The role of the Regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising and European Media Freedom Act in the EU’s anti-disinformation strategy

The EU takes many different actions against disinformation. With the adoption of the Digital Services Act (‘DSA’), the EU took legal measures against disinformation for the first time. The DSA has been supplemented by new legislation which has received considerably less attention for its anti-disinformation goals: the Regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising (‘TTPA Regulation’) and European Media Freedom Act (‘EMFA’). The goal of this paper is to bring the TTPA Regulation and EMFA into the debate about the EU’s actions against disinformation. This paper shows how the TTPA Regulation and EMFA are meant to help with curbing disinformation and how they complement the DSA and Code of Conduct on Disinformation. The paper also shows how the TTPA Regulation and EMFA should be understood against three developments in the line of actions that the EU took against disinformation over the past decade, leading to new research questions about the EU’s legal measures against disinformation.