Democracy rests on civic engagement. Civic engagement rests on a degree of trust in the elected rule-makers and government decisionmakers of the day. Step forward disinformation campaigns and malign foreign interference designed to unpick both, often with a degree of success as Brexit, manipulative covid claims, climate denial and election results have shown.
It doesn’t stop there. Automated, hallucinated, nudified content appears with increasing regularity, undermining the public interest at best, and eroding public trust at worst. What if we can’t trust what we see? The EU and its member states, along with other democracies around the world (notably Australia, Canada, Switzerland and New Zealand), recognise the problems this causes and have taken steps to try and combat disinformation. The EU addresses this as well via its External Action Service and needs to integrate foreign and domestic plans to make them effective.
Recent EU initiatives to strengthen democracy
The EU Commission unveiled two initiatives on 12 November designed to fortify democracy in the EU: the European Democracy Shield (EUDS), and the EU Civil Society Strategy.
The purpose of the EUDS is to boost the EU’s democratic systems against disinformation, foreign interference, and digital threats.
It comprises three pillars:
- Preserving the integrity of the information space;
- Strengthening our institutions, fair and free elections, and a free and independent media;
- Strengthening the resilience of society and the engagement of citizens.
A ‘European Centre for Democratic Resilience’ has been established “to increase our collective ability to anticipate, detect and respond to threats and build democratic resilience”, primarily through information exchange between member states and the development of joint capabilities.
The centre institutionalises and cements the EU’s commitment to combating threats and building democratic resilience. It thereby complements the raft of important legislation introduced to address cyber security and, notably, threats to free elections outlined the framework of the Digital Services Act (DSA).
Resisting the pressure from lobbyists
There has been heavy lobbying by big platforms and foreign actors to dilute obligations on them in both the DSA and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act to comply with EU requirements on privacy, non-consensual or opaque commercialisation of citizen data, and addressing (taking down immediately), extremist, harmful (often pornographic) content. The Australian government, among others, has shown how this can be progressed. Opaque algorithms and recommendation systems determine what we see, and one of the DSA’s aims is to make those platforms transparent and accountable for what they put up. Members of the European Parliament want to see the Commission and member governments enforcing that rather than diluting rules at the behest of lobbyists in the proposed ‘Omnibus’ regulation.
Citizen groups are scrutinising this with a view to suggesting improvements and preventing the erosion of rights. The EU AI Office inside the Commission set up a ‘Whistleblower Tool’ to enable anonymous reports by citizen whistle-blowers ofpotential breaches of the AI Act. The aim is to engage the public and encourage the safe and transparent development of AI. It will be telling to see how the Office uses its power.
Demonetising disinformation is vital
No one can credibly claim to be unaware of the mounting evidence that algorithms favour and enable the dissemination of disinformation and extremist, harmful and polarising content.
It would be equally disingenuous to claim that this is separate from a business model that rewards them. That is why demonetising disinformation is vital. The EUDS must prioritise this to ensure that online platforms and disinformation creators cannot profit from or facilitate the spread of false content.
The EU has made a start by requiring openness over ad revenue sharing, and disclosure of political ties, donations and established ad repositories. This will affect not just political parties and lobbyists but also influencers and the media.
A trickier issue concerns who or what (an automated bot friend?) moderates content, user bias and filters. Leaving this to an automated ‘AI-friend’ is risky and insufficient, so several national governments have either already decided to ban access to social platforms by young users, or are contemplating doing so.
Could bans work?
Will banning risky and deeply harmful, offensive, racist, misogynistic and polarising content be sufficient? If algorithms can be created to develop such content, it must be possible to mandate platforms to use algorithms to prevent such content appearing in the first instance. Legislators playing catch-up to combat often criminal, often malign foreign or cynical domestic content is not sufficient. Article 35 of the Digital Services Act requires mitigation measures to be taken in the case of systemic risks.
Digital imbalance is a blot on the landscape
It is up to the EU and national governments to enforce this immediately and not fall prey to spurious arguments by lobbyists that such regulations are too onerous and will erode their capacity to innovate and be competitive.
Corporations buy public information which legitimate researchers undertaking research for the benefit of society, for example in universities, cannot afford. This imbalance is a blot on the landscape. How many people genuinely understand how their personal data is monetised by and for someone else’s commercial gain? Or who benefits when, for instance, they tick ‘accept terms and conditions’ boxes? Clickbait, headline content and disinformation are highly lucrative.
Supporting democratic literacy
The EUDS sees the need for boosting citizen understanding of what is going on in the media. It supports digital literacy initiatives, funding civil society and independent journalism, but is a relative newcomer to the challenge of defending threats to democracy that are created by malign, external and domestic actors, some of whom fund mischievous and subversive disinformation. But politicians also need digital literacy training.
With a few obvious exceptions, most EU governments want to cooperate and together boost their own democratic resilience to insider and outsider threats to their way of life. Boosting public knowledge about who funds digital content and why they do is seen as a step to helping each of us take on shared responsibility for sustaining our rights and democracy.
Democracy and innovation: not an either/or
We need to know what content creators get out of what they put online. Can they or it be trusted? If not and if we doubt the integrity of our own governments and politicians, democracy is at risk. We lose more than that: our personal freedoms are endangered. While the public may welcome big fines on platforms that don’t comply fully with the rules, as happened in 2023 to Facebook in Ireland, that is not enough of a deterrent.
Governments, politicians and the EU must make sure that they enact and enforce appropriate legislation immediately to safeguard us against digital manipulation and malign disinformation. None can afford to allow a free-for-all or gullibly accept lobbyists’ misleading claims that such rules undermine our capacity to innovate. This is not an either/or. We can have democracy and innovation. Citizens demand no less. The EUDS may be a baby step in the right direction but must be complemented by prompt and well-informed domestic digital literacy and robust security and foreign policy initiatives.
