Right-wing climate sceptics blast EU's anti-disinformation drive
'As citizens of a free society we are each entitled to our own opinions but not entitled to our own facts,' Emil Andersen, a mid-ranking Commission official, said at the start of the debate.
But his words weren't welcome by several conservative and right-wing lawmakers, with some linking the European Commission's anti-disinformation activism to the authoritarian dystopia famously imagined in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Neo-denialism Alternative for Germany's (AfD) Anja Arndt questioned the scientific community's consensus that climate change is caused by human activities, and argued that the fight against disinformation is a 'front-on attack on freedom of expression, freedom of science, and the truth'.
Fellow AfD party member Marc Jongen took a similar line: 'If the Commission decides now what is a fact and what isn't, and what is opinion and what isn't, then we're on the road to a totalitarian system.'
But the criticism of the Commission's initiative was not limited to the fringes of the right wing.
Sander Smit, a Dutch member of the centre-right European People's Party, said that fact-checkers tended to make 'a certain type of discussion impossible', and that the Commission would be going 'a step to far' if it were to fund fact-checkers during election campaigns. Enlightenment values Liberal and social democrat lawmakers, on the contrary, highlighted the importance of a debate informed by science.
Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, the Renew group's lead negotatiator on the 2040 climate bill, said that the acknowledgement climate change and willingness to fight it was not an ideology – while denying it was precisely that.
Gerbrandy urged his colleagues to keep the political debate 'clean' and called for a coalition against climate change deniers. He also asked the European Commission to debunk in writing the climate 'nonsense' spouted by the AFD – but failed to extract such a promise.
Belgian social democrat Bruno Tobback recalled the stories of Galileo and Copernicus – 'who had science and facts on their side' but were persecuted by the practitioners of a "backwards ideology'.
'For God's sake, let us not go back to the dark days of European history, where dogma and opinions held us back – or tried to hold us back, luckily without success,' Tobback said. Commission wisdom Andersen, the Commission official, ended the debate by pronouncing on the distinction between opinion and facts.
'Both opinions and facts are indispensable to a thriving democratic conversation," Andersen said. "This is not what is being questioned.'
'But while facts should continue to shape our opinions, our opinions must never be allowed to colour the facts.'
The Commission, he continued, 'doesn't decide what is fact'. That was the task of peer-reviewed scientists – 'this is what underpins the policymaking of the Commission', Andersen said.
(rh, aw)
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