Brussels, according to the draft of the plan to which he has had access to THE COUNTRY, proposes to strengthen the three units available to the European Commission to combat the campaigns of misinformation from areas such as Russia, the Middle East, north Africa, or the western Balkans.
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The Commission also proposes the creation of a “rapid alert system” to ensure “the joint response and a coordinated” for all the partners of the EU compared to a few attacks of propaganda that are often concentrated in the most difficult moments of the national policy of each country, or when approaching electoral events.
The approval of the plan arrives surrounded by controversy, for the division within the Commission on the possible direct accusations to Russia as the alleged source of the disinformation campaigns that regularly hit the european countries.
community Sources recognize that Russia is the greatest threat to Europe as a source of disinformation. The fear is endorsed, according to these sources, for the evaluations carried out by the so-called “cell fusion of the EU against threats hybrid”, a monitoring unit integrated in the Analysis Centre of Intelligence of the EU. The direct accusations against Moscow in an official document of the Commission, however, pose a dilemma that must be resolved by this Thursday, the team of commissioners headed by Jean-Claude Juncker.
The community agency, in contrast, has no doubts about the urgent need to act as soon as possible to ensure that the electoral processes are conducted in a manner that is clean and without major distortions driven from outside of the EU.
“An urgent intervention is needed more than ever given the evolution of the techniques and the instruments used to create and disseminate misinformation”, warns the Commission’s text. The document will be transferred to the european summit held in Brussels next week (13-14 December), in which the 28 presidents of the Union Government expect to agree the shielding Restbet of the european elections.
The plan of action includes the monitoring of social networks. Brussels will verify that large platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, apply the code of conduct they have signed the past month of September. The technology companies have committed to hinder the income of advertising which they receive the web pages dedicated to misinformation and to curb the use of fake accounts and bots to spread the news deliberately falsified.
The new plan of action comes after three years of timid and unsuccessful interventions of the Union against the calls fake news. The first alarm went off during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2014, which resulted in the annexation by Moscow of the peninsula to ukraine of Crimea.
The Service of foreign policy the Commission created a specialized unit to detect the manipulation of informational spread, to promote Russian interests. But that drive, (little more than a dozen of persons) did not dispose of its own budget (1.1 million euros) until January of 2018 and their ability to deal with the armies of cyber-that, apparently, act in the service of the Kremlin has been limited. In march of this year, the Parliament of the Netherlands even called for its dismantling because it had placed some of the media of that country among those suspected of disseminating information favorable to Moscow.
The slow reaction of the EU has been contrasted with the tremendous impact that is attributed to the fake news. 85% of europeans, according to a public consultation of the European Commission, believe that the fake news are a problem in their respective countries. And the 68%, according to the same query, it ensures that encounters with any news faked at least once a week.
The Commission believes that the problem has been aggravated by the transformation of the information channels, with a displacement of the traditional media and the entry of digital platforms that act as aggregators and distributors of content without adopting necessarily the structures and editorial functions of the media”.
The transfer of users has been put in check, the business model of the print media in Europe, whose revenues between 2010 and 2014 experienced a drop of more than 13,000 million euros, compared to an increase in the digital formats of almost 4,000 million euros.
The action plan, which is expected to be adopted this Wednesday, suggests the introduction of support measures to facilitate the cross-border cooperation between media and the creation of independent teams of verifiers of data (fact-checkers), as well as the future launch of campaigns aimed at instilling the state of alert in the opinion of the public against possible misrepresentations.
