The DEM-Debate project spent almost two years investigating how Wikipedia addressed disinformation during the 2024 European elections through legal and computational analyses. This final report, produced by researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Eurecat – Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya, delivers two sets of recommendations: one specifically targeting the upcoming revision of the Digital Services Act (DSA), and one drawing on Wikipedia’s governance model as a blueprint for the broader online information ecosystem. These recommendations are aimed to inform future regulation on platform regulation to strengthen the resilience of the information ecosystem.

Written by Camille Françoise (WMFR) and Michele Failla (WMEU).

The article was originally published in the European University Institute Policy Report on Open Internet co-edited by Patryk Pawlak and Nils Berglund.

Open your social media feed. Within thirty seconds you will likely have seen something engineered to provoke you — a post calibrated by an algorithm to raise your cortisol, confirm your suspicions about the “other side”, or send you spiralling into an outrage loop that keeps you scrolling. This is not a bug. It is the business model. Platforms built on advertising revenue seem to have discovered, empirically, that anger and anxiety are among the most reliable engines of engagement. So their algorithms are optimised for both.

Now open Wikipedia. You land on an article. At the top, perhaps, a small notice: “This article’s neutrality is disputed.” Or: “This article needs additional citations.” Or nothing at all — just the text, the citations, the talk page quietly humming in the background where a numerous strangers are negotiating the phrasing of a single contested sentence. This, too, is not an accident. It is the result of deeply intentional architectural choices — choices that point in precisely the opposite direction from the attention-advertising economy.