ELI Digital Law SIG Held a Sixth Seminar in its Speaker Series

13.07.2022

On 13 July 2022, the ELI Digital Law SIG’s webinar entitled ‘Tackling Disinformation Through Procedural Safeguards: The European Union Approach in the Digital Services Act’, was delivered by Oreste Pollicino (Professor, Bocconi University) and Giovanni De Gregorio (Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford).

The European strategy to tackle disinformation has led to a new approach as underlined by the Digital Services Act. Rather than regulating content, the Union has focused on the introduction of procedural safeguards that aim at reducing the discretion of platforms to make decisions on online content, particularly asking very large online platforms to be accountable by requiring them to conduct a risk assessment. The European Commission has also anticipated this system by adopting a Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation that defines a new co-regulatory architecture to fight disinformation. This approach aims at finding an agreement among different stakeholders and plays a critical role as a potential risk mitigation measure, introduced by the Digital Services Act. The webinar addressed the strategy, particularly underlining the role of the Digital Services Act in providing a new horizontal framework of procedural safeguards and the Strengthened Code of Practice of Disinformation as a potentially new approach to tackling disinformation.

More details are available here.