FIDU claims the importance of defending the rule of law. For this reason, we contribute to the study, knowledge and dissemination of facts to counter the risks of misleading and propagandist information.
In the new digital age, trust in institutions and support for democracy are in decline. People feel they have no impact on the main development processes that affect their lives. The digital revolution, within this scenario, has represented a significant hope that new technologies would have been an advantage for democracy, freedom and social involvement.
Today we are witnesses of the worrying democacry’s decline and its principal cause is the so-called “digital authoritarianism” that embraces the collapse of the hopes placed in the democracy’s ampliflying function in the Digital Age.
The new instruments of digital technology, as well as social networks, are more and more associated with hostile phenomena to democratic processes, such as populism and propaganda. Fake news and disinformation spread rapidly in the digital age and when they become the protagonists of our debates, our democracy is damaged. They compromise our trust in the concepts of truth, facts and reality, making the work of denouncing human rights violations and awareness-raising by the NGOs extremely difficult.
This scenario becomes dangerous in relation to the political elections. Election interference is not just an European challenge. Foreigner intrusion is suspected to be present in the elections in all over the world. Several actors use this destabilizing technique – that has shown to be more powerful than the traditional attack strategies and significantly cheaper, harder to prove and to pursue.
Besides, the growth of platforms on Internet -that have an unprecedented capacity of collecting data- has created new opportunities for authoritarian regimes, like China and Russia, to control civil society in a more effective way by spreading fake news and extreme ideas.
FIDU is a signatory of the EU Code of Conduct on Disinformation and actively contributes to European efforts to strengthen transparency, accountability and resilience in the digital information space. We are also part of the Counter Disinformation Network (CDN), led by Alliance4Europe, a collaborative initiative that brings together civil society organisations and research entities working to identify, analyse and counter disinformation trends across Europe.
Within this framework, FIDU contributed to the report “Sanctioned but Thriving: How Online Platforms Fail to Address the Widespread Presence of Entities under EU Sanctions,” published in cooperation with other organisations. The report highlights systemic shortcomings in how online platforms enforce EU sanctions regimes, demonstrating how sanctioned entities continue to maintain visibility and influence in the digital sphere.