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Responding to digital threats

Which are the possible responses to emerging digital threats?
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Well, responses are difficult. We don’t have– we are facing a digital revolution. And all the checks and balances that we had built in decades or centuries of constitutional, legal, and economic balances are in discussion. So in the short term, we are very worried for electoral processes. But we don’t have a good instrument to intervene. We have good the rules for offline control of media and electoral processes. We should try to transfer this rule online. But the authorities normally they don’t have the ability to do this. So they have to ask, often, platform to do it themselves. But that’s relying on self-regulation. In such a delicate issue, it’s a very complicated situation. So should at least control the self-regulation is working.
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But even controlling is not easy, because you need a lot of expertise that normally we don’t have.
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So in the short, term I’ll probably– we don’t have much more than self-regulation with some attempt at control. In the midterm, probably instead we could try to change a little bit And this could imply two moves. One move could be regulation, try to regulate this platform. But this requires a big investment in technological ability of the regulators. And the second would be more antitrust. We could probably reconsider the fact, if we can accept that there are media that are dominant. I don’t think that media should be dominant. I think that the dominance in media should be forbidden , as was , historically forbidden for newspaper or for station, we should see that reconsider the reach of digital platforms.

Watch this video, where Pier Luigi Parcu, from the European University Institute, answers the question: “Which are the possible responses to emerging digital threats?”

What do you think?

In your opinion, which measures could countries implement against the spread of fake news and hate speech online?

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