When asked about the selection process and potential conflicts of interests within the group, Commissioner Gabriel’s cabinet insisted they had carefully examined applications from organisations that said they had received funding from Google. This was done in order “to exclude situations where applicants would have an interest that could compromise or be reasonably perceived to compromise their capacity to act independently”, a cabinet member states.

Divina Frau-Meigs, who teaches media sociology at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris and was also a member of the expert group, stresses the integrity of the academics in the group, who she believes were working honestly and diligently.

However, she still found the financial relationship between the platforms and some other group members troublesome: "It’s a very subtle dependency relationship: it is difficult to focus on the platform that supports you, even without strings attached. Having a financial relationship lays you suspect to some kind of bias of self-censorship.”

“It's been known for some time that Google, Facebook and other tech companies give money to academics and journalists,” said Ska Keller, the German MEP. “There is a problem because they can use the threat of stopping this funding if these academics or journalists criticise them in any reporting they do."

According to Frau-Meigs, independent funding for academics as well as journalists is extremely important. “Google and Facebook are paying these partnerships from their direct marketing arm, not through more neutral foundations,” she says.

The fact that platforms support both academics and journalists is in itself not a problem for Frau-Meigs as long as it is transparent, but the lack of clear criteria and a separate funding entity is. This can lead to a complicated and opaque situation, as the expert group’s example demonstrates. Frau-Meigs concludes: “The platforms should not exert influence the way they do now.”

A hobbled code

When the ‘high-level group’ on fake news and online disinformation was created it had grand ambitions. Commissioner Gabriel – alarmed by the Brexit vote and Trump’s election – announced in autumn 2017: "The fake news phenomenon is not new, but the reach and speed with which disinformation has spread online is unprecedented.” She said she had decided to call together a group of experts “in order to find a common solution to this growing phenomenon”.

The code of practice that the European Commission adopted last September certainly included some valuable guidelines. It acknowledged the need to improve the scrutiny of advertisement placements; to ensure the transparency of political and issue-based advertising; to establish clear labelling and rules for bots so that they would not be confused with human interaction; and to reduce the visibility of disinformation by making trustworthy content easier to find and by ensuring users have access to different news sources with a range of viewpoints.

A significant omission, however, was the mechanisms proposed by Goyens and others that would have forced the platforms to be more transparent about their business models and, in turn, would have helped policymakers assess whether these models might enable or promote disinformation. This was something the platforms tried hard to prevent, according to group members who spoke to Investigate Europe.