The Facebook page in Slovakia called Som z dediny, which means “I’m from the village”, trumpeted a debunked Russian claim last month that Ukraine’s President had secretly purchased a vacation home in Egypt under his mother-in-law’s name.

A post on Telegram — later recycled on Instagram and other sites — suggested that a parliamentary candidate in the country’s coming election had died from a Covid vaccine, though he remains very much alive. A far-right leader posted on Facebook a photograph of refugees in Slovakia doctored to include an African man brandishing a machete.

As Slovakia heads towards an election on Saturday, the country has been inundated with disinformation and other harmful content on social media sites. What is different now is a new EU law that could force the world’s social media platforms to do more to fight it — or else face fines of up to 6 per cent of a company’s revenue.

The law, the Digital Services Act, is intended to force social media giants to adopt new policies and practices to address accusations that they routinely host — and, through their algorithms, popularize — corrosive content. If the measure is successful, as officials and experts hope, its effects could extend far beyond Europe, changing company policies in the US and elsewhere.

The law, years of painstaking bureaucracy in the making, reflects a growing alarm in European capitals that the unfettered flow of disinformation online — much of it fueled by Russia and other foreign adversaries — threatens to erode the democratic governance at the core of the European Union’s values.

Europe’s effort sharply contrasts with the fight against disinformation in the US, which has become mired in political and legal debates over what steps, if any, the government may take in shaping what the platforms allow on their sites.

A federal appeals court ruled this month that the Biden administration had very likely violated the First Amendment guarantee of
free speech by urging social media companies to remove content.

Europe’s new law has already set the stage for a clash with Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter. Musk withdrew from a voluntary code of conduct this year but must comply with the new law — at least within the EU’s market of nearly 450 million people.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Thierry Breton, the European commissioner who oversees the bloc’s internal market, warned on the social network shortly after Musk’s withdrawal.

The election in Slovakia, the first in Europe since the law went into effect last month, will be an early test of the law’s impact. Other elections loom in Luxembourg and Poland next month.

New York Times News Service