There and Back Again. Policy Formulation, Alternatives and Future Outlooks in the EU Regulatory Response to Post-Truth Politics

The story of the EU regulatory response to post-truth challenges a series of struggles first to make sense of the disruption of the public spheres and secondly to establish rules for the new reality. By definition, regulatory politics affects the winners and losers’ positions in a given policy field, and the processes of regulation saw the definition of different and often conflicting proposals of how to regulate by media companies, journalists federations, digital rights NGOs and social media platforms, among others. Whereas the policy concern for disinformation started with foreign interference concerns around 2014, attention turned to social media effect upon elections with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and debates on how to use EU regulatory options started in 2018 and became a clear demand with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The result is the European Democracy Action Plan, whose normative expectations and diverse set of specific measures proposes a systemic response, partially coherent with Habermas' normative for the public sphere. However, using data from the consultations 2018-2024 our process tracing study of the policy outcome as defined by measures such as the Digital Services Act or the European Media Freedom Act shows that the EU response is adaptative and focused mainly on the co-regulation of social media platforms and on the support and to some extent compensation for key intermediaries in the public sphere such as civil society and the media. Alternative regulatory proposals such as the democratic governance of platforms, a more salient role for the public sector in digital communication or greater interoperability between platforms were discarded in different moments of the regulatory process, but the political challenges of the 2025-29 period may make them relevant again.