Mr. Paolo Cesarini:

I agree fully that fact-checking is not a silver bullet. Nevertheless, there is a need to create more clarity about the trustworthiness of the information space within which we experience our access to news on a daily basis. Fact checkers can make an important contribution that has to remain independent from any public interference. The initiative must come from the media sector. The SOMA project is helping fact-checking organisations that have been growing over the past couple of years, having entered this newly emerging market, to work together to avoid duplications, to learn from one another and to develop fact-checking in a proper way. Mr. Packalén's question raises the important question of where to draw the limits between news and views, or between what is false and what is real. It would be a dangerous move to concentrate on the idea of regulating content. We have to focus much more of our attention on detecting, analysing, preventing and, where necessary, sanctioning online behaviours that are systematically directed towards the amplification of certain stories and narratives and that use the vulnerabilities that exist in the current digital media ecosystem to mislead the users of such media by making them believe that a certain story has popular support when, in fact, it does not. We need to hide the authors and vectors that have been helping this manipulation to happen.

In other terms, we should be much more focused when we talk about regulation and much more concerned about the conduct than the content, although the content FactCheck has provided and the analysis it has carried out are important in order to provide leads to identify the kinds of conduct that could be reprehensible in a regulatory framework.