Guest Op-Ed Hounaz Beheshti, Advocacy Manager, RNW Media
In the first piece in this series, we traced the different methods used to silence journalism, from the physical elimination of reporters to the infrastructural capture and control of digital media. We ended that piece with a question: whether Europe is willing to treat media viability and information integrity as strategic democratic priorities, rather than secondary values that get negotiated away when politically inconvenient.
This piece attempts an answer.
Three things need to change if Europe is serious about protecting its information ecosystem and, by extension, its democracies. The first is where Europe puts its money. The second is what its policymakers actually understand about the threats AI poses to journalism and the information environment. The third is how Europe relates to global governance of the digital space, and whose voices are excluded from that picture. Each of these is a political choice, and each of them is currently being made in the wrong direction.
The money goes where the concern is
Europe is alarmed. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, defence budgets across the continent have surged, and the conversation in Brussels and in national capitals has increasingly centred on military capability and deterrence. These are legitimate concerns. But they rest on a particular, and increasingly incomplete, understanding of where democratic societies are actually being attacked.
What Europe is failing to understand is that the front line has shifted. Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) is the new geopolitical threat Europe is facing. Hostile governments are allocating vast budgets to state media and influence operations to distort public debate, sway elections, and undermine trust in democratic institutions.
Public interest media can play a crucial role in countering these challenges, for example by offering plural and diverse narratives, to proactively pushing back against disinformation campaigns and polarisation. But independent media is under-funded, partly because Europe thinks it should invest its funds in tanks and fighter jets. Perhaps those are needed too, military spending is not our argument to make. But what we do know for sure is that sustainable and considerable funding can support independent and public interest media outlets in performing their pivotal role in protecting democracies.
What’s more, this funding gap is a political choice.
The architecture of EU funds, most important of which is AgoraEU, does not recognise the key role of media as democratic infrastructure. And policymakers seem to turn a blind eye to the urgency of this matter. Which brings us to our second argument.
AI, the pace of technological change, and the shifting boundaries of human rights online have left Europe without a clear view of the mechanisms it needs to support media.
There is a knowledge gap at the centre of European media policy that is worth naming directly.
The online sphere is where media now operates. In the online sphere, different rules apply. Algorithms determine visibility, and therefore viability, of media. Synthetic content floods the information space; verification work is more expensive and difficult than ever. Fact-checked content that’s so costly to produce gets scraped off websites by bots. And manipulated narratives influence the public mind before facts get a chance to land. This is the environment online media is operating in and trying to survive.
In addition, the human rights frameworks the EU inherited, were built for a different time, where threats to freedom of expression were physical and the silencing of media looked different. Policymakers may have relatively clear answers to a journalist being detained, but few clear ones to a journalist whose reporting is algorithmically suppressed, or whose outlet is flooded with AI-generated content designed to overwhelm its editorial capacity.
The enforcement of EU laws makes this knowledge gap very clear. The DSA has been actionable since 2022, but platform compliance is moving in the wrong direction. Commitments under the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation (the mechanism designed to hold platforms to account on disinformation) have declined by 31% since the Code was launched. Meta is officially exploring expanding its community notes model globally, including to the EU in 2026, replacing the independent fact-checking infrastructure that currently flags tens of millions of pieces of misleading content on European platforms each year.
When the Commission issued its first major enforcement action, a €120 million fine against X in December 2025, Elon Musk denounced it publicly as regulatory overreach, and X executives temporarily deactivated the Commission’s advertising account in protest. The power dynamics have shifted too. Europe’s digital infrastructure is heavily dependent on US tech companies. This dependence has become a geopolitical complexity, as technology is a powerful tool. Europe has started to recognize this and introduce alternatives to decrease its dependency, like local cloud providers. Although this is a step in the right direction, these measures seem too weak. In addition, Europe needs to take an even bigger step in breaking away from Silicon Valley’s tech ideology and form its own stance. One grounded in core democratic values: meaningful equality of access, privacy and protection of user data, and protection of free speech.
In this context, the existing frameworks need the political backbone to execute them, or they will fail constantly.
The DSA and the AI Act represent Europe’s attempt to close the gap between analogue rights frameworks and digital realities. They are very meaningful steps. But they are not enough to defend the information ecosystem.
In light of this, we see two responsibilities for Europe:
- To demystify AI technology and its impact on journalism and make sure this understanding is integrated into policymaking.
- To create a shared updated understanding of human rights concepts and their violation online. One that can help the international community arrive at a unified solution to the protection of human rights online.
As a last thought, perhaps there is a simple solution to the lack of funding for independent media, especially those affected by tech hegemony. The EU could allocate its earnings from the legal cases it wins against tech giants to investing in free media that can fight back against multiple threats. That is a political choice too.
Geneva talks are in full swing, but without the global majority!
This week, Geneva is hosting three overlapping events that together represent the most significant moment in international AI governance to date: the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the AI for Good Global Summit, and the WSIS Forum 2026. The convergence is deliberate. It signals that AI can no longer be debated on separate technical, commercial, and diplomatic tracks without those tracks eventually having to account for each other.
The institutions are writing the rules for AI with the help of the companies that built the technology in the first place. Standard-setting bodies, model evaluation frameworks, and the technical working groups that feed into UN and ITU processes are dominated by participants from a small set of wealthy economies, even as the harms of AI systems fall hardest on users in the global majority.
Civil society organisations from these regions are routinely invited as observers after the substantive decisions have already been shaped elsewhere. The result is governance built around the assumptions of those already in the room, not the experiences of those actually affected.
In addition, the organisations shaping AI governance norms are often governments, large technology companies, and academic institutions. Media as a whole has very little say in norm-setting or policymaking.
Inclusive governance is a necessity, not a luxury.
Europe has the regulatory credibility to push back against that drift. The DSA, the AI Act, and the EMFA have given Europe a position in global digital governance to advocate for broader inclusion. Fellowship programmes and regional consultations within the AI Dialogue architecture are just a few examples of concrete mechanisms that already exist in proposal form. It is up to the EU delegations to advocate for these, and eventually make them happen.
Foreign policy is another lever. Unfortunately, what we see over and over again is that trade agreements and diplomatic partnerships are often prioritised over the protection of human rights. Media freedom and information integrity should be an integral part of trade policies and other areas of diplomatic ties, if only for Europe to stay consistent with its human rights values and their application.
Making different political decisions
None of what is outlined here requires new principles. Europe already has the commitments and the frameworks. The gap is between what is promised and what gets funded in reality.
Authoritarian governments understood long ago that controlling the information environment is a primary strategic objective. They budget for it, they legislate for it, and they build the infrastructure for it with consistency and patience. Europe has spent two decades treating the same terrain as a secondary concern, at the margins of trade policy, or in cultural funding rounds, or in civil society consultations.
That can change. But it requires understanding that the health of the information ecosystem is not a soft indicator of democratic culture, but a fundamental condition for democracy.