The Republic of Moldova has become a testing ground for new disinformation tools. Because of this, only together can we build a strong and resilient enough Europe. We need to face the challenges of today and tomorrow. This was the message of the president of our country, Maia Sandu, during the European Forum Alpbach 2022, with the generic: “New Europe”, which she attended on August 22, where she also gave a speech.
Maia Sandu declared that “there is no simple answer on how to build a strong and resilient Europe”, but she came up with some theses, which would be a benchmark for “a new Europe”.
“I would like to suggest a few things for discussion: countering misinformation, strengthening energy security and a faster transition to green energy, fighting corruption together and expanding peace, theses that should become projects of the European Union. One of the biggest threats to democracy in Europe today is disinformation. We need to do much more to fight propaganda than we have done in the last decade. For too long, the EU has treated this subject superficially, and the tools used have been ineffective. We have seen the effects of propaganda and disinformation in the case of several elections in European countries,” said Sandu.
As an example, our head of state brought the Republic of Moldova, which, as the president declares, “has become a testing ground for new disinformation tools.”
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“In Moldova, we have become a testing ground for new disinformation tools. We feel their consequences the hard way. Today we are witnessing a full-fledged campaign to justify the war in Ukraine through propaganda and disinformation. And unfortunately, there are many people who fall into this trap, regardless of the country they live in or the language they speak. We need new international norms on social media, however unpopular that may sound. For example, several social networks never respond to requests from Moldovan institutions to suspend pages that share or promote fake news about war, about COVID, or hate speech. If we could develop some common mechanisms and apply them together as an international community, the owners of these social networks could no longer ignore the problem so easily and we could protect our democracy,” Maia Sandu said.
The President says that in order to become more resilient, Europe must ensure its energy security and a faster transition to green energy.
“This crisis has shown that Europe has not invested enough, at the right time, in its own energy security. It needs to reduce market fragmentation, further diversify its energy supply and a faster transition to green energy. Greater energy integration and accelerated investment will allow Europe to defeat Russia’s strategy or anyone else’s future attempts to weaken Europe through energy harmonization,” notes the Head of State.