European Parliament Election 2024 - DRT Report

Executive Summary

This report is a summary of the tasks and activities of the Disinformation Response Team (DRT) set up to support the larger European community in addressing disinformation threats arising in the lead up to and during the European Parliament (EP) election, held between 6 and 9 June 2024. The report also lists the learnings and recommendations for improving the future iterations of similar DRTs.

Context

2024 is a milestone year for elections across the globe. Nearly 64 countries are scheduled to go to polls in 2024, with more than 4 billion people eligible to vote. Simultaneously, mis- and disinformation targeting these elections has been identified as one of the biggest challenges, especially for platforms operating in the information ecosystem.

Complementary to the ongoing efforts of the self-governing volunteer communities, the Trust & Safety team has decided to focus support on three major elections in 2024, and the EP election was one of them (alongside India and the US). In line with the team’s goal of effectively addressing disinformation risks emerging from the 2024 EP election, a formal DRT was set up in May. It was composed of members of the T&S Disinformation and the Human Rights team. Outreach emails to join the DRT were also sent to:

7 Arbitration Committees (English, Czech, Finish, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, and German language Wikipedia communities),
6 Communities/User groups/affiliates (EN functionaries, French, Spanish, Italian, Ireland, Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova), and
All Stewards

Learning from the India election and other DRTs, staff also sent targeted emails to 3 trusted editors and functionaries.

Incident Analysis

In the weeks leading up to the election and the 4 days of voting, no major disinformation incident was reported to the DRT. Given the strong track record of communities to resolve issues on their own projects, this was not entirely surprising. In the DRT meeting held 2 weeks prior to the election, community members had highlighted the increased likelihood of vandalism and promotional edits rather than disinformation attacks. Since community members have deep experience dealing with such issues, they were able to address it without intervention needed from the Foundation as platform provider.

The other issue that the communities highlighted was the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make edits on Wikipedia. Editors noted a lot of block revisions made by AI. They also said they were aware of and addressing the issue of spammers using AI to generate articles. However, they had not seen any instance of AI being used for disinformation purposes on the projects.

Overall, there was no major disinformation activity on Wikipedia during the EP election. This is most likely because most misinformation continued to appear on social media, which Wikipedia projects by default do not consider to be reliable sources. This was an observation similar to what was seen during the Indian election, the Polish election, and other DRTs prior.

Recommendations

Drawing from the findings above, there are three key learnings and recommendation:

Diverse DRT composition

Learning from the experience of the Indian elections in April 2024, the invitation to join the DRT was sent not only in a broadcast message to the European community, but also targeted outreach to specific, trusted editors. This ensured that interested individuals joined the T&S team in anti-disinformation efforts. Also, because the EU region is so diverse (multiple languages and their corresponding Wikipedia language versions), the outreach plan intended to establish collaboration with editors from all possible language versions as helpful to the communities. This kind of diversity ensures the surfacing of different concerns even when they are not disinformation related, but impact the integrity of the elections.

Continue sharing insights and training with the community sufficiently well before the key event

As we saw with the pre-election exploration, there is value in sharing information and insights with the community leading up to any notable election. We will also continue sharing training and resources such as the self-paced disinformation and digital security trainings with volunteers well ahead of the election. Both these steps will ensure that community members involved in election focused anti-disinformation efforts are aware of and prepared for the most relevant risks.

2-way communication with the impacted community

The T&S team shared training and resources with the European community members well ahead of the election. However, this iteration of the DRT also included new types of insights shared by the community with the T&S team. Dedicated pre-election DRT meetings with the European community outside the regular, broader meeting frameworks for the Foundation-volunteer partnership coordination helped surface specific concerns that communities had identified. This was greatly beneficial because the DRT was able to reassess its priorities and focus on the threats that were actually materializing than the ones staff anticipated would materialize - an important insight given delicate elections ahead in both the US and Eastern Europe later this year.