BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The ecu Union’s executive proposed on Wednesday spending extra income to counter fake news online, establishing a first warning system to alert governments and pushing tech companies do more to halt disinformation before next year’s EU elections.

The European Commission’s plan, which have to be agreed by EU leaders, is part of a shot to stop what the Country, NATO and also the EU say are Russian tries to undermine Western democracies with disinformation campaigns that sow division. Russia has repeatedly denied such a actions.

“There is strong evidence pointing to Russia like a primary supply of disinformation in Europe. Disinformation belongs to Russia’s military doctrine and section of an approach to divide and weaken free airline,” said Commission Vice chairman Andrus Ansip.

Before elections to your European Parliament in May 2019, the Commission hopes to see tech giants which include Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) agree with step up efforts to remove misleading or illegal content. That is going to include incitement to hatred, extremism additionally, the online sale of counterfeit products.

With a code of practice that commits online platforms and advertisers to consider steps to prevent fake news from being both uploaded and disseminated, the Commission wants messages automatically spread by machines, or bots, defined as such.

The proposal will even seek to build a more powerful section to check and flag Russian misinformation, raising the cost in the EU’s foreign service EEAS in this to five million euros ($5.7 million) from 1.9 million in 2018.

That is way lower than the millions of dollars that NATO and also the EU say Russia spends on disinformation, but Western governments are cautious with any strategy that is certainly construed as indoctrination.

Russia has purchased a state-of-the-art media organization with many journalists abroad that will wean the earth off exactly what calls aggressive Western propaganda – dubbing it, with echoes in the Cold War, Sputnik.

It can also be now very active on the web, in advertising and marketing which include Twitter.

A the third step to the EU may be to generate a “rapid alert” mechanism to warn governments, so they can counter developing disinformation campaigns.

Facebook has stepped up fact-checking to counter fake news which is taking care of reducing the ranking of those disinformation to making it less visible. Still faces criticism it is not quick enough to close rogue accounts.

Facebook disclosed a year ago that Russians with fake names used the online social network to attempt to influence U.S. voters while in the months before the 2019 election, currently talking about inflammatory subjects, establishing events and getting ads.