Fortifying Digital Democracy: Central and Eastern Europe’s Blueprint for Social Media Regulation
Since 2018, the European Union (EU) has reaffirmed its power to act like a normative force, spearheading both regulatory and non-regulatory initiatives aimed at curtailing disinformation and enhancing transparency within social media platforms, thereby attempting to bolster societal resilience. The EU has been at the forefront of regulating social media through frameworks like self-regulative Code of Practice on Disinformation and the Digital Services Act (DSA). These regulations are crucial in holding social media companies accountable and ensuring they take proactive measures to combat the misuse of their platforms for spreading polarisation, undermining of democratic processes and becoming tools of both domestic and foreign malign influence. Self-regulation of social media platforms, introduced by the Code proved to be insufficient. Monetisation of disinformation in the form of paid advertisement and consequent multi-billion annual revenues trump over democratic principles and adherence of own terms and services by the platforms. At the moment, the transparency reports produced under both the Code the Code of Practise and Digital Services Act suffer from deficiencies in quality and informational value. Spanning hundreds of pages, these reports often lack contextualization, contain partial or extraneous information without furnishing specific and coherent details regarding the impact and efficacy of mentioned policies. While the DSA entered into force, at the same time, it is a process with the transitional period for its various provisions to come into effect in upcoming months and impact its enforcement.
The policy brief social media regulation offers recommendations on the priorities that the European Commission should adopt in the area of foreign malign influence. The brief is part of the GLOBSEC consultation project and will be included in the publication Pivotal Moment for Europe: Central European Proposals for the Next EU Leadership.
