Agribusiness Groups, Google Among the List of Companies Helping Write EU Trade and Media Policy-Documents

Business groups, corporations, and industry lobbyists continue to dominate the European Union’s advisory boards and consolation meetings on issues of great importance to the environment, democracy and economic equality, according to an analysis of EU official documents.

A ”High-Level Expert Group” of stakeholders met today for the first time to discuss trade deals, including the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the EU-Canada trade agreement (CETA), and plans for a Multilateral Investment Court system (ICS).

The list of stakeholders, who are given direct influence into policymaking, is comprised of groups like BusinessEurope, the European Chemical Industry Council, the European Services Forum, EUROCHAMBERS, and the Confederation of European Businesses. While some ecological and trade unionist organisations are included, the deck is heavily stacked towards the corporate sector.

Significantly, major NGOs that have opposed TTIP and CETA, such as ATTAC, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth are unrepresented, to say nothing of anti-fracking campaigners, activist philosophers from groups such as Earth First!, or War On Want.

Many of these organisations have signed a letter that was sent to EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström imploring her to respect the rights of Europeans.

Malmström came under fire for saying that she “doesn’t take her mandate from the European people,” during the debates over TTIP, the stalled trade deal that would have allowed companies like Monsanto, General Motors, Google and Tyson Foods to sue European countries for alleged “loss of profit” and gain direct input into the lawmaking and regulatory process.

“High-Level Expert Groups” are now being used in other realms to improve the EU’s lost “credibility.” A “High-Level Group on Fake Newsand online disinformation” was founded on January 12 to deal with the alleged problem of computational propaganda.

Like the Expert Group on trade, it contains some legitimate experts on journalism, including university professors, however it is mostly made up of traditional media outlets (AFP, Sky, and Reuters), news industry groups, and the tech companies that themselves are allegedly helping spread propaganda, including Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

All parties involved thus have a direct financial interest in how “fake news” is defined and how it should be dealt with. The definition is itself variable, with a BuzzFeed article claiming that the “fake news story” shared most during the Brexit vote was in fact a (legitimate) article on the danger TTIP posed to the NHS in the case of a Remain victory. The tech companies that will define “fake news” in the “Expert Group,” were (and are), intriguingly enough, huge supporters of TTIP and other corporate trade deals, according to Greenpeace.