Publication
Based on the 2026 municipal elections, in preparation for the provincial council elections of March 2027.
Initiated and coordinated by Post-X Society, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, AI Forensics and Trollrensics.
The Netherlands is a target of international information-manipulation campaigns. Social media do little or nothing to counter them, even enable the manipulation, and the regulators do too little to protect voters. We saw coordinated campaigns, the use of fake accounts, inadequate enforcement of the advertising rules, misleading and extreme content, unlabelled AI content and fake stories about electoral fraud. We saw the same resources, infrastructure and methods in Hungary and other democracies too: internationally, then, the Netherlands is no exception. 97% of the extremist content that we reported through official channels was not removed. Only after media attention did the platforms step in.
The eleven recommendations in brief
- Make adequate enforcement the very highest priority, and hold the AP, ACM and the Dutch Media Authority to account (including their readiness for the elections in March 2027).
- Call on the European Commission to specify the transparency obligations (DSA arts. 27 and 40), with timely access for researchers.
- Call on the EC to establish standardised, independently verifiable benchmarks for moderation (DSA art. 45).
- Treat functioning advertising libraries as a separate compliance obligation.
- Fund multi-year, structural monitoring of the risks of social media (through civil-society and public organisations and academia, under independent oversight).
- Fund the development of open and federated alternatives to the dominant platforms (such as Mastodon).
- Address information manipulation and election interference explicitly in diplomacy, particularly towards third countries such as Nigeria.
- Set clear standards for political parties that demonstrably fail to comply with the rules on online campaigning.
- Make the labelling and watermarking of AI content concrete and enforceable (AI Act), with an accessible route to report and remove it.
- Establish a permanent, binding elections protocol under DSA art. 35(3).
- Strengthen the local and intergovernmental response to information manipulation.
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