must learn fast, adopt fast and through that frontline experience to offer practical value to Europe’s collective security.

My dear friends,

History will probably remember us not only as those who witnessed birth and the rise of artificial intelligence. But as a generation that had to decide whether truth could remain stronger than manipulation in a digital world. And this is a very big dilemma because the choice is very, very complex. We are democracies, we want to remain democracies. But at the same time, democracies offer space quite generously also for their enemies. And this is the question, and this is the dilemma, and this is the hard choice we must make.

So, how we defend our information space not by curtailing liberty, but by reinforcing it, not by fearing technological progress, but by anchoring in it democratic values, not by retreating into digital isolation, but by building open, critical and confident societies.

So, I don’t know in your countries, in Albania we have a say, I don’t know if it is authentic or it’s copied by some neighbors, we have a long argument about it, who was the first and who came next, but I’m just sharing it with you. When lie has made the tour of the globe, the truth is still putting up its pants. This was true before this era. Now imagine how many tours of the globe the lie can do while the truth is putting up its pants. So, I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I’m not very optimistic for as long as we will not make the clear difference and will not make the clear cut between freedom of speech and freedom of reach. The right to reach everyone by telling the most outrageous nonsense is not the right to speak freely, it’s something else.

How do I deal with it? I don’t know. This is why we have tried to invite some very bright and very well-informed people to share with us their knowledge and to try and learn from them how to navigate in these very, very turbulent waters. So much thank you for your patience and I very much wish I was not boring and I look forward to getting the full report of what will be said and how we can make the best use out of it and we will do.

We will do it because we need it desperately. Thank you so much.