Local and regional politicians voice frustration with
social-media platforms and call for EU to help civil
society and local government identify disinformation.
The European Union should "urgently" involve local
and regional authorities in efforts counter
disinformation, the European Committee of the
Regions says in a report adopted on 5 December. The
EU's assembly for local and regional politicians
also urged the EU to exert greater pressure on
social-media platforms to respond more quickly,
effectively and appropriately to disinformation.
Local and regional leaders drew up the recommendations
on the EU's Action Plan on disinformation at their own
initiative and the proposals therefore do not form part
of the EU's formal review process. However, their
unilateral decision to send their input to the EU's
decision-making institutions underscores the importance
they ascribe to localising the battle against
disinformation, exerting more pressure on the private
sector, and investing more effort and resources to
fact-checking and working with civil society.
The
recommendations
were drafted by
Randel Länts
(EE/PES), a councillor in the rural community of
Viljandi in southern Estonia. He said: "The EU is
currently working principally at the national level,
but disinformation also needs to be fought at the local
level. The Action Plan adopted in December 2018 takes
insufficient account of the regional and local levels,
although it is often there that the problems associated
with this subject originate. Some of the solutions –
such as educating, informing and activating citizens –
also need to start in our regions and towns. But most
local governments lack knowledge about how to counter
disinformation, as well as money and skills. So this is
an area where the EU can step in and say 'we have some
money', and help efforts to build up
counter-disinformation capacity, in part by developing
networks of fact-checkers and compensating citizen
fact-checkers who have demonstrated their accuracy."
He continued: "There is also a crying need for
social-media companies to get more local in their work.
Their staff typically neither understand the language,
the political context nor the cultural context of the
disinformation campaigns being operated in the EU's
regions. And, as anyone who has tried to report
disinformation or hate speech knows, social-media
operators offer no swift and effective feedback
procedure. If they do not improve their performance
voluntarily, we need to force them, through regulation.
What the CoR is proposing are measures that reflect the
reality of disinformation: it comes from both external
and internal sources, targets our local and national
identities, and is often highly localised. We have to
force the internet companies to grapple with this
reality in a serious way – and we need to do the same,
through cooperation between all levels of government,
civil society, members of the public and social-media
platforms."
Among recommendations related to social-media
platforms, the CoR calls for the EU to oblige
social-media platforms –through regulation or through
self-management – to do far more outreach work to
educate users on disinformation and the verification of
sources, and to contextualise posts and warn users
about sources of disinformation ahead of elections and
during crises. Platforms would contribute to funding
fact-checking networks and paying individual
fact-checkers.
The recommendations include principles and ideas
intended to protect personal liberties, to avoid
over-reaction, and to build public support. The opinion
warns that "without sufficient transparency, there is a
great risk that measures to counter disinformation
themselves fall victim to hostile information attacks"
and therefore argues for "the public having access to
comprehensive information and being kept abreast of,
for instance, data protection, personal data processing
and financing aspects". It says "the possible spread of
disinformation must be systematically and continuously
monitored" – "but not all the time", suggesting that
such high-intensity monitoring should be restricted to
the run-up to elections and times of crisis and abrupt
social change.
The EU's work against disinformation has four pillars:
improving detection of disinformation, coordinating
responses, mobilising the private sector to take
action, and raising public awareness.
EU-level action to curb disinformation began in 2015,
with the creation of a task-force to improve the EU's
capacity to forecast, address and respond to
disinformation activities, to strengthen the media
environment in the EU's member states and
neighbourhood, and to communicate EU policies in its
eastern neighbourhood. The scope of the EU's work has
since expanded and deepened, both geographically and
thematically. Input from a high-level expert group in
2017 and from a public consultation fed into the
adoption, in April 2018, of an
EU approach to tackling online disinformation
. Since then, social-media platforms have agreed to a
voluntary
Code of Practice
, with the EU warning that regulation could follow
without adequate action. The European Commission's
Action Plan against disinformation
was adopted in December 2018, and in March 2019 the
Commission created a Rapid Alert System ahead of the
European elections held in May 2019.
Contact:
Andrew Gardner
Tel. +32 473 843 981
andrew.gardner@cor.europa.eu