Europe is entering a period where information has become both a resource and a battleground. From foreign interference campaigns to AI-generated deepfakes, the challenges facing European democracies are no longer sporadic or peripheral, they are structural. Recognising this, the European Commission has introduced the European Democracy Shield, a comprehensive initiative intended to strengthen the EU’s democratic systems against manipulation, disinformation, and hybrid threats

Front Cover of EDMO Report (source: EDMO ) In the course of our work at TITAN (designing and deploying an AI-powered Socratic coach to build citizens’ critical thinking skills) we have kept a close eye on the broader ecosystem of how Europe's democracies are responding to disinformation. The recent European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) report How is disinformation addressed in the Member States of the European Union? – 27 country cases provides a timely and important map

Disinformation isn’t new, but its speed, reach, and sophistication have exploded in the age of social media and AI. Our open-access paper, Mapping Automatic Social Media Information Disorder: The Role of Bots and AI in Spreading Misleading Information in Society (PLOS ONE, 2024), by Andrea Tomassi, Andrea Falegnami, and Elpidio Romano, offers one of the clearest maps yet of how this phenomenon works, and what we can do about it.