The European Union wants to confront foreign interference and stop the flow of misinformation spreading on the Internet. To this end, the European Commission has just presented a project called the European Democracy Shield.
“Disinformation, algorithmic manipulation and financial pressure on media and AI tools threaten our democratic way of life,” European Commissioner Michael McGrath told reporters on Wednesday (12/11/2025).
“Authoritarian regimes use hybrid tactics, attacking infrastructure, exploiting migration, manipulating information, spreading criminal networks and interfering in our electoral processes,” McGrath continued.
The European Union’s chief digital officer, Hina Virokonen, who was standing next to him, was less ambiguous, and explicitly accused Russia of attacking the bloc through “information manipulation and interference.”
What is the European Union’s “democratic shield”?
The EU’s so-called European Democracy Shield is largely based on strengthening already existing measures or on improving coordination. The European Union wants to work with technology companies on a new “incident and crisis” protocol to ensure EU governments can act more quickly if they discover a massive disinformation campaign.
The Commission also committed to “strengthening” funding for local and independent media, as well as “evaluating” new ways to “update advertising rules to enhance the sustainability of EU media.”
But the most notable event is the creation of a new EU counter-disinformation centre, which an EU official said was likely to be operational next week.
We also welcome future members
Countries aspiring to become new EU members, such as Ukraine, Montenegro or Albania, will also be invited to join the anti-disinformation club.
“The reality is that as they get closer to EU membership, the severity of the threat they face in terms of foreign interference is going to increase,” McGrath said.
Moldova, an EU membership candidate and former Soviet state, has faced widespread attempts to interfere in crucial elections this year, including schemes exposed by journalists in which citizens were offered cash payments from Russia-based banks to post anti-government content online. Moscow denied its involvement in the interference.
Is the plan strong?
The new headquarters is only a voluntary measure, meaning that individual EU country governments will not be obliged to participate.
“Member states do not necessarily want the European Commission to be too active in an area that they consider to be a national competence and a matter of sovereignty,” Louise Quaritch, a researcher at the Jacques Delors Research Centre, told DW.
Quaritch stressed that Brussels’ new plans are full of “good ideas”, but warned that the EU’s current approach to combating disinformation may be a failure. These actions include debunking and exposing individual instances of false narratives spread by online bots, or websites known as “like” (“duplicate” or “duplicate”, which mimic the original websites almost perfectly), to trick users into thinking they are reading articles on national news sites.
“By the time people saw it, or by the time fact checking was added, it was already too late,” the expert explains.
Lack of confidence in Washington?
The EU executive has gone out of its way to stress that its democratic shield will not suppress freedom of expression, a message that appears to have been carefully crafted not only to the bloc’s citizens, but also to lawmakers on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Trump administration has strongly criticized the bloc’s digital regulation, and Vice President J.D. Vance used a speech in Paris in early 2025 to attack the European Union and warn that “the United States cannot and will not tolerate” foreign governments “tightening the screws” on American technology companies.
The new measures just introduced by the European Commission do not impose new legal obligations on big tech companies, but instead require platforms such as Facebook, TikTok and Google – which have voluntarily signed the EU code of conduct against disinformation – to cooperate more proactively with governments.
What about the tenth?
This has once again put Company X, formerly Twitter, in the spotlight, which withdrew from all voluntary EU measures in 2023 under Elon Musk.
The European Commission denies accusations that it delayed the results of a two-year investigation into alleged violations of European law in X, in an attempt to keep the Trump administration happy amid uncertainty over US tariffs and support for Ukraine.
Reporters Without Borders is one of the organizations that asked the European Union to tighten the technological measures of the Democracy Protection Plan. “It is time to take back control of cyberspace, and ensure that social media platform algorithms and AI assistants are designed to support democratic guarantees by promoting trustworthy news sources,” said Thibaut Broten, Director-General of Reporters Without Borders.
(ms/CP)
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