The EU Declares War

I apologize for the alarmist headline. The European Union hasn't actually declared war, more a case of having recognized a war, a shadow war. Vera Jourova, Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency, claims Russia and China are engaging in a "digital war" with fake news and disinformation in order to undermine European democracy. She is all about fighting back.

She is right to be alarmed of course. There is no greater enemy to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping than democracy. If anything causes them sleepless nights, democracy is it. With massive militaries including nuclear weapons, they've got the external threats covered. But if their people start to think seriously about choosing their own leaders, the regimes could collapse from the inside. Both Putin and Xi know about that.

Ms. Jourova, who is all too familiar with dictatorship, having grown up in communist Czechoslovakia, has been assigned to develop the European Democracy Action Plan. She intends to set clear goals: in addition to fighting disinformation the plan will aim to strengthen the media sector, make platforms more accountable and protect the democratic process.

Jourova reports the EU is "getting better at detecting and countering disinformation. We have set up a Rapid Alert System ... to facilitate the sharing of data and assessments of disinformation campaigns and enable alerts .... We have pushed the digital industry to sign up to the Code of Practice on Disinformation for online platforms and the advertising sector."

She insists this isn't enough. "We need to enlist the whole of civil society, including media, academia and fact-checkers," she declares, "This is why we have funded ... a digital service infrastructure ... to support co-operation between fact checkers and academia. This is why ... we have proposed the Creative Europe Programme 2021-2027 to support quality journalism."

In a speech to a recent conference in Brussels on disinformation, she emphasized the unfortunate fact that "Disinformation and foreign interference are a soft underbelly of our democracy, because they attack one of our dearest values—freedom of speech and the right to information." And quoted Hannah Arendt to outline the goals of Russia and China: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist." She could be describing the world of Donald Trump.

In a nice take on Mark Zuckerberg's attitude, she summarized her approach to social media, "I want the platforms that have contributed to breaking things ... to fix them." With a warrior like Ms. Jourova on their side, the EU should be well-equipped to deal with the enemy.