The European Commission is not going to introduce legislation on disinformation or at least, not yet.
In a communication presented on Thursday 26 April, the Commission suggested that the platforms should be allowed to regulate themselves. It is, however, committed to examining the issue in October and will propose, if needs be, additional measures in December 2018.
During the press conference, Mariya Gabriel, the Commissioner for the Digital Society and Economy explained, “We are not going to create a Ministry for Truth or become the font of all truth. There is not going to be censorship”.
The final document is slightly different to the one leaked to the press a few weeks ago (see EUROPE 12003). It still prefers the term “disinformation” to “fake news” (deemed misleading insofar as it has been used previously to dismiss content regarded as unwelcome). It also maintains the same priority working areas, namely, improving the ecosystem, respect for the democratic process, media education, support for quality journalism and tackling external attacks.
It should be recalled that the Commission defined disinformation as, “verifiably false or misleading information that is created, presented and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public, and may cause public harm”.
Shift to code of conduct for platforms
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and with a year to go to the European elections we could have understood that the Commission would be tempted to introduce coercive measures, but this is not at all the case. It decided to, “give the platforms a chance” by providing them with a six month period to implement concrete measures. In an address to journalists a few days ago, the Vice President responsible for digital issues, Andrus Ansip, stated that “In the EU at least two and a half years are needed to obtain new rules. But life is rapidly changing. I really believe that the platforms want to win back citizens' trust”.
In this context, the Commission is proposing to organise a multipartite forum on disinformation - consisting of representatives from the platforms, the advertising world and civil society - to work on a code of good practices. This code should be published by July so that its impact can be assessed by October 2018. It will be based on key identifiable principles established by the high level group on fake news and online disinformation. It will attempt to respond to the following objectives: (1) considerably improving advertising controls and restricting advertising targeting options that are politically motivated; (2) stepping up efforts to close down bogus accounts and improve access to reliable news; (3) allowing users to flag up cases of disinformation and introduce clearly marked out rules on bots; (4) attempting to ensure that new online services provide guarantees against disinformation; (5) help reliable bodies to verify the facts and universities to better analyse and monitor the information dynamics, as well as improve the understanding of how algorithms work.
The rest of the communication suggests setting up an independent European network for fact checking and to subsequently launch a secure European online platform to support this network (financed by the interconnection mechanism in Europe). The draft communication can be seen at the following link: https://bit.ly/2JvWxo9 . (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)