During the plenary session (16-19 September 2019) of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, MEPs hold a debate on foreign electoral interference and disinformation in national and European democratic processes, as they threaten the stability of political systems in member states and the cohesion of EU integration. Statements by Tytti TUPPURAINEN, for the European Council, Vĕra JOUROVÁ, European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, Julian KING, Commissioner for the Security Union, Tomas TOBÉ (EPP, SE), Kati PIRI (S&D, NL) and Pascal DURAND (RE, FR).

Strasbourg

debate

plenary session

JOUROVÁ, Věra (EC)

KING, Julian (EC)

PIRI, Kati

fight against hate speech, populism, and fake news on social media (T)

DURAND, Pascal (S&D, FR)

propaganda against EU (T)

TOBÉ, Tomas (EPP, SE)

TUPPURAINEN, Tytti

Foreign electoral interference and disinformation in national and European democratic processes: extracts from the debate

https://api.multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/documents/20125/9500517/I177456Chapters%5BSD-EN%5D.srt

SOUNDBITE (English), Tytti TUPPURAINEN, for the European Council, Almost four months have passed since the European Parliament elections which were combined in several Member States with other elections. No major interference campaign was identified but fact-checkers and academia have nonetheless flagged malicious activity from foreign forces to influence turn out and vote preferences. We have to constantly be prepared.

SOUNDBITE (English), V&#277;ra JOUROV&#193;, European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, The conduct of free and fair elections is primarily the responsibility of Member States. Nevertheless a European approach is necessary given the cross-border dimension of efforts to manipulate democracy and the importance of joining efforts to address the threats. What affects one Member State can affect all.

SOUNDBITE (English), Julian KING, Commissioner for the Security Union, There are well research reports that show that online promotion for one of the German parties represented up to 86 percent of all party activity on Facebook. Four times the comments, six times the shares of all of the political parties combined. Many of these likes and shares came from a cluster of 80000 suspicious accounts with random two letter first and last names that each mutually liked hundreds and thousands of pieces of content. Large scale automated propaganda and disinformation is unfortunately a fact. It's a fact of our modern political life. And if the platforms can't figure out that thousands of coordinated accounts with random two letter names are suspicious then we have a problem.

SOUNDBITE (English), Julian KING, Commissioner for the Security Union, We've established a rapid alert system bringing the EU institutions and the Member States together to work to spot and tackle coordinated disinformation campaigns.

SOUNDBITE (English), Julian KING, Commissioner for the Security Union, We've mobilised a community of fact-checkers, researchers and civil society to help detect and analyse disinformation campaigns, we will soon deploy a new European online platform to bring together thirty eight fact-checking organisations from across 17 Member States working on this platform funded through the Connecting Europe Facility program.

SOUNDBITE (English), Julian KING, Commissioner for the Security Union, We've pushed the big Internet platforms to sign up to a Code of Practice on disinformation, as has already been set out. We finalised that work in September last year. The initial signatories, Facebook; Google; Twitter; Mozilla; trade associations from the advertising sector, have, I'm glad to say, now been joined also by Microsoft.

SOUNDBITE (English), Tomas TOB&#201; (EPP, SE), In this plenary, we do disagree a lot. It's called democracy. It is okay to disagree but I think it's very important that we agree that if we leave democratic decision making open to foreign interference we will also lose our self-determination.

SOUNDBITE (English), Kati PIRI (S&amp;D, NL), To address this challenge effectively, my group proposes to establish a special parliamentary committee so that European democracy, in which elections are always free and fair, is and remains self-evident, and once again can be taken for granted.

SOUNDBITE (French), Pascal DURAND (RE, FR), We know that foreign powers, who do not wish the European Union well - and we've talked about Russia, it's not just Russia, but it's established and has been defined in the case of Russia - have financed to the tune of a billion euros funding for European political parties including those who wish to destroy Europe.

SOUNDBITE (French), Pascal DURAND (RE, FR), We must provide the means to StratComms which has three million euros a year; five million, it was increased, you are right to say, Commissioner, but that is up against one billion.

Foreign electoral interference and disinformation in national and European democratic processes: extracts from the debate

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