Verbatim report of proceedings

Thursday, 18 June 2020 - Brussels

Tackling Covid-19 disinformation and the impact on freedom of expression (debate)

  Sergey Lagodinsky, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – Madam President, it should be clear to us there will never be a silver bullet to solve all problems of disinformation. But hey, we are in politics, and we all know there is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach. But we should be clear about our starting point, and the starting point is to defend our democracy, not to damage it.

That’s why our strategy should be threefold and should be holistic. First, fight geopolitical propaganda attacks from outside. Second, educate and inform press and internet consumers. And third, protect personal opinion and free speech.

The past weeks have demonstrated the pitfalls, but also the chances that we saw. There was a strong sense of direction from the European institutions, and I’m grateful to Mr Burrell for framing it right. It’s not about just fake news, it’s about a debate and a battle of narratives.

On the other hand, we saw how we can end up in an anti-democratic trap. This is why criminalisation of alleged misinformation about COVID, like in Hungary, attempted prevention of true press information in Poland, prosecution of pharmaceutical representatives in Bulgaria – just because they wanted to warn about a lack of drugs. This is all unacceptable.

We should not lose sight of our strategic principle. By confronting disinformation, we must defend democracy, not destroy it.

And one more point, because many people represent it here. Anonymity is an important good in the internet. Anonymity protects women, minorities, opposition voices in the internet, and that’s why we should never abolish this there.

One more point on education and then I’m done. We should invest more in education, in justice and value systems and not cut this by 20% as is planned now in the MFF, and we should invest more as part of the recovery in civil society and education and not disregard it as is planned now. This is the way to go. This is the way to protect democracy.