AMSTERDAM POLICY PRIZE - APP 2023

The theme APP 2023 is ‘Safeguarding Democracy in the Digital Disinformation Age.’ The European Union has several policies in place related to democracy and disinformation. The European Democracy Action Plan, aiming to strengthen media freedom and counter disinformation, serves as an overarching policy framework. In addition to this action plan, the commission presented the European Media Freedom Act in September 2022, which seeks to bolster the independence and stable funding of public service media. The Guidance on Strengthening the Code of Practice on Disinformation was developed and presented in June 2022, to provide a framework for stakeholder dialogue, as well as transparency and accountability in these policies. These efforts build on the Action Plan on Disinformation, which was presented in December 2018. The action plan acknowledged the key role played by civil society and by social media companies and was created with the European Parliament elections of 2019 in mind. An international organisation to consider is NATO, for which disinformation and information warfare is decidedly important to the security of the alliance as a whole. Finally, last December the government of the Netherlands presented its new strategy for countering disinformation, aimed mostly at strengthening civil society and increasing bureaucrats’ resilience against fake news. 
For the first time in the history of the APP, participants were given three policy options on which they could focus their proposals as a well to give them more freedom to pursue what they believed was the best policy route for the EU. The first track regarded "Curbing Social Media’s antidemocratic tendencies", the second "Restoring Trust in the Fourth Estate" and the last "Proposing a transatlantic grassroots initiative: education on disinformation". The participants could choose one of the three and use them as a base for their proposals.