Harrison, R. (2021)

Harrison, R. (2021). Tackling Disinformation in Times of Crisis: The European Commission’s Response to the Covid-19 Infodemic and the Feasibility of a Consumer-centric Solution. Utrecht Law Review. https://www.utrechtlawreview.org/article/10.36633/ulr.675/

- (para 11) "The European Union and its Member States should also continue to bolster their capabilities to address hybrid threats, including in the areas of cyber, strategic communication and counter-intelligence. The European Council invites the European Commission and the High Representative to take this work forward and report on progress by the June European Council." - 'Resilience against hybrid threats' becomes a priority. The EU takes a softer approach: "this approach ‘influences citizens without resorting to measures that could… harm free speech’ including media literacy, fact-checking and platform self- and co-regulation". - "Empowering consumers: signatories should invest in technologies which prioritise verified, relevant information and make it easier for people to find diverse perspectives on public interest topics. Efforts must be made to improve critical thinking and digital media literacy." - "requires Member States to promote the development of media literacy skills" - "Although the Infodemic demonstrated that victims of disinformation spanned several age groups, it is nonetheless recommended as a long-term strategy to begin media literacy training from the age of 12 up until – and potentially including – third-level education. Although research has shown that older persons are more likely to ‘share’ misinformation, the impressionability of young teens makes them perfect targets for viral disinformation where they do not yet have the critical analysis skills to detect disinformation. It also appears that young people are aware of their vulnerability to biases, with 40% of them considering that critical thinking, media and democracy are ‘not taught sufficiently in school.’"
 * European Council (2018)
 * European Commission (2018a). Action Plan against Disinformation
 * European Commission (2018c). EU Code of Practice on Disinformation
 * Audiovisual Media Services Directive (2018)
 * European Commission (2020a). Digital Services Act (DSA)
 * But: "digital media literacy programmes are an impractical solution for the short- and medium term. It is idealistic to think that the user community at present is sufficiently equipped to play a significant role in detecting and reporting disinformation given the politically divisive time that is 2020."
 * "Finally, as the 2021 Code has not yet been released and considering the aforementioned difficulties in ensuring a comprehensive EU-wide regulatory approach, the feasibility of a more ‘consumer-centric’ solution to disinformation was posited. This solution seeks to empower consumers to detect and report disinformation by providing mandatory EU-wide digital media literacy programmes. This approach would enable the user community to critically analyse content before accepting its validity; improvements in media literacy and critical analysis skills would go some way in ensuring better-informed online public discourse can take into the future. Of course, ‘future’ is the key word where this solution is concerned, and its inability to tackle the rampant spread of disinformation in the short- and medium-term is accepted given the frequency of content online and underlying biases built into the user community at present."
 * "If a mandatory EU-wide digital media literacy programme could be put in place, its potential effect on users would go some way in curbing the scale of disinformation in the next infodemic as it inevitably arises."

Benefits of media literacy according to the EU
 * (Commission (DAP) (n 75), Section 4.2.) Media literacy skills help citizens check information before sharing it, understand who is behind it, why it was distributed to them and whether it is credible. Digital literacy enables people to participate in the online environment wisely, safely and ethically.
 * (Commission (DAP) (n 75), Section 4.2.) "If EU citizens are given the tools to detect disinformation and political biases, they can form positive online habits; this might include seeking out multiple, verifiable news sources on a contentious story. The knock-on benefits for democratic resilience across Europe are powerful; countering disinformation through education and the promotion of open political debate is ‘crucial for effective participation in society and democratic processes.’"
 * "The final benefit of empowering users by investing in digital media literacy education would be that informed users could fill in gaps in the detection of harmful and illegal content. Although 89% of the hate speech detected on Facebook’ is done via AI tools, human content moderation still plays a crucial role ."