Photo credits: Marcel van Hoorn
On May 15, Studio Europa Maastricht, in collaboration with Brightlands Smart Services Campus in Heerlen, organised a public event titled “Disinformation, data, democracy: can the EU ensure a safer digital future?” Policymakers, industry experts, and researchers gathered to discuss the challenges and achievements of regulating big tech in Europe. The discussion focused on the implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in the EU in February 2024.
Policy brief collection on digitalisation
Experts from Maastricht University provided recommendations on the effectiveness of the DSA in the second policy brief collection published by Studio Europa Maastricht. The event opened with Philippe Verduyn, editor-in-chief of the collection and associate professor of psychology at Maastricht University, who gave the audience an extensive overview of the nine policy briefs and set the stage for the panel discussion.
Philippe then handed over the collection to Kim van Sparrentak, Member of the European Parliament (Greens/EFA). Kim was a negotiator for the Greens group on the AI Act, the Platform Work Directive, and the own-initiative report on Addictive Design.
Panel discussion
Sally Wyatt, professor of digital cultures at Maastricht University and one of the policy brief authors, took over as moderator. She set the tone for the conversation by asking the three panellists a crucial question: what, in their view, is the greatest threat from digital technologies to democracy in Europe today?
For James Waterworth, director of EU public policy at Amazon, it was not mastering them: “You ain’t got much future if your country is not relevant in tech. We will have a major social problem if we don’t master it,” he noted.
“You ain’t got much future if your country is not relevant in tech.”
For Kim van Sparrentak, it was the way technological tools “are being actively weaponised against our democracies: foreign actors actively use it to spread lies and destroy our democracies,” she claimed, adding that making people addicted to their phones – and young people already spend on average 7 hours on them – only makes tech companies richer.
For Mariëlle Wijermars, assistant professor in internet governance at Maastricht University, who examines how authoritarian states such as Russia seek to shape and restrict the circulation of information, the question of foreign interference in European elections—with Romania being the latest test case—is also worrying.
However, she pointed out that an even more troubling issue is researchers’, journalists’, and NGOs’ lack of access to the data needed to uncover such interference: “My main concern is about the freedom of academic research,” she emphasised.
“My main concern is about the freedom of academic research.”
When it came to evaluating what Brussels is doing well—and what could be improved—in regulating big tech, panellists agreed that a more nuanced approach is needed. This includes considering not only Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), but also smaller platforms that may have strong local influence and generate significant profits.
“Policy needs to be granular. What’s good for social media is completely irrelevant to big market places,” James Waterworth explained, adding that while the DSA’s intention to protect Europeans from disinformation is good, grouping companies that “do completely different things” makes the regulation less effective than it could have been.
Kim van Sparrentak, in turn, acknowledged that more could be done at the European level to prevent big tech from dictating the rules: “Big companies that have fundamental profit is what’s wrong with the internet. They only want to be bigger and more centralised. The situation is that 5-6 companies are deciding what your internet is like. These companies only have the bottom-line at heart. These companies have gotten so big that they don’t care anymore,” she said.
“As policymakers we messed up. We should have never allowed them to get so big. We should maybe split them up. We need decentralised internet where people have more say,” she stressed.
“We need decentralised internet where people have more say.”
Van Sparrentak also noted a hopeful trend: young people are increasingly self-organising and engaging with policymakers to share the trauma caused by growing up with an unregulated internet and find ways to combat it. However, she warned against calls from older generations to “just ban social media,” pointing out that it’s not a viable solution.
Wijermars, who has studied how the Russian government has worked over the past 15 years to reclaim control over what was once a free internet space, was less optimistic in her closing remarks: “I’m very pessimistic, but what gives me hope is how tremendously resilient people are, how despite all the pressure from the government they keep on resisting.”
Workshop on disinformation
Increasing public resilience to disinformation and fake news was also the topic of the second part of the event which featured a workshop led by Ruurd Oosterwoud, CEO and founder of DROG. He challenged participants with tasks that demonstrated how easily even innocent online content—such as puppies—can be weaponised when paired with the right message and targeted to the right audience. He also showed how AI technologies are replacing traditional troll factories. Finally, he demonstrated that facts alone are often not enough to combat online disinformation, as people tend to trust information they perceive as sincere, even when it is not accurate.
