Alaphilippe: Disinformation, threat to democracy in Europe

Disinformation remains one of the main threats to democracy in Europe, therefore Alexandre Alaphilippe, director of “EU DisinfoLab” calls for cooperation between civil society organizations, media and state institutions to address it.

In an interview with The Geopost, the expert in the field of disinformation and cyber defense says that they work to investigate and expose disinformation campaigns, especially those coming from foreign actors, and to promote Internet transparency and information protection.

Full interview:

The Geopost: It is a huge conference that EUDisinfo is organizing this year, what is the topic of discussion?

Alaphilippe: The conference is growing every year and it’s true that with all the elections that we have seen this year, with the surge of generative AI, with the question of foreign difference from Russia, but also what’s happening in the cyberspace, the question of disinformation is still central in the agenda in Europe. So, it was a time to gather everybody that is working on this, from civil society organizations, media, fact-checkers, academics, private companies and governments to have a better alignment, to have a better understanding about what are the different challenges that we are facing and what we can do together to counter this threat.

The Geopost: Recently we had elections in Europe. What interference and from which country you’ve seen more?

Alaphilippe: We had a lot of debates just before the elections. So, it’s important to be reminded that foreign interference and disinformation does not only happen during elections. Most of the efforts are most visible in elections because these are crucial times for democracies. But if you observe an operation like the Doppelganger, the Doppelganger has been active two years before elections, it was active during elections and it’s now active after elections. So, actors do not look only at elections as a way to persuade or to influence maliciously voters in Europe. The kind of threats we’ve seen, we’ve seen that we have issues with managing operations such as Doppelganger and all the avatars. We’ve seen that these operations have also targeted journalists more and more. And we also see that the question about how we can regulate content moderation on social platforms is complex with investigations opened by the European Commission against Meta and Twitter, notably.

So, a lot of challenges and still many answers to find.

The Geopost: Balkan is the first neighbor of EU, and second in line for Russian disinformation, after Ukraine, why you don’t have a topic about Balkans this year in EUDisinfo conference?

Alaphilippe: The problem is like the amount of space that we have is very limited. We know it’s an important topic in the Balkans. We work, our mandate and our association is mostly working on EU member states in the priority. Doesn’t mean that we don’t talk about the rest, but we are looking forward to expand the program in the future years. And we’re also, of course, looking at what’s happening in Balkans, in Western Balkans, and to try to better understand what are the different things and how they are playing there. And most of effort that should also be done to support civil society and independent media in the region would definitely be something crucial to do in the next years.

/The Geopost