If you imagine a lump of butter being cut through with a hot knife, you’ll get a fairly accurate picture of our European democracies. The most unbridled activists, such as the Russian, Ukrainian, American, Chinese, Palestinian, Israeli, Azeri, Korean, Iranian and Turkish militaries, tear and dissolve this poor soft matter at will, without encountering any reaction other than dismay and apathy.
The charge launched by Elon Musk against Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz for the benefit of the British and German far-right, in two of Europe’s most powerful countries, has been extended by Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to break with his strategy of formal compliance with European regulations. Europe is more vulnerable than ever to strategies of influence designed to destabilise it, because it has no control over the digital infrastructure that forms its democracy.
It is to the credit of the Obama team that it first experimented with the discreet power of an initial tool, social network advertising on Facebook, during its 2008 campaign. Some Russian entities used it to interfere in the 2016 American campaign. More recently, the method was used on TikTok in Romania.
Do you think that in Europe, since 2016, regulations have required social platforms to have the capacity to accurately track, analyse and stop advertising in real time during crucial elections? A second tool consists of using social networks to build up the capacity for mass distribution of a single message, for example via networks of ‘bots’ or communities organised around a cause or an ‘influencer’. With his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk has built up real political power thanks to a community that is engaged by abrupt, offbeat and emotional discourse. Why are the German and British heads of government so surprised and destabilised by such approaches? For us specialists in digital communications, the fragility of legal systems, the difficulty of accessing data and the permeability of digital spaces all present technical challenges in terms of monitoring, mapping, alerting and remedying when a personality, company or organisation is subject to concerted negative influence. Much could be done to improve the operation of these spaces without sacrificing freedom of expression or privacy.
Of course, we have the DSA, a European regulation which logically states that ‘what is illegal offline is illegal online’. Unfortunately, this regulation is of little use, because some companies are opposed to it and largely escape European sovereignty. They oppose it mainly in the name of freedom of expression, a valid argument that must be taken into consideration, given that regulations and fact-checking actions have sometimes been used to give weight to certain political and ideological views and to muzzle others. However, depending on the platform, technological constraints (algorithms are unable to identify problematic content), economic constraints (platforms do not want to invest in human moderation) or political constraints (the American cultural battle is raging and being exported) may take precedence. The consequence is worrying: while the Americans are bringing TikTok to heel, and the Russians and Chinese are isolating their internet and using their local social networks VK, TikTok and Douyin, the Europeans are virtually regulating.
True to the saying, ‘the Americans innovate, the Chinese manufacture and the Europeans regulate’, our continent regulates in a vacuum and has not put itself in a position to create a single digital company to irrigate its public space. In the name of competition or controlling inflation, Europe has created extremely powerful regulatory systems, but not in favour of creating technology companies or the fundamental fabric of its public space. We have, at random, the DSA, the RGPD, the HATVP rules, the CSRD, the ZAN, the HACCP, the CS3D or the MACF, but we don’t have any companies. In short, Europe regulates without creating, regulates without the objective of creating, and as a result regulates companies that are largely beyond its control.
By Xavier Desmaison
