THE risk of voters being exposed to disinformation campaigns ahead of this week’s
European Parliament elections is very much alive, EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova has warned on Wednesday.

“The fact that, at this moment, we don’t know about any big disinformation attack does not mean that it doesn’t exist; maybe
it has not been discovered.

“We still have several days ahead of us. This is not paranoia, this is carefulness. What matters is to be prepared,’’ Jourova told dpa.

Over 420 million people are eligible to vote in the European Union elections taking place from Thursday to Sunday, one of the
world’s largest democratic exercises.

Following accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and online meddling in that year’s Brexit
referendum, EU officials are concerned about efforts to manipulate the European elections in favour of eurosceptic parties.

The European Commission has taken several steps in recent months to counter disinformation, launching a rapid alert system
and enlisting the help of social media giants Facebook, Google and Twitter, among other things.

Jourova said she was not reassured by the absence of any obvious evidence of Russian manipulation in the EU elections.

“The fact that we don’t have any big, isolated case which we could present doesn’t mean that the small cases don’t have any impact,’’ she noted.

The Czech national recalled her own experiences before the fall of the Iron Curtain, noting that lies tend to be far more “sexy” than the reality.

“I remember very well how the Russian propaganda works.

“A 100-times repeated lie becomes the truth,’’ the commissioner said.

-NAN

BE

– May 22, 2019 @ 11:24 GMT |