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623,000 online votes: strong response to the recommendations of the “Forum against Fakes”

There has been wide public support for the recommendations of the Citizens’ Panel “Forum against Fakes” on how to deal with disinformation: in the final online participation phase, more than 200,000 citizens cast 623,000 votes on 28 recommendation proposals of the Citizens’ Panel “Forum against Fakes”. The online participants’ rating of the measures was predominantly positive. 

Contact persons

Foto Stefan Roch
Dr. Stefan Roch
Project Manager
Foto Anna Renkamp
Anna Renkamp
Senior Project Manager
Foto Angela Jain
Dr. Angela Jain
Senior Project Manager

Content

The online participation of the Bertelsmann Stiftung project “Forum against Fakes – Together for a strong democracy” offered the entire population of Germany a final opportunity to cast online votes on 28 concrete measures put forward by the Citizens’ Panel.

The Citizens’ Panel had worked intensively for nine days to develop the 28 measures. The aim of the three online participation phases was to give the general public a clear and democratic say in how to deal with disinformation. The Evaluation Report (in German) for the third and final participation phase has now been published.

Germany’s citizens made use of their chance to vote. Their evaluation of the measures was predominantly positive but differentiated. There was more approval than rejection for each individual proposal. On the other hand, no single measure was approved by more than 75 per cent. The measures with a high level of approval were mostly those intended to guarantee greater transparency of information and media content and give the public a clearer understanding of the source(s) of information. For example, there was 73 per cent approval for the labelling of content created by artificial intelligence.

Individual approval levels were generally lower for measures which directly affect citizens’ user behaviour. For example, there was 48 per cent approval for the proposal that “Users should be given a cooling-off period to decide whether or not to publish posts containing apparent disinformation”.

One thing is clear: the majority of people in this country are in favour of policymakers, platform owners, media and civil society actively tackling the issue of disinformation and developing appropriate solutions.

The citizens’ online vote results from all participation phases and the detailed catalogue of recommendations by the Citizens’ Panel “Forum against Fakes” will be published as a Citizens’ Report and submitted to Federal Minister Nancy Faeser on 12. September. The Report will then be discussed by stakeholders from the fields of politics, media, business and civic society. For the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, the Citizens’ Report is an important source of direct input by the German public as a basis of government strategy for dealing with disinformation.

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