Regulating disinformation in the EU: A research agenda on the institutional strategies, public spheres and methodological challenges

Despite the entrenchment of disinformation/post-truth politics as a political issue (Conrad et al. 2023), public authorities in the EU have so far been mostly reluctant to regulate technology companies in general and social media companies in particular. How to deal with disinformation is an open normative, empirical and political question in all liberal democracies. To understand the process of building the EU's agenda and cooperation networks between different professional and political sectors we analyse the debate to combat disinformation in the EU - constructed by actors coming from different preexisting fields, such as journalism or foreign policy - not only to define what is ‘true’ from what is ‘fake’, but also to determine the sort of public sphere and democracy the EU strives for. We expect that the actors of each field will try to establish the rules of the game, and that it is precisely the pre-existence of these fields which leads the actors present in them to selectively politicize and depoliticize certain aspects at the expense of others in the disinformation regulatory debate (Oleart & Bouza, 2022). The analysis is based upon an empirical analysis of actors demands on recent regulatory projects driven by the EU, such as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Democracy Action Plan (EDAP) or the European Media Freedom Act. In doing so, our contribution to the literature is establishing the connection between different normative understandings of the public sphere, and differentiated policy approaches to address disinformation.