EU keeps up pressure on vaccine disinformation

Social media

(BRUSSELS) – The EU confirmed Thursday extension of its monitoring programme on measures taken by online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Microsoft and Google to reduce the ‘dangerous lies’ of disinformation.

The Commission has published the May reports by the online media giants detailing they have taken against coronavirus disinformation as signatories of the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation. It ahs also extended the programme until the end of the year.

The EU executive says the reports show the importance of effectively monitoring the measures put in place by the platforms to reduce disinformation. “We decided to extend this programme, because the amount of dangerous lies continues to flood our information space and because it will inform the creation of the new generation Code against disinformation,” said EC vice-president Vera Jourova: “We need a robust monitoring programme, and clearer indicators to measure impact of actions taken by platforms. They simply cannot police themselves alone.”

Facebook launched vaccine profile picture frames to encourage people to get vaccinated. Twitter introduced prompts appearing on users’ home timeline during World Immunisation Week in 16 countries, and held conversations on vaccines that received 5 million impressions. TikTok’s report keeps on providing useful data, says the Commission, in particular, April shows a slight decrease of the number of COVID vaccine tags applied to videos (7,256) in the EU, while in Italy and Spain clicks and impressions on the same tag more than doubled compared to the March.

Microsoft has redirected users searching for “coronavirus” or “#covid” to the LinkedIn official page on COVID-19, displaying information from verified international sources.

Google’s Ad Grants offered to public authorities generated 470 million impressions and 83 million clicks.

Despite these measures, the EU executive says the reports ‘still lack sufficient data on the impact of the policies taken to fight coronavirus related disinformation’. It adds that the recently published Guidance to strengthen the Code of Practice will setup a robust monitoring framework, with clear Key Performance Indicators, measuring also the efficiency of the actions taken by platforms as set out in its ‘European Democracy Action Plan’.