EU GOES AFTER FAKE NEWS AHEAD OF POLLS
It has funded fact-checking organisations, enlist tech giants for help
THE European Union has launched a coordinated fight against fake news ahead of this month’s European Parliament elections, but officials acknowledge there are limits to what can be achieved against a danger barely recognised a few years ago.
The risk is “very high“, said Lutz Guellner, one of the EU’s top officials in charge of the anti-disinformation campaign.
“Just look at the past, the United States elections, what happened in France, Germany.”
By funding factchecking organisations, building up an in-house unit to counter disinformation from Russia, and enlisting Facebook, Google, Twitter and others, Brussels hopes to shield the 427 million people eligible to vote for the 751-seat EU chamber on May 23 to 26.
Facebook opened a fake news war room in late April, later showing journalists around the Dublin facility, but security experts said that might be too late to uproot the seeds of doubt planted by malign campaigns to undermine one of the world’s biggest elections.
EU officials said they could not quantify the impact of their efforts. They were suffering from limited funding and institutional restraints, and were only just coming to terms with the scale of the problem.
“The EU can’t have a Ministry of Truth,” said a EU official.
Despite the pan-European nature of the risks, the vote is held as separate elections in each of the 28 EU countries, some of which have been slow to put in
place safeguards.
EU governments and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies said Russia was targeting elections to undermine Western democracy. Moscow denied that.
In a case that forced EU officials to pay attention to the realworld impact of fake news, a story in 2016 about a Russian-German girl reportedly raped by Arab migrants sparked a media storm until Germany’s intelligence service established it as a Russian attempt to manipulate German public opinion.
By alerting people to examples of disinformation, the EU, like other Western governments, hoped to “inoculate” citizens against fake news, according to Heidi Tworek, a expert on information warfare at the University of British Columbia.
“Potentially we will be able to win, but not yet, because we have neglected this for so long,” Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius said.
Because May’s elections are likely to produce a fragmented Parliament, with anti-establishment parties doing well, EU officials are anxious about “bad actors” disrupting debate.
Turnout for European Parliament elections is traditionally low, making it easier for far-right and far-left groups to focus on voters favouring extremist parties via social media.
Russian media in Europe, while not successful in reaching the broader public, provides a platform for anti-EU populists.
Following a fire at Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral in April, Russian media outlets in Europe blamed Islamist militants and Ukraine’s pro-Western government.
Fact-checkers in Germany called out a fake news article circulated on Facebook about Frans Timmermans, the Socialists’ top candidate in the European elections. The report falsely claimed he wanted “mass immigration of Muslim men to Europe.”
Potentially we will be able to win, but not yet, because we have neglected this ( fake news issue) for so long
LINAS LINKEVICIUS
Lithuanian foreign minister