In Italy, as elsewhere, one approach puts the onus squarely on tech companies. Matteo Renzi, the leader of Italy’s governing center-left Democratic Party, told The New York Times last November that the very quality of Italian democracy depended on the help of social-networking sites, especially Facebook. To that end, Facebook rolled out for its Italian users this month a new fact-checking program aimed at identifying and debunking false information that appears on the site. Like similar efforts Facebook has launched in the past, the program relies on user reporting and third-party fact checkers to flag potential false material. But unlike past fact-checking tools that only flagged the posts as false (an effort that paradoxically caused the content to be shared more, not less), this new scheme takes that effort one step further.

“We scan Facebook pages we suspect spread false and misleading information,” said Giovanni Zagni, the director of Pagella Politica, an independent fact-checking organization Facebook is paying to spearhead its efforts in Italy. “Once we find a news article that is obviously false, we write a fact-checking piece that is published in a specific section of our website and we provide its link to Facebook.” Facebook, in turn, displays the piece as a “related article” next to the false story it disputes, which is subsequently demoted on the Facebook algorithm. Users who attempt to share the false reports also receive a notification that alerts them the content has been disputed by fact checkers, and encourages them to read the fact checker’s article. As for what kind of content attracts Pagella Politica’s attention, Zagni said the group focuses on falsehoods, not political commentary. “We do not think of ourselves as arbiters of the truth.”

Meanwhile, Italy has parallel efforts underway to help readers become their own arbiters. Italian lawmakers launched an experimental project in October to make media literacy—including how to recognize falsehoods and conspiracy theories online—part of the country’s high-school education curriculum. As The New York Times reported in October, the program aims to teach students how to identify suspect URLs, as well as encourage them to verify news stories by reaching out to experts themselves. And last month, the Italian government unveiled a new online portal that allows people to report false reports they see online.

These efforts may seem piecemeal and haphazard—it’s tough to find evidence of an overall strategy to combat disinformation in Italy, or elsewhere, for that matter. But Italy’s is among the best-developed and targeted approaches launched in Europe so far. In Germany and France, new laws have been introduced aiming to stop or punish the spread of false news—mainly by targeting social-media companies. Other countries, like the U.K. and the Czech Republic, have launched government units tasked with combatting disinformation.