On Tuesday 8 March, the Telecommunications Ministers of the EU Member States as well as those of Norway and Switzerland called on the digital sector to take a more active role in combating online disinformation.
The joint statement was issued at an informal meeting of the relevant ministers, whose agenda was disrupted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Discussions were also held over lunch with representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter.
“We had frank and lively discussions on the issue of disinformation, on what the big social networks do and don’t do. There is unity among the EU27, a common will to go further, to put pressure on these platforms to do more”, said the French Secretary of State for Digital Affairs, Cédric O.
In concrete terms, the Member States “unanimously” called on the relevant actors to take the necessary measures to ensure that the propagation of disinformation is combated.
On this point, Mr O detailed, the business representatives present “referred to the measures already taken and are open to taking some additional decisions in the next few days or even hours”.
The measures envisaged would be neither “regulatory” nor “legislative”, said the French Secretary of State, who also recalled that a number of provisions included in the framework of the Digital Services Act (DSA) - currently the subject of interinstitutional negotiations (see EUROPE 12900/18) - could also, in the long term, make it possible to respond to some of the challenges in the field of disinformation.
Moderators in all languages
In addition, the Telecommunications Ministers stressed the need for additional human resources for content moderation. In this respect, attention was drawn to the importance of having teams in all Member States’ languages - including in markets with a “small” number of users - able to intervene quickly to deal with accounts that spread disinformation and with fake accounts.
However, Mr O said, “there has been no discussion of the number of moderators; each country is discussing this with the platforms”.
Again, the Secretary of State felt that the DSA - while not a magic bullet - could play a role. “The DSA could allow us to know how many moderators are active at a given time ‘T’, to have an idea of the efficiency. Under normal circumstances, the DSA and DMA (see EUROPE 12885/7) will allow a superior level of response and preparedness”, he said.
In addition, the Member States, Switzerland, and Norway called on platforms to implement the EU Code of Practice on disinformation, to prioritise the dissemination of accurate information from reputable sources, and to share real-time information and all relevant data on what they observe on their systems.
These exchanges on online disinformation take place against the background of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moscow banned access to several social networks, including Facebook, on Friday 4 March. The EU had decided three days earlier to ban the Russian state media Sputnik and RT from broadcasting on its territory (see EUROPE 12901/5).
On Tuesday afternoon, 8 March, the Telecommunications Ministers continued their discussions on the issue of the resilience of telecommunications networks. Discussions are scheduled for Wednesday 9 March on the level of cybersecurity in the EU.
See the joint statement: https://aeur.eu/f/ne (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)