LET's ENSURE BIG TECH PLATFORMS ARE NOT ABOVE OUR LAWS.

Vigilia is a group of citizens, researchers and programmers from across the EU, concerned about the state of our information space.

We are:

• Apartisan. Our goal is to ensure that all large tech platforms that operate in Europe abide by the law of the land. This is - thankfully - an issue that cuts across political lines.
• Ambitious. EU tech regulation, and in particular the Digital Services Act, has rightly set a high bar. We aim to match that level of ambition and contribute to enact large-scale change.
• Constructive. Many great people, inside and outside tech companies, are trying to do the right thing. Our first choice is to always work with them, not against.
• Eager. There's a lot of work to do, so let's get going !

FIXING BIG TECH TO HELP FIX INFORMATION DISORDERS.

We see free speech being suppressed under a torrent of anonymous hate and harassment. We see resentment, polarization and radicalism rise, while the space for nuance, complexity and expertise shrinks. We see less and less common reality shared across society. We see sowers of chaos, foreign and domestic, deploy considerable means to press on the fault lines that divide our societies.

We are not the first generation to face these issues. But we are the first to have to deal with social media platforms' engagement-based business model, which has resulted in new power structures that reward and feed off division, outrage and addiction.

The good news: we have an opportunity to stop this. Although the reckoning has been long in the making, our continent is now leading a worldwide movement to ensure that large tech platforms move on from their "too big to care" approach.

The road will be long. Social media companies, most of them based in the US, have so far operated in a regulatory vacuum and effectively imposed their choices on their users across the world, including in Europe.

Changing the status quo that has made these platforms immensely profitable will require them to undergo massive cultural and technical change. And change is never easy, especially when it costs so much.

But too much is at stake to allow Europe's digital rules to go unenforced, and we want to do our part.

We spend (too much) time on all social media platforms that matter to Europe and find where their practices might run against EU or Member State law.

We then go about remedying the problem using all tools at our disposal:

• Dialogue with the platform
• Publishing research detailing our findings
• Engaging with national or EU regulators
• Strategic litigation

We are fully financed by our members' contributions.