Introduction
EU DisinfoLab welcomes the Commission’s prioritisation of the topic of the protection of democracy, the fight against foreign interference and manipulation (FIMI) and the fight against disinformation. We feel, however, that the promise of a robust shield has been replaced with the reality of a broadly hollow shell. Our core concerns fall under three main headings:
Voluntary solutions instead of enforcement
The big tech companies behind the structural flaws described below are almost all members of the voluntary Code of Conduct on Disinformation. It seems naïve at best and self-serving at worst, to expect companies to obey a voluntary code when they are demonstrably not respecting the law. On top of this, the Commission proposes leaving participation in the Centre for Democratic resilience optional for Member States, even though the absence of one or more of them will inevitably have a deleterious effect on participation from third countries. It proposes “mutual voluntary assistance” (sic) in relation to electoral processes, without mentioning who is meant to be helping whom. It proposes a voluntary network of influencers to raise awareness of EU rules, with a footnote inexplicably pointing to the Regulation on Transparency of Political Advertising as an example of what the unnamed voluntary influencers will be informing other unidentified influencers about. There is also a proposal for voluntary commitments for “the private sector”, with funds being spent on a study to work out what this might entail.
Relaunching old initiatives
The Democracy Shield Communication “will reinforce the core elements” of our democracy according to the Commission President. Yet, not only does it to a large consist of descriptions of initiatives that are already in place, and voluntary measures that may or may not be taken up by the intended stakeholders, in places it even announces pre-existing initiatives as being new measures. Ironically, possibly the most egregious example of this is the announcement of the creation of a European network of fact-checkers that, in fact, already exists.
Structural flaws are skirted over
Digitisation has led to the news media being pummeled by big tech, news is subject to the whims of all-powerful recommender systems, and advertising revenue is being decimated by a fraud-riddled, personal data-abusing online advertising system dominated by a big tech duopoly, which rewards clickbait and drives accelerating levels of hyperpersonalisation, that is slowly destroying our sense of a shared democratic reality. These huge challenges to our democracy are simply brushed over. Addressing these challenges, by unapologetically implementing EU legislation, the GDPR, DSA and DMA, in particular, would be a real shield for our democracy.
You can download our overview of the European Commission’s Communication below. It colour codes the entire text to show what we consider to be good analysis (green), poor analysis (red), filler (white), background information (blue) and in need of improvement (yellow).
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