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.

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Commitment 14
In order to limit impermissible manipulative behaviours and practices across their services, Relevant Signatories commit to put in place or further bolster policies to address both misinformation and disinformation across their services, and to agree on a cross-service understanding of manipulative behaviours, actors and practices not permitted on their services. Such behaviours and practices include: The creation and use of fake accounts, account takeovers and bot-driven amplification, Hack-and-leak operations, Impersonation, Malicious deep fakes, The purchase of fake engagements, Non-transparent paid messages or promotion by influencers, The creation and use of accounts that participate in coordinated inauthentic behaviour, User conduct aimed at artificially amplifying the reach or perceived public support for disinformation.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 14.3
In line with this commitment, did you deploy new implementation measures (e.g. changes to your terms of service, new tools, new policies, etc)?
No
If yes, list these implementation measures here
No
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 14.3
Relevant Signatories will convene via the Permanent Task-force to agree upon and publish a list and terminology of TTPs employed by malicious actors, which should be updated on an annual basis.
 Allinace4Europe has continuously mapped and reported on tactics and techniques used by threat actors on social media platforms, supporting the signatures with data for their reviewing of the list of TTPs.