A new white paper published this month by the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) makes for sobering reading for anyone working on the challenge of extremist narratives in Europe. The Great Retreat: How Platforms Deprioritised Information Integrity and What to Do About It arrives at a critical moment, and its findings speak directly to the work at the heart of the ARENAS project.
Over the past two years, the world’s most powerful technology platforms (Meta, Google, X/Twitter, TikTok and others), have quietly and not-so-quietly walked back their commitments to fighting disinformation. Safety teams have been scaled down, third-party fact-checking partnerships wound up, and references to “misinformation” scrubbed from official risk assessments. On one leading platform, the word appeared 77 times in its 2023 report; by 2025, just once.
The consequences are measurable. Research cited in the paper found that roughly 20% of posts on public-interest topics on TikTok contained misinformation, with Facebook at 13% and X/Twitter at 11%. More alarmingly, low-credibility accounts consistently generated more engagement per follower than high-credibility ones, a dynamic the authors call the “Misinformation Premium.” Meanwhile, the rapid rise of generative AI is adding new threat vectors faster than existing safeguards can adapt.
The ARENAS project was funded under the Horizon Europe programme precisely because extremist narratives do not exist in isolation. They spread. They circulate through media, social media and political discourse, and their power depends on the infrastructures through which they travel.
The EFCSN white paper documents in real time what ARENAS has been studying structurally: the conditions that allow extremist and misleading narratives to gain traction and go unchallenged. Where ARENAS works to characterise the linguistic and semiotic mechanics of extremist narratives, their roots, their circulation patterns and their influence on perceptions, the EFCSN paper shows the platform environment in which those narratives now operate is becoming increasingly permissive.
The paper’s call for rigorous Digital Services Act enforcement, hybrid verification models combining crowd-sourced community notes with professional fact-checking expertise, and sustainable EU funding for information integrity work all align closely with ARENAS’s own recommendations for policy makers, journalists and educators.
It reflects the same underlying conviction as ARENAS: that the “battle of stories”, not merely the debate over facts, is where democratic resilience is won or lost. As the platforms retreat, the need for research-grounded tools, educational resources and policy frameworks to counter extremist narratives becomes more urgent, not less.