The seminar was delivered by Marta Cantero Gamito (Associate Professor, University of Tartu).

The European Commission put forward a proposal on Media Freedom and Pluralism in Europe, the EMFA. These rules, ultimately seeking to facilitate the independence of media, will apply to media services that exercise editorial control and therefore have editorial responsibility. As a result, these rules do not apply to online platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or TikTok, even if recent events have shown that platforms do exercise a considerable amount of power through content moderation practices.

While the recently enacted Digital Services Act (DSA) addresses media freedom as part of the risk-assessment by Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPS), this raises the question of whether platforms are the ones to assess whether fundamental rights and democracy are at risk. Moreover, the webinar discusses the lack of procedural safeguards in the ‘structured dialogue’ between platforms and media providers when the former decides not to provide their services to media services as foreseen in the EMFA proposal.

More details are available here.