After a first draft in July, platforms and advertisers published on Wednesday 26 September the final version of their code of good practice for countering disinformation online. While this version, which is very similar to the previous one, seems to satisfy the European Commission, it has not been so warmly received by civil society.
The code of practice is built around the following themes: control and placing of advertising, political advertising, the integrity of services, consumer empowerment and of the research community. It supports political advertising being clearly identified as such and consumers should have access to varied points of view on subjects of public interest.
The document is co-signed by Edima, the association of online platforms, including Twitter. Facebook, Google (and therefore YouTube), and Mozilla, which have also signed in its own name.
A laborious process
The European Commission’s communication on disinformation, published in the spring of 2018, prefers autoregulation for tackling the problem of fake news. It calls on parties to get round the table to define a code of best practices "by July in order to have measurable effects by October 2018" (see EUROPE 12010).
The platforms and advisers in a ‘working group’ thus published a first draft in July (see EUROPE 12064) while a ‘reflection group’ submitted comments over the summer. A European civil servant confided to us that it was a "laborious process".
And it is not over yet: the platforms will now publish "in the next few days" their implementation plan, which will be individual.
Main differences
No great revolution on the draft text published in July. In terms of commitments, the platforms and advertisers have added a measure on investment "in technical means for a hierarchy of pertinent, authentic and false information that is the authority, if needed, in search, flows or other channels of distribution that are automatically classified." The new draft also adds performance indicators, making more of a link between a commitment and an indicator.
The Commission satisfied, working group disappointed
Commissioner Mariya Gabriel published an immediate statement. In July, she called for improvements, but this time, she seems quite satisfied with what she sees as a step in the right direction.
She called, however, on stakeholders – online platforms and the publicity sector – to immediately start to implement the action agreed in the code of practice in order to make significant progress and measurable outcomes over the next few months, adding that she expected more platforms to join the initiative.
The reflection group, comprising commercial television (ACTE) and the European consumer association (BEUC), published a far less enthusiastic reaction, saying that the claimed code of practice doesn’t contain any common approaches or clear and significant commitments, or measurable objective or key performance indicators, and therefore there is no way of controlling the process and no conformity or application tools. BEUC concluded that it is certainly not autoregulation and therefore despite their efforts, the platforms have not published a code of practice.
A few days ago, a source at the Commission said they would assess and verify by the end of December whether to take further action and the European Summit in December would be the time to present is conclusions. [link: https://bit.ly/2xEjvpw ] (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)