Safeguarding the Public Debate from Disinformation: EU Perspectives During the 2024 European Parliament Elections

The 2024 European Parliament elections happened about ten years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed the scale of social media interference in democratic processes. Given the persistent concerns about disinformation and its effects on the democratic process, and against a decade of political and public concern about disinformation, this paper examines how disinformation was framed in EU political discourse during the 2024 election campaign. Drawing on a frame analysis of three communicative registers, namely European Parliament plenary debates, party manifestos, and X posts by key political actors during the 2024 European Parliament election campaign, we identify three dominant narratives that articulate the disinformation problem in markedly different ways, revealing a tendency towards ideological asymmetry. Across these narratives, diagnostic framings are generally more developed than prognostic ones, with proposed responses remaining limited and often repetitive. Salient issues linked to contemporary information environments, particularly artificial intelligence, receive comparatively little attention. Overall, the findings suggest that disinformation was an infrequently invoked topic and only rarely treated as a central political issue. Despite a decade of public and policy attention to disinformation, political actors largely reproduced problem-oriented narratives, while discussion of concrete responses remained limited.