Description
In the wake of the digital public sphere, efforts to govern online platforms have become an important arena in which democracies must balance between taking regulatory steps to protect democracy and avoiding potentially illiberal methods in doing so. The European Union (EU) has recognized disinformation as a security threat, and concerns have only intensified after the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US elections. Since then, the EU has become one of the leading international institutions addressing disinformation and its regulation, culminating in the implementation of the Digital Services Act in 2022—an EU-wide framework tackling a range of online risks, including the spread of disinformation.
The overarching aim of this paper is to understand why and how the EU advanced its regulatory framework on disinformation, and what this reveals about the tension between defending deliberation and ensuring pluralistic debate in the digital public sphere. Building on Wardle and Derakhshan’s (2017) concept of “information disorder,” the paper critically engages with the term, arguing that invoking disorder presupposes a normative ideal of an informational or epistemic order. Following Arendt’s (1967) insight that lying is a perennial feature of politics, the question is not whether a stable informational order ever existed, but what is distinctive about today’s unruly digital sphere, where algorithms and platform logics transform the conditions of democratic communication.
Theoretically, the paper draws on Habermas’s theory of the public sphere to examine how notions of informational order and disorder interact with democratic values such as pluralism and freedom of expression. Empirically, it analyzes the EU’s approach to disinformation during the 2019–2024 legislative period, focusing on institutional motivations, political actors, and the broader normative implications of regulation for democratic governance.
