Ladies and gentlemen, Sadly, today we learnt about passing away of great French and European politician, former President of France, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. I want to pass my condolences to his family and friends. [ Ссылка ] #eudebates #Media
#Media4Democracy #France #MediaFreedom #Journalists
It is only fitting to start this press conference by quoting a first sentence written by him in the French Democracy. "No society can live without an ideal that inspires it, nor without a clear knowledge of the principles that guide its organisation."
I dare to add: Our ideal, our principles, in the European Union, are our values: respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights.
Sadly, today none can be taken for granted.
Not all but many of today's problems are amplified with the world going online.
And Europe wants to go digital but we want to do it in our truly “European way”, in full respect of our fundamental principles. Our digital agenda that we are rolling out, with today's European Democracy Action Plan and the Digital Services Act soon, among others, aims to shape our information space for the next at least 20 years. It will determine our digital soul for what President von der Leyen called the EU's digital decade.
We are presenting the European Action Democracy Plan, which reacts on a number of new problems and risks. We try to solve following ones.
We have seen the rise of extremism, especially online; a lack of transparency and accountability of online platforms; insufficient application of rules relevant for elections in the digital world or sometimes lack of any rules; we have seen interference in our democratic processes, and the situation of the media and safety of journalists is deteriorating.
And now we are in the middle of Covid-19 pandemic which made all those risks even stronger and more endangering.
The Democracy Action Plan tries to react on all these worrying trends:
By enforcing rules on fair competition in online public debates;
By protecting the integrity in the electoral process;
By involving and empowering the public;
By strengthening the media;
And last but not least by fighting disinformation and interference.
Let me know briefly describe the key pillars of this plan.
Part 1 – elections
Elections laws date from the offline reality and are not fit for the online world. But political campaigning has moved online. The aim of the plan is to close this gap.
I therefore will prepare the legislation on transparency in online political advertising. I speak about the next year. This is indicatively planned for third quarter of the next year. And just make a comment on the whole European Democracy Action Plan, this is the plan which foresees the future actions to come over the whole mandate of this Commission. So now, I am speaking about next year's activity – legislation on transparency in political advertising.
We are convinced that people must know why they are seeing an ad, who paid for it, how much, what micro-targeting criteria were used. New technologies should be tools for emancipation, not for manipulation.
I don't want elections to be a competition of dirty methods. We saw enough with the Cambridge Analytica scandal or the Brexit referendum.
This is why I want to limit the micro-targeting criteria. Promoting political ideas is not the same as promoting products.
Part 2 of the plan - Media pluralism and media freedom
This Plan, together with the Media and Audiovisual Action Plan that we have just adopted, too, is our political declaration – we do not abandon media and journalists in difficult situation.
Media are not only an economic sector; they are the fourth estate and one of the pillars of democracy.
Yet. Journalists are attacked, harassed online. 73% of female journalists globally have experienced online violence in the course of their work.
Since the start of 2020, at least 140 journalists and media workers were attacked during protests in 11 Member States.
We will work with Member States and the sector to propose a Recommendation on the safety of journalists.
[ Ссылка ] #eudebates
