Generational Perspectives on EU Documents Tackling Disinformation

Abstract

The last decade witnessed great transformations concerning the internet with the perils of disinformation becoming key concerns among political actors. Within this framework, the EU has developed efforts to approach these digital challenges taking into account the political challenges. These challenges are related with elections and trust in information campaigns and media coverage. However, they don’t take in consideration a generational approach. This has an impact on effective and valuable relationships between citizens and the EU demands. This chapter intends to shed light on Europe’s efforts to address disinformation from a generational-driven perspective, focusing on five key documents that the EU has created in 2018 to tackle disinformation as, for political reasons, 2018 was a strategic year to engage citizens in the democratic process anticipating EU parliament elections. By means of document and thematic analysis, this chapter points to the poor achievement of this objective, given that the analyzed documents weakly address different generational groups, their specific problems, and needs. It thus calls for more generational-oriented communication policies.