Consultations: Our democracy in Europe is in danger – Disinformation as a growing problem in our society

In the past months, the project team of the ERASMUS+-funded project CheckMate has got in touch with various different experts: legal experts, digitalisation experts, social media content creators, influencers, just to name a few of them.

The aim of the CheckMate project is to create networks and to then raise awareness about the growing problem of disinformation in Europe.

In Austria, the coordinator BürgerInnen Forum Europa conducted interviews with several well-known experts and also realised a focus group with citizens to get insights on the biggest topics and problems that the topic of Fake News and disinformation is creating in our society.

The results were quite dramatic. There is ongoing a real “campaign of disinformation” run by authoritarian countries, especially by Russia. The “troll factories” are massively destabilising democracy in Europe – with negative consequences for a pluralistic and open-minded society.

On social media channels such as TikTok the level of non-verified information is getting every day more and more and it is getting harder for influencers that try to keep up for example European and democratic values. The algorithm and the echo-chambers are creating parallel worlds in the net, where conspiracy theories, lies, discrimination and truly authoritarian values are happily shared among users.

The CheckMate consultations in Austria showed a clear picture: Disinformation and Fake News is a threat to our life how we are used to it. It can destroy our open and inclusive societies, damage the democratic institutions, and create massive negative consequences for Europe and the EU.

Now we need to act – and we at the CheckMate project will try to take up these results and work on a broad network against disinformation: Not just to raise awareness about fake news, but also to help to save our democracy how we know it.