EU elections, Gori: In many countries there is disinformation about the voting method

The European Union elections expected to be held in June have been affected by disinformation, says Paula Gori, secretary general at the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO).

In an interview for The Geopost, Gori says that in many EU countries there is disinformation about the way of voting.

“What we saw in many countries is that there is disinformation even about how to vote. So, this means that in fact it is not only the right to be informed that is affected, but also the right to vote that is affected by disinformation “, she says.

Full interview:

The Geopost: How is the situation about the disinformation in Europe?

Gori: Europe is taking disinformation very seriously. In the last year or so, lots of developments from a policy point of view and also, of course, from a technological one. So, as you may know, in Europe we now have the so-called Code of Practice on disinformation. This is a self-regulatory tool which has lots of signatories, including the platforms, fact-checkers, civil society organizations, advertisers, and so on. And the idea there is really to work all together to make sure that actually there are actions that counter disinformation. This is a self-regulatory tool which will become co-regulation, because as you may know, in the EU we now have the Digital Services Act. And according to this regulation, the platforms have to run yearly risk assessment to understand if actually the way their services work can be exploited to among others of course also share disinformation. So this is the current situation in the EU, very shortly of course on a policy level. Let me also say that any solution that deals with disinformation needs to respect fundamental rights and this is why also in the EU we started with self-regulation and not with regulation of content for example. This is really important also because at EU level, disinformation as such is legal. It’s not illegal content like other, for example, child pornography or copyright violations, and so on, which is illegal. But it’s very important when we deal with disinformation to respect fundamental rights.

And this is why in the EU, we tend to go to what is called the whole of society approach. So all the experts and all the parties that are involved in the field of information and disinformation work together and jointly to deal with the phenomenon.

The Geopost: Now we have an election in Europe, who is fighting your organization, what kind of disinformation is coming and attacking Europe?

Gori: So, of course, now in June we have the EU elections and this is a quite important moment also because we saw also how much AI is being used more and more. We can also count from some experiences which we have in the last national elections in some countries. What I can tell you is that there are, of course, specific measures. For example, the European Commission recently issued guidelines for election integrity, there is a Digital Services Act as I was saying, EDMO itself has built a task force that is actually focusing only on this upcoming election.

And so everything is getting ready in order to deal with disinformation narrative which will be spread for sure and they will focus on content like on substance of the elections but also on the procedures. What we saw in many countries is that there is disinformation also on how to vote. So this means that actually it’s not only the right to get informed that is affected but also the right to vote that is impacted by disinformation. So it’s very important for citizens to be aware about that. Tendentially disinformation narratives, they are linked to information. So if there is a given piece of information on a given topic, disinformation follows on that.

So what we expect is that disinformation on EU elections will be in any case a link to the local agendas. So if there’s anything relevant in a given country, disinformation will be on that. Regarding the actors behind, of course, we may expect external influence. This is for the European External Action Service, of course, to see but let’s also mention that the EU elections have a clear strong impact also nationally so we may expect also domestic disinformation related to the EU elections.

The Geopost: If I can ask you about disinformation in Ukraine and Russian information, which is your strategy for the relations of the five countries?

Gori: So what we did when the invasion started is we built a database that was at the beginning updated on a daily basis with fact-checking articles from all our networks and we have fact-checkers in all member states. And on the basis of this we produced for quite a lot of time also monthly briefs that were recapping basically the main disinformation narratives. Clearly when it’s about disinformation related to the conflict is the whole part on the sanctions that were imposed by the EU and this is something that goes beyond if you want disinformation. But it’s very important to know which are the narratives, to know also which are the techniques that are used to actually share disinformation in order to get protected from them. So as I was saying before, it’s not only a matter of debunking, but it’s way more, it’s creating resilience in society, it’s explaining how disinformation is produced. Let me also say that it’s very cheap to produce disinformation because a picture out of context is often sufficient actually to spread disinformation narrative. What we also did at a certain moment as EDMO, we had a task force on the conflict. And the task force, which was composed of a number of experts, very well-known experts, had the mission to understand, actually, if the whole setting was prepared and ready to deal with a situation like a conflict like this one. And the answer was yes and no, in the sense that we need, for example, way more research infrastructure to understand the phenomenon, we need to have way more coordination among all the bodies that are dealing with disinformation.

We have to have more protection for journalists because journalists and fact-checkers are also psychologically can be heavily impacted by watching, for example, images related to conflict so we have to make sure that they are protected. So there is a number of recommendations that this task force has produced which we hope will be implemented because this will make us more resilient in case of other conflicts or other crisis situations.

The Geopost: And for the end, what is your message for organizations, media and journalists in Balkans?

Gori: The first thing is continue doing the work you are doing, we need independent journalism, we need quality journalism, we know that the business models of media were impacted in the last years, but quality needs to be there, because quality that expresses click-bait is not an option, citizens have the right to be informed, and I really want to push journalists to continue doing their work in the most independent and quality way because this is really really important and also to all the people that are working behind the scenes in information really need a strong if you want information environment and also the same applies to the fact-checkers who are really doing an impressive work in the debunking and I don’t think that the journalism and fact-checkers are actually excluded. They exclude themselves. On the contrary, they can really be complementary.

/The Geopost