I started thinking about this article while travelling back to Rome from Udine, my home town, where I had participated as a speaker in the presentation of Europa Radicale’s Peste Putiniana dossier. Between university and work commitments, I only had time to put my ideas in order last night, and today the piece arrives.

What prompted me to write was the question, rhetorical up to a point, that I asked towards the end of my speech.

“Can we counter, within the limits of democracy, the wave of disinformation launched at us by authoritarian states; the very ones who trample democracy and freedom of the press underfoot on a daily basis?“

Necessary scruples or structural weaknesses? The fragility of our cardboard shield

To answer this question seriously, we need to broaden our gaze. It is not enough to look at current events: we need to understand how the information war works today and what Europe’s position really is in this scenario. A position that, to look at it honestly, resembles more that of a defendant defending himself by citing codes than that of a general studying the battlefield.

The first truth, often unspoken, is that the EU approaches disinformation with the tools of a jurist rather than those of a strategist.

The main reason is historical, and also understandable. After the tragedies of the 20th century, we have built a political order based on a deep – almost visceral – distrust of any form of information control. Freedom of the press, plurality of opinion, and suspicion of state propaganda have become inalienable pillars, true articles of civil faith.

This spirit also permeates recent regulations such as the Digital Services Act, which aims to empower digital platforms without compressing freedom of expression. A very subtle balancing act, pursued with almost obsessive scrupulousness.

The problem arises when these same scruples are applied to actors who share none of them. Democracies weigh every word so as not to violate a right; authoritarian apparatuses treat information as a mere weapon to be deployed on the geopolitical field.

This creates astructural asymmetry, even before the tactical one: those who defend freedom are forced to move with surgical caution, while those who fight it know no operational limits. From our perspective, it is like pretending to win a game of football by respecting the rules against opponents who take the ball in their hands and put it in the goal.

The difficulty of a European response

We Europeans possess one of the most sophisticated regulatory apparatuses in the world. But this very complexity makes it difficult to orchestrate a coordinated communication strategy.

Any attempt to build a common narrative is viewed with suspicion, as if the Union risks slipping into propaganda. The fear of resembling one’s adversaries thus ends up paralysing the ability to react. It is the paradox of a mature democracy: so aware of its past mistakes that it even fears its own defences.

Meanwhile, other actors move with radically different logic.

The Internet Research Agency, which was for years controlled by the notorious Evgenij Prigožhin, operated with theexplicit aim of polluting Western political debate, interfering heavily and demonstrably in the US elections and the 2016 Brexit referendum. Today, the service has been directly absorbed into the Kremlin and FSB structures, and operations continue in an even more mellifluous form.

Read more: Kremlin goons: how Russia built a killing machine in Europe.

At the same time, digital offensives traceable to the People’s Republic of China have been analysed by institutes such as theAustralian Strategic Policy Institute, which has mapped coordinated influence campaigns on major global social networks, to which are added exorbitant editorial campaigns in the world’s leading newspapers, traceable directly to the ‘joyous war machine’ that is Beijing’s Foreign Ministry.

In the face of these systematic strategies, financed, planned and executed with almost military discipline, our response is slow, fragmented and perpetually on the defensive.

The paradox of the western digital ecosystem

Further complicating the picture is a phenomenon that deserves its own analysis: the double standard of the Western information ecosystem.

Digital platforms and a significant part of the European media system exercise strict, often sacrosanct, vigilance over the statements of democratic governments. Fact-checking and rigorous cross-checking have become ordinary, almost liturgical tools of public debate.

But this same severity tends to soften, sometimes to the point of disappearance, when narratives come from authoritarian regimes.

The result is a bitter paradox: the most open systems also become the most exposed. Thus transparency, a democratic virtue par excellence, turns into vulnerability.

The cognitive warfare of the 21st century

Moscow and Beijing realised before we did that information is now a battlefield in its own right. Not an appendix to foreign policy, but its main theatre.

The disinformation campaigns linked to the war in Ukraine, monitored by theEuropean External Action Service among others, have revealed a global network of sites, bots and coordinated accounts that systematically amplify anti-Western narratives. An industrial infrastructure of falsehood, aimed at justifying the Russian imperialist projection.

The Chinese strategy is even more refined. Rather than destroying democratic debate head-on, it tends to saturate it: multiplying messages and interpretations to the point of making it impossible to distinguish true from false, fact from opinion, news from manipulation.

In this scenario, our strategic minority is evident: we are unable to follow a line that is authentically our own, oscillating between the propaganda of our adversaries and the narratives coming from the United States. This in the internal debate leads to mistrust, resignation and blandishments towards autocratic systems.

The real issue: who controls the algorithms

The decisive point, which will determine the balance of the coming decades, concerns the structure of digital information itself.

Today, the perception of reality is no longer only shaped by newspapers or television. It is increasingly shaped by social algorithms that decide what we see on our screens every day. Billions of automatic micro-decisions that direct collective attention with a precision that no publisher of the past could have dreamed of.

The major search engines, social platforms and artificial intelligence models that organise global information flows are almost entirely controlled by non-European companies.

In other words: the feed has become the new editorial. And we Europeans do not (yet) own the headline.

The emblematic case, long covered by L’Europeista, is that of TikTok, controlled by the government company ByteDance. Analyses conducted by research centres such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies have shown how algorithms profile users by targeting their content for political purposes; but above all, they operate to induce addiction to Western GenZ.

In China, the app’s equivalent, Douyin, frequently promotes educational, scientific, edifying content.In the West, distribution tends instead to favour fast, viral, and under-stimulating entertainment.

There is no need to imagine sophisticated conspiracies: the architecture of algorithms is able to direct collective attention with the precision of a watchmaker. And whoever controls the clock, controls time.

Without sovereignty over these instruments, talking about strategic autonomy or cultural identity amounts to a mere rhetorical exercise.

Do we still believe in ourselves?

In the end, any technical analysis gives way to the simplest and at the same time most challenging question.

Assuming that defending democracy without betraying it is only possible if democracies truly believe in their values; ultimately, do we still believe in our values?

We have built our contemporary political identity on the memory of 20th century tragedies and on the defence of individual freedoms: an immense heritage that no other continent can boast to the same extent. A heritage that must not, however, result in victimhood and institutionalised penitential narratives, less so in shame about who we are and fear of telling our stories.

If we Europeans continue to treat the defence of our information space with embarrassment, the battle will be lost before it has even begun.

If, on the other hand, we manage to rediscover ourselves as proud Europeans, children of the greatest political civilisations in history, then we will also be able to face the new information war.

Because the challenge of the 21st century will not be won by censoring ideas. It will be won by a democracy confident enough to defend itself without denying what makes it so.

And with a Europe finally aware that it is, even today, much more than a mere spectator of history.