Online Disinformation: Regulatory Issues and Approaches in the European Legal Landscape

Today, in the context of post-truth, public political discourse is less and less anchored in the objective and truthful narrative of facts. Instead, it relies on appealing to people’s emotions and preconceptions, which allow the emergence of forms of informational pollution that primarily affect freedom of expression and more broadly democratic and constitutional values and fundamental rights. This scenario has been further problematized by the development of generative AI systems, which often risk producing inaccurate, unreliable or hallucinatory knowledge, or can be deliberately used to mislead information recipients. This calls for examining the phenomenon of disinformation, with particular attention to its online dimension, to understand its impact in the current socio-political context and investigate the main regulatory approaches developed in Europe.