DISINFO: The EU does not need Russian 'interference' as it has Brussels for that
SUMMARY
The EU doesn’t need Moscow to interfere in its democracy, it has Brussels for that. According to the EU itself, Russians and their “disinformation” didn’t have any impact on the European Elections earlier this year. Vera Jourova, the Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency, has emerged from an Orwellian novel to announce that “no major information interference operation capable of disrupting the elections was recorded.” Jourova acknowledged that the EU’s Digital Media Observatory was only able to find between 4% to 8% of what they qualify as “disinformation” among all articles analysed until March 2024, and that the figure climbed to just 15% in May 2024, right before the EU’s June election. This means that a whopping 85% of information and analysis was EU-approved. Jourova said that “disinformation narratives [included] allegations that the elections are rigged, but mostly topics that trigger a strong emotional impact – the war on Ukraine, the Middle East, false narratives on climate change, and migrants.” These things used to be called topics of debate. But that was before they decided that the agenda Brussels was trying to ram down everyone’s throats across the entire bloc wouldn’t be served by messy democratic dissent.
RESPONSE
This is a disingenuous distortion of the original statement by the European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova. While the sentences highlighted in this disinformation story were part of this speech, Ms. Jourova did not affirm that Russia’s disinformation did not have any impact, but that this and other foreign information operations did not have the capacity to disrupt the elections. She also highlighted that this was due to a series of measures adopted by the EU which had “put in place instruments to address the threats”, such as reinforcing the EU’s “toolbox and cooperation structures with bold initiatives to protect democracy and the integrity of elections, starting with the 2020 European Democracy Action Plan”, the “2023 Defence of Democracy package” and “the Digital Services Act”.
Contrary to what this disinformation story claims, Ms. Jourova’s mention of articles containing disinformation do not refer to controversial or debatable topics, but to deliberately misleading content in line with the definition coined in the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. Trying to frame the fight against these malign practices as a matter of “freedom of speech” is a frequent pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative.
Russia’s interference attempts in the European elections and political processes have been well documented, for example the Voice of Europe or the Euromore influence operations.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that RT is stigmatised because it fights indoctrination by the collective West media, that NATO is waging cognitive warfare by banning Russian media, that RT is targeted because it exposed Ukraine conflict as Western proxy war, that press freedom means nothing to the European Union, that the EU ban on Russian media is Russophobia and murder of free speech, or that the EU introduced censorship ahead of European Parliament elections.