EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas said Romania’s recent canceled presidential election due to disinformation is not an isolated case and the EU needs to move faster in order to send a clear message about why it has regulations regarding the activity of online platforms.
Regulation is necessary “to protect our democracy which is increasingly under attack,” EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas told the European Newsroom (enr) in an interview on Wednesday in Brussels.
In December, Ms Kallas said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “regime is already undertaking increasingly brazen acts of sabotage: cyber-attacks in Spain and Czechia; election interference in Romania and Moldova… disinformation campaigns; jamming of GPS systems that stops aircraft from landing [in Estonia and Finland]; damage to underwater cables.”
Russia has learned how to influence elections through new technologies, she said.“I see the examples from Romania, but also other parts, that [the] Russians have really cracked the code on how to influence elections,” Kallas said on December10.
‘The Romanian presidential election was canceled due to the misinformation, and this is increasingly a bigger problem, how the platforms are used to manipulate elections. So I think Romania is not an isolated case and Europe is facing a sharp rise in disinformation,’ the EU’s chief diplomat said in response to a question by AGERPRES news agency.
She specified that the European External Action Service, which is under the coordination of the High Representative, ‘is actively tracking and exposing disinformation campaigns.’
‘We are also promoting digital literacy to help citizens to recognize fake news. And by the way, there is a very interesting thing. The problem is not the young people. The problem is rather the old people who are used to like, ‘Oh, it was in the news. That is the truth’.
Whereas, I mean, the young people have been educated also from the school to make a difference of different channels. But it’s a problem in all age groups, of course,’ Kaja Kallas detailed.
The European Union also has the Digital Services Act (DSA) ‘that mandates tech platforms to really take action against illegal content of this information.’
‘So, I mean, the Digital Services Act is there, it needs to be used as well, the procedures are ongoing, but I also feel that we need to move faster to make a clear point why we have these rules in place, and why we have them is to really protect our democracy which is more under attack all the time,’ the e EU’s top diplomat add.
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