Leveraging its field-specific expertise, the EDMO Network has surveyed three important areas of the Code of Practice on Disinformation dealing with media literacy, empowerment of researchers and empowerment of fact-checkers, with a view to assessing the quality and effectiveness of the actions reported by very large online platforms and search engines in their September 2023 transparency reports.

Three main messages emerge from this analysis. Firstly, despite recent launches of new tools for researchers, access to data remains an unfulfilled condition and quick progress needs to be made by all platform signatories of the Code to ensure transparency and accountability of their risk mitigation measures. Secondly, structural support and funding of fact-checking, research and media literacy expert communities remain inadequate. Thirdly, progress towards the integration of independent experts’ feedback into platforms’ user-facing tools is still patchy and insufficient.

EDMO will further engage with all the regional and national EDMO Hubs to strengthen and deepen its monitoring of platforms’ future transparency reports.