The European strategy on disinformation mainly advocates self-regulation and is beginning to achieve its first results. Platforms and advertisers’ representatives published a code of good practices on 17 July focusing on 14 commitments. There is only one problem: this is only a temporary version that does not, at this stage, include comments from civil society.
It should be recalled that the European Commission made a commitment on 26 April to set up multipartite forum representing the different interests involved in publishing a code of good practices before July for which it would be possible to assess its effects by October 2018 (see EUROPE 12010). We are still a long way from achieving this goal.
The document published on Tuesday 17 July, only represents the contributions made by the platforms (such as Facebook and Google) and the advertisers. It will in fact be necessary to wait until September to receive the contributions from “the reflection body”, the other subgroup in the forum, which brings together representatives from the press and broadcasters, as well as the fact checkers and academics (such as the media information industry and European Consumer Organisation) and obtain the finished product.
The advertisers and platforms' version
The code takes the shape of a main document, including a range of commitments and key performance indicators, as well as an annex listing the practices already applied.
The main document reformulates the five Commission communication objectives: tackling advertising control and placement; advertising policy; service integrity; consumer and research community empowerment. The stakeholders will engage with this objective by flagging up any advertising content as such, adopting a clear policy on the use and identification of “bots” (programmes for disseminating automatic messages) or supporting independent efforts for tracking disinformation.
As part of the key indicators, the document mentions an annual “reviewable” report by a third party and allocates specific tasks to the global advertisers' federation and European association of communication agencies. It also makes it incumbent on signatories to appoint an “objective” third party for assessing their progress.
More information: https://bit.ly/2uM07oa (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)