In wake of alleged election meddling by Russia and others, Sir Julian King aims for greater transparancy

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The UK’s most senior representative in the European commission has set out a Brussels plan to crack down on disinformation campaigns executed by Russia and non-state actors, which he suggests were deployed during the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Sir Julian King, the commissioner for security in Brussels, warned in a speech that it has become too easy for those seeking to manipulate elections, democratic processes and institutions.

The commission is proposing a series of measures to counter behavioural manipulation and fake news, including an obligation on internet platforms to demand greater transparency from those who use them to micro-target messages at individuals.

Currently the social media tools, King said, “can easily be hijacked by malicious actors – both state and non-state – to subvert our democratic systems and use them as a weapon against us”.

King told an audience in Brussels: “What once might have been dismissed as fantasy has rapidly entered the world of fact with everything from a referendum on an EU agreement with Ukraine, through a referendum on EU membership to a presidential election apparently being fair game.”

The EU’s member states are soon to publish their plans to tackle the hacking of electoral systems and attempts to obtain voter data.

However, the commission is seeking to win round member states’ efforts to tackle a “much more subtle and pernicious” attempt to undermine democracies, through the use of social media as a “weapon of mass disinformation – a WMD for the modern age”.

King said: “In my view, this can take three forms: hacks and leaks designed to change public opinion by revealing damaging information at a crucial point during a campaign; the use of fake news to sway public opinion and influence results; and the misuse of targeted messaging based on psychometrics derived from mined user personality trait data – or Cambridge Analytica for short.”

King said he wanted agreement “in the coming weeks” on a code of practice to ensure internet users were informed as to why certain messages or stories were being fed to them via Facebook or Twitter. The identity of those behind sponsored content should also be clearer.

“Users should know who has created the content they are seeing, who might gain from it, and why it is being shown to them,” he said.

The EU’s monitoring had catalogued “over 4,000 examples of disinformation, including for example 31 disinformation narratives around the chemical attack in Salisbury and 57 around the downing of flight MH17”, King added.

“Thanks to this, we now have a better idea of the main tools, channels and messages of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign,” he said.