Between April 2024 and November 2025, the European Union adopted or presented several instruments to defend the information space of its democracies. This consistency in timing says something about the seriousness of the diagnosis: without a shared factual base, democratic institutions spin empty. The EU is betting that this base is built, financed and protected like any other public good.
The essentials
- The EU coordinates three instruments: the Media Freedom Act and the Anti-SLAPP directive, both adopted on 11 April 2024, and the European Democracy Shield, a communication from November 2025.
- The Media Freedom Act (applicable since 8 August 2025) protects editorial independence, bans spyware against journalists and mandates transparency on media ownership (European Commission).
- The Anti-SLAPP directive, adopted on 11 April 2024, protects journalists and human rights defenders against abusive lawsuits; transposition by member states was due by 7 May 2026 at the latest.
- The Horizon DEMOCRACY-10 call finances three research projects on media literacy and disinformation mapping for 3.5 to 4 million euros.
- The central tension concerns media literacy’s ability to rebuild a common factual base against algorithmically driven disinformation that is structurally faster than education.
Three texts in nine months, a single logic
The Media Freedom Act came into force on 8 August 2025. It protects editorial independence and in principle bans spyware against journalists, subject to strictly defined exceptions. It also requires media owners to publicly declare themselves, allowing any citizen to know who controls what they read.
In November 2025, the Commission presented the European Democracy Shield; the formal communication JOIN(2025) 791 final is dated 12 November 2025. This integrated strategy goes beyond the media framework: it covers manipulation of information online, protection of electoral processes and strengthening of democratic institutions against foreign interference. The Shield treats disinformation as a systemic threat rather than a series of isolated incidents.
The Anti-SLAPP directive completed the framework in April 2024; 7 May 2026 was the deadline for member states to transpose it. Its purpose is specific: SLAPP suits — strategic lawsuits against public participation. When a state or company sues a journalist or activist, the objective is often not to win the case but to exhaust the opponent. Years of procedure, mounting legal fees, and many give up before the court even rules. The directive creates a filter: judges will be able to quickly dismiss manifestly abusive lawsuits.
This is structural protection, not symbolic.
These three texts share a common assumption: the health of the information space is a condition of possibility for democracy, and the state has a legitimate role in guaranteeing it.
“Common knowledge” according to Pinker and the factors that weaken it
Linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker formalized an idea that political scientists have been using for a long time without naming it clearly: social coordination rests on common knowledge. Knowing that the other knows. Knowing that the other knows that you know. This recursivity produces trust, makes institutions legitimate and enables deliberation.
In When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, Pinker shows that this shared knowledge is the invisible substrate of social contracts, it precedes and makes possible money, political power, collective norms. An election works because everyone knows that everyone knows the rules of the game and shares a minimally common reading of the facts.
Algorithmic disinformation attacks precisely this mechanism. When contradictory narratives spread rapidly and information bubbles fragment groups, common knowledge erodes. Elections, legislative compromises, public health policies — everything that requires minimal agreement on facts — becomes harder to legitimize. A major threat lies in the collective fragmentation of knowledge.
European investment in media literacy directly addresses this problem. DEMOCRACY-01-10 plans to finance up to two projects on political participation in multilingual spaces, subject to proposal selection, with an indicative budget of 6 million euros. The work consists of teaching citizens to distinguish a reliable source from one manufactured to undermine the common ground.
The limits of media literacy
Daron Acemoglu, Asuman Ozdaglar and James Siderius showed in a theoretical model that platform incentives to maximize engagement can favor information bubbles and unreliable content. The Digital Services Act recognizes that certain recommendation systems or algorithmic choices can amplify emotional content and contribute to information risks, which it seeks to frame.
Since European digital regulation, major platforms operate under more stringent rules on algorithmic recommendation and transparency in political advertising. But the underlying model remains intact: TikTok, YouTube and Meta rely largely on advertising revenue. Training citizens to think critically about this terrain is like asking pedestrians to adapt to a highway rather than slowing down the cars.
This tension between individual education and systemic architecture runs through the entire debate on information resilience. The European response acknowledges it partly: the Democracy Shield covers both citizen training and platform regulation. The Media Freedom Act attacks the problem on the supply side, strengthening producers of reliable information. Anti-SLAPP attacks intimidation. The Horizon call attacks on the demand side, training citizens.
Together they form a more complete response than a single pillar.
But the funding reveals what priorities actually are. Six million euros total for two projects on political participation in multilingual spaces: that is a laboratory ambition, not a mass policy. This allocation illustrates the asymmetry between resources devoted to citizen training and those mobilized by other actors in the information space.
The concrete effects of the Media Freedom Act
Before 8 August 2025, the specific ban in the Media Freedom Act did not exist, although the legality of pressure also depended on other European and national norms. Practices varied considerably: some states had genuinely independent newsrooms, others had gradually transformed their public media into government communication tools.
The Media Freedom Act shifts the legal balance. It requires states to respect editorial independence, creates the European Board for Media Services tasked notably with advising and coordinating, in principle bans spyware against journalists subject to strictly defined exceptions, and provides explicit remedies for guarantees relating to sources and surveillance. Hungary and Poland resisted certain provisions during negotiations: the final text is a compromise, but it sets a European floor where there was none.
Transparency of ownership is another concrete advance. Countries like Malta or Bulgaria had largely opaque media ownership structures, allowing political or economic interests to control information without public scrutiny. The transparency database that the regulation mandates changes this reality, slowly, but structurally.
Anti-SLAPP, or how to defend those who are expensive to attack
SLAPP suits have a typical profile. They target independent investigative journalists, watchdog NGOs, local activists. The plaintiffs have the means to sustain years of proceedings; their targets often do not. Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia faced dozens of simultaneous lawsuits when she was assassinated in 2017. Her death catalyzed European awareness of this mechanism.
The Anti-SLAPP directive, adopted on 11 April 2024, responds to this pattern. It applies to civil and commercial cases with cross-border implications. National judges will receive tools to quickly identify abusive lawsuits and dismiss them before financial exhaustion of the target. Member states have two years to transpose the directive.
The mechanism also protects actors one does not spontaneously associate with civil liberties: health researchers documenting the effects of a pesticide, whistleblowers on financial practices, environmental associations contesting development projects. The expansion of protection beyond journalists alone is deliberate: the information resilience of a society depends on all those who produce verified information, not just professional newsrooms.
An allocation of three and a half million euros
The HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01-10 subject concerns political participation in multilingual spaces. The indicative budget was 6 million euros for two projects: this is modest in volume, but the objectives are precise. Mapping disinformation networks, who produces what, at what speed, through what channels, is long-haul work that university teams do better than government agencies. EDMO, the European Digital Media Observatory, already coordinates a network of fact-checkers across Europe and serves as an anchor point for this work.
The question of scalability remains open. A research project on media literacy produces methods. Effective methods must then be deployed in the education systems of twenty-seven member states, with different languages, different media cultures and different levels of urgency. Finland has taught media critical thinking since the 1990s and achieves measurable results. Bulgaria starts from a very different point.
Financing research is a necessary condition; transposing results into classrooms is too, and this depends on member states, not Brussels.
This implementation challenge is common to many European policies, a tension one finds in other domains of supranational governance, where the framework is set at the European level but execution remains national.
Deliberative democracy requires a factual floor
The European bet is clear: deliberative democracy works if its members share a minimum of common facts. Training in critical judgment on information is therefore a productive expense, comparable to literacy in the classical sense. Economies that invested heavily in basic education achieved lasting returns on their social cohesion and governance capacity.
Algorithmic disinformation is a phenomenon recent enough that long-term studies are still lacking. What we know: observations suggest a correlation between institutional mistrust and factual polarization. The causalities at play remain complex and bidirectional, complicating diagnoses. Training citizens to verify sources requires parallel work on institutional credibility.
This is why the coherence of the European package matters as much as its individual pieces. The Media Freedom Act strengthens media independence. Anti-SLAPP protects those who produce information costly to obtain. The Horizon call trains those who consume it. And the Democracy Shield attempts to reduce the asymmetry between actors injecting disinformation and those attempting to correct it.
The question that will remain open after 2026 is whether platform regulation, the fourth element the EU has attempted to address via the Digital Services Act, produces measurable effects on the quality of the information space. If certain algorithmic choices amplify emotional content at the expense of reliable content, increased regulation may constitute a possible complement to media education. The EU has laid the foundations for a coherent policy; it is still measuring whether the foundations can bear the weight of the load.
Sources
- European Commission, Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, Media Literacy Policy: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/media-literacy
- Steven Pinker, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life: https://stevenpinker.com/publications/when-everyone-knows-everyone-knows-common-knowledge-and-mysteries-money-power-and
- European Commission, European Media Freedom Act, regulatory text, applicable since 8 August 2025 (EU Regulation 2024/1083)
- European Commission, Anti-SLAPP Directive, adopted 11 April 2024, transposition by 7 May 2026 at the latest
- European Commission, European Democracy Shield, strategic communication, November 2025
- Horizon Europe, subject HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01-10, research funding on political participation in multilingual spaces (€6M for 2 projects indicatively)
- EDMO, European Digital Media Observatory, directory of media literacy practices: edmo.eu
- Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, PublicAffairs, 2023
