The spread of disinformation in digital media represents a growing challenge and a serious threat to social peace and democratic processes. Messenger services such as Telegram and WhatsApp in particular have developed into platforms on which false information is spread on a massive scale. So far, there is a lack of effective counter-strategies tailored to the complex dynamics of disinformation spread on messenger services. In this policy paper, researchers from computer science, law, psychology and journalism (funded by the BMBF project DYNAMO) present joint recommendations for action and point out the need for further research.
First, it describes how messenger services are used to form anti-constitutional and state-skeptical counter-publics. When analyzing the current legal framework, it is found that existing legal acts, such as the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), do not adequately address the specific challenges of disinformation in messenger services. There is therefore a clear need for additional measures to effectively curb the spread of disinformation in messenger services in a way that complies with fundamental rights. The policy paper makes concrete proposals to supplement the DSA that are tailored to the special situation of messenger services.
The focus of the policy paper is the analysis and evaluation of an approach to preventing the spread of disinformation in messenger services, so-called prebunking. In comparison to conventional fact-checking, prebunking begins before the actual spread of disinformation by either providing specific information about individual disinformation content (narrow spectrum) or training general media literacy (broad spectrum). Taking into account current psychological and communication science research results, prebunking is critically evaluated with regard to its technological and legal feasibility. Even if prebunking can be viewed as a well-implementable strategy overall and broad approaches represent a technically easy-to-implement and fundamental rights-preserving way of regulating messenger services, psychological studies indicate that content-specific approaches could be more effective. Further research is therefore required into empirical effectiveness and fundamental rights-compliant and practical applicability.
