On 27th April, Robert Abela, Prime Minister of Malta, called the country’s general election for 30th May, a year before the Labour Party administration’s term was due to end. As this was a snap election, MedDMO’s Maltese team was onboarded into the rapid response system (RRS) at short notice.
The Maltese team immediately got in contact with the recently-established EDMO Task Force for Elections and Crisis-related Disinformation, having been made aware of the process by our colleagues in Cyprus, who had themselves just initiated the process in light of the Cypriot election.
The Transparency Centre of the EU’s Code of Conduct on Disinformation defines the rapid response system (RRS) – which was piloted during the 2024 European elections – as follows: “a time-bound dedicated framework of cooperation and communication among relevant signatories, which allows non-platform signatories to swiftly report time-sensitive content, accounts, or trends that they deem to present threats to the integrity of the electoral process and discuss them with the platforms in light of their respective policies.”
This short report outlines the Maltese team’s experience of the RRS, including how they used it, and the feedback they received from the VLOPSEs (very large online platforms and search engines) they sent reports to, namely Meta and Google.
A total of 296 unique URLs were flagged over the course of 21 days (8th-29th May). These are all listed in the live sheet on MedDMO’s website.
Overall, the platforms were quite responsive, and they removed the majority of the content reported. However, our team did note a few issues, which are also described in the report.
You can read the full report on the Maltese team’s experience with the RRS below.
