Alliance4Europe

Report March 2025

Submitted
For the European Elections, Alliance4Europe convened a network that now consists of around 42 organisations and 130 researchers, fact-checkers, academics, and journalists. It was later named the Counter Disinformation Network and now consists of 47 organisations and over 200 participants from 11 EU and 5 non-EU countries.

 Network participants produced 37 alerts in 2024, sent out to government agencies, EU institutions, social media platforms, and advocacy groups. The Code of Practice Rapid Response System was utilized to flag the alerts which touched elections and the relevant platforms. 

 The members of the network managed to identify: 
 - 700 channels violating sanctions against Russian media or sanctioned individuals on social media platforms;
 
 - 611 influence operation ads not labelled as political or touching social issues at the time of posting;
 
 - 131 instances of unlabelled AI-generated images used by European political parties;
 
 - Identified an enforcement issue in enforcing Meta’s Ad policy towards Chinese state-controlled media
 
 - 1.6k Doppelganger tweets;
 
 - Over 800 organisations targeted by a Russian influence operation;
 
 - Approximately 99k violations against the French election silence period;
 
 - Two platforms' reporting systems fell short of their DSA obligations during the French elections;
 
 Our reports have according to members of the community contributed to:
 
 - The takedown of a network of inauthentic Facebook pages operated from West Africa, targeting France with unlabelled political ads;
 
 - Geo-fencing or takedown of over 100 pages violating sanctions against Russia. 

- The labelling of unlabelled political ads;

- Submission of evidence to EU institutions and national authorities;

- Over 40 meetings with officials from different EU countries and institutions raising our findings;

- Over 60 articles in the press, reaching over 2 million readers.

- Providing actionable intelligence to the Europan Commission, members of the European Parliament, the European External Action Service, and several EU member state government institutions on the EU, French, Romanian, and German elections.

- Connected smaller organisations with EU officials, providing expert voices a way into Brussels.
 A4E also provided over 70 researchers, fact-checkers, academics, and journalists with training on the use of the DISARM framework.

- Organised 16 workshops and presentations targeting a broad public, at least reaching 450 participants.

 The Code of Practice on Disinformation Election Working Group and the RSS are to be attributed to parts of the success of the network.

Download PDF

Commitment 12
Relevant Signatories commit to increase oversight of political and issue advertising and constructively assist, as appropriate, in the creation, implementation and improvement of political or issue advertising policies and practices.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 12.1 Measure 12.3
In line with this commitment, did you deploy new implementation measures (e.g. changes to your terms of service, new tools, new policies, etc)?
Alliance4Europe has defined unlabelled political or issue advertising as one of our focus areas in our influence operations research, and have been providing feedback to the platforms on how to improve their policies. 
If yes, list these implementation measures here
We listed unlabelled political or issue advertising in the training we provide and the different collaborative monitoring projects we engage in, such as elections monitoring. From the cases we identified, we have developed recommendations. 
Do you plan to put further implementation measures in place in the next 6 months to substantially improve the maturity of the implementation of this commitment?
No
If yes, which further implementation measures do you plan to put in place in the next 6 months?
No
Measure 12.1
Relevant Signatories agree to work individually and together through the Task-force to identify novel and evolving disinformation risks in the uses of political or issue advertising and discuss options for addressing those risks.
Alliance4Europe worked to research, monitor and report on the use of online political or issue advertising across Member States. Our reports highlighted systemic issues with one specific social media. The two issues detected were: 
- Automated ad labelling systems circumvention methods used by foreign threat actors to intervene in the French elections,
- Platform regulation of state-controlled media ads - not labelling an authoritarian state's ads as political or issue advertising. 

Both issues were at least partially addressed. 
QRE 12.1.1
Alliance4Europe has monitored the ad libraries of social media platforms for unlabelled political and social issues ads. In 2024, we identified 611 unlabelled ads and reported them to the social media platforms through the CoP RRS. In these conversations, we highlighted the underlying techniques used to circumvent their ad policies. We also publicly published reports on these cases and provided recommendations.