Overview of EU joint and coordinated action

In recent years, the EU has stepped up its efforts to counter disinformation and foreign manipulation, later labelled as FIMI (see Figure 22). In September 2015, the East StratCom Task Force (ESTF) was set up under the EEAS, to raise awareness about pro-Kremlin disinformation, information manipulation and interference, exposing attacks on the EU, its Member States and the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood. To date, the Task Force has collected, analysed and debunked over 15 000 disinformation stories in its EUvsDisinfo database. The EEAS later added two further task forces – Western Balkans, and South (focused on the Middle East and North Africa, and the Persian Gulf region) – in charge of shaping strategic communication with neighbouring countries. Alongside the StratCom Task Forces, the CSDP missions deployed abroad are also becoming increasingly instrumental in identifying and responding to disinformation attacks. Within the EU, a network of EU-anti-disinformation hubs, covering all 27 EU Member States, has been set up as part of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), an independent platform addressing disinformation in Europe.
The European democracy action plan adopted in December 2020 was another important step, envisaging new legislation on political advertising, measures to support media freedom and pluralism and to counter disinformation. Since then, the Digital Services Act (DSA) entered into force on 16 November 2022, imposing a range of obligations on online intermediary services, including search engines and social media platforms, to ensure transparency, accountability and responsibility for their actions. The Code of Practice on Disinformation, strengthened in 2022, includes additional voluntary commitments by its 44 signatories to date. The Commission plans to put forward a defence of democracy package, including a legislative proposal designed to strengthen the resilience of the EU democratic space to foreign interference (to curb the influence exerted through covert interest representation services paid for or directed from outside the EU) and other non-legislative support measures. Following debates in the European Parliament, as well as concerns raised by number of civil society organisations regarding the potential restriction of civic space in the EU and beyond, it was decided that a full impact assessment of the proposal will be undertaken.
The Strategic Compass, sets ambitious goals for developing tools to increase resilience against disinformation and foreign manipulation. A central measure is the creation of an EU hybrid toolbox – a set of measures to respond to, detect and analyse such threats, among other things. The EU hybrid toolbox on foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) should, among other things: strengthen the EU’s ability to detect, analyse and respond to such threats; as well as to deal with ways to impose costs on malign disinformation actors – including the Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC), the rapid alert system (RAS), the deployment of EU hybrid rapid-response teams and the development of an EU cyber-defence policy. In addition, as part of its sweeping sanctions on Russia following the Russian war on Ukraine, the EU has already included Kremlin propagandists on the sanctions list, and suspended the broadcasting of major state-owned Russian broadcasters, such as Sputnik and Russia Today, in the EU.
Furthermore the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI), on which the European Parliament and the Council reached a political agreement in June 2023, aims to act as a deterrent against any potential economic coercion, enabling the EU to better defend its interests and those of its Member States on the global stage.