EDMO and its network of national and regional Hubs have extensive experience monitoring and countering disinformation before, during and after elections across EU Member States and beyond.
This report draws on four EDMO Hubs’ experience across six recent high-stakes elections and their contributions to the EDMO Taskforce for Elections and Crisis-Related Disinformation. The Taskforce became operational at the end of April 2026, building on existing cooperation between EDMO.eu, which entered its third phase in March 2026, and the relevant Hubs. This included guidance on the Rapid Response System (RRS) under the Code of Practice on Disinformation, now the Code of Conduct, particularly during the April 2026 elections in Hungary (covered by HDMO) and Bulgaria (BROD).
The report also covers the May 2026 general elections in Malta and Cyprus, monitored by MedDMO, and the 2025 elections in Moldova and Romania. Although the latter preceded the Taskforce’s establishment, FACT and BROD shared their findings with the wider EDMO network and received support from EDMO.eu, particularly on the RRS. Other elections covered by the EDMO Taskforce, such as those in Denmark, Sweden and Latvia, were not significantly affected by disinformation campaigns on social media and are therefore not included in the report.
Focusing on social media and online platforms, the report identifies lessons learned through the RRS and areas where EU-level action could improve platforms’ efforts to counter disinformation and inform the revision of the DSA Election Guidelines.
One important caveat: platforms often respond to disinformation-related issues reported by organizations within the EDMO network by removing content. As EDMO, we neither endorse nor support this practice. We believe that a better approach is to label content and inform the public about what is false or misleading and why. When platforms remove content without explaining the reasons for doing so, as often happens, this makes the situation even worse and can undermine the effectiveness of the remedy, fuelling the spread of further conspiracy theories and disinformation about the removals themselves.
Moreover, targeting content is not only problematic but also less effective than targeting accounts. Bots are not real people and therefore have no human rights of their own to protect. Accounts operated by real people who systematically violate the law and platform rules, on the other hand, should be sanctioned, as they would be in the offline world, in order to protect other users and deter criminal and predatory behaviour.
