Jakub Szymik, Founder of CEE Digital Democracy Watch, discusses the EU's ongoing initiatives to fight disinformation, regulate political advertising, and protect election integrity on social media. Jakub shares his insights on the Digital Services Act, the European Democracy Shield, and how these initiatives relate to digital political advertising on social media. We also discuss the latest Polish Presidential elections in terms of digital ad spending, Gen AI content, and political influencers.

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CEE Digital Democracy Watch has just published a new report outlining how 60 stakeholder from CEE countries perceive the effectiveness of EU tech regulation and what challenges remain moving forward.

Read more about CEE Digital Democracy Watch's proposed policy actions for the European Democracy Shield, including the disinformation monitoring service mentioned in the episode.

Dan Brahmy, Co-Founder and CEO at Cyabra, discusses the cutting-edge in disinformation monitoring. Dan shares some of Cyabra's work around the new pope, the tariff war, and narratives following the Trump assassination attempt. We discuss how monitoring works technically, what type of attributes are used to classify accounts as inauthentic, and how source attribution can be identified through patterns.

Special thanks to Jill Burkes, PR and Communications lead at Cyabra, for setting up and contributing to the episode!

Here's the link to Cyabra's newsletter.

Dr. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik and Dr. Ioana Literat share research from their new book Not Your Parent's Politics: Understanding Young People's Political Expression on Social Media.

We discuss how young people use social media such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to experiment with their political identity, even if they are too young to vote. Examples from the 2016 US election, Black Lives Matter protests, and climate anxiety help illustrate the various ways that youth express their political opinions across social media platforms. We also discuss how to approach these expressions from a democratic and citizenship perspective.

Dr. Kligler-Vilenchik is Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dr. Literat is an Associate Professor in the Communication, Media and Learning Technologies Design program at Teachers College, Columbia University.