En la cubierta: "STUDY Requested by the LIBE committee"

Bibliografía: p. 93-106

This study explores the European legal framework and analyses the roles of all stakeholders in the information landscape. The study offers recommendations to reform the attention-based, data-driven information landscape and regulate platforms’ rights and duties relating to content moderation. Disinformation has become a constant feature of the attention-based, data-driven information landscape. This study aims at introducing how the operating mechanism of this information system fosters disinformation by creating an optimal environment for its creation, dissemination and proliferation. The result of this malfunction is a reduced functionality of the discursive social space, which interferes with citizens’ right to receive accurate information, which would be the passive side of freedom of expression, and a cornerstone of democracies. This study discusses the responses to disinformation from this perspective. Building on a wide range of recent research on various aspects of disinformation, this study keeps its focus on the legal and theoretical analysis of the responses to disinformation from the perspective of freedom of expression. International case law on freedom of expression did not yet come to address specifically disinformation-related legal questions. Still, the conclusions from existing case law are obvious. On the one hand, imparting information, even false facts, is protected unless it violates the rights of others or concrete public interests such as public health, morals, or security. The press enjoys a specific privilege and currently, even bloggers and other unofficial authors may be regarded as public watchdogs for the purposes of protection. The European Convention on Human Rights also requires states to protect human rights from being restricted by private actors. Measures that limit the spread of disinformation, such as deprioritising and labelling rather than removing or blocking it, are regarded as more proportionate in the practice of the Court of Justice of the EU and the European Court of Human Rights.