Bill # 2 from Martin Ajdari, President of Arcom

"Legitimate debates on plurality or public audiovisuel must not divert our attention from the profound threats that are undermining information, and with it our democracy."

Public debate on information and the media in France has focused in recent months on the Commission of Inquiry into the neutrality, functioning and financing of public audiovisual media, as well as on controversies concerning the compliance of one channel, CNews, with its obligations, particularly in terms of plurality.

These debates are as important as they are legitimate; Arcom has taken them on board and will be responding to them in the coming weeks, under the provisions of the mission entrusted to Bruno Lasserre on the impartiality of public audiovisuel and the investigation of the submission of a case before the court on plurality sent to it by the association Reporters sans frontières in January.

But this focus should not divert our attention from the deep-seated threats to information and our democracy, which are the focus of Arcom's daily attention.

Television, radio and the press - editorialized and professional media - remain the French people's preferred sources of information. But a growing share of public debate is shifting to algorithmic media, whose model is based on the notice and targeting mechanisms of the platform economy. Here, information is presented without any journalistic input of its own, without verification of sources or separation between facts and commentary, and is shown unfiltered, if not deliberately biased or distorted. And social networks, video-sharing platforms and generative AI are now the main channel for accessing information for 20% of French people - and 54% of those under 25.

These mutations expose public debate to manipulation (external interference, instrumentalization of polarizing themes, etc.) and threaten citizens' freedom to inform themselves and debate on the basis of shared, verified facts. Their corollary is a massive shift in revenue from traditional media to digital players, threatening the very existence of professional news production that meets high standards of journalistic rigor and ethics: television, radio and the press still accounted for half of the advertising market in 2018, and are set to fall to one-fifth by 2030.

We therefore need to move away from a magnifying glass effect applied to the media to which we are accustomed - and which we comment on all the more readily because they respond to codes that we master - to also give their full place to the responses to be brought to three challenges:

• The Arcom report on online disinformation published in March shows how certain targeted or vulnerable audiences can be influenced by the fabrication of false or misleading content, reinforced by manipulated images or videos and media brand usurpation. This misinformation is shown via artificial amplification techniques (bots, coordinated networks) and algorithmic targeting. 70% of French people believe they are exposed to false information at least once a week. Faced with an increasingly uncooperative attitude on the part of platforms, we support the European Commission's action under the Digital Services Regulation (DSR), and summon it to move away from a co-regulatory approach, which has shown its limits, towards a more prescriptive approach, notably requiring these players to effectively fight against fake accounts and the monetization of misinformation, and to finally be transparent about their recommendation schemes.

  Beyond this, we need to build a liability manager for artificial generative intelligence services (which 30 million French people already use): economic liability towards the news media whose content is used to drive the AI models that help make them invisible, and editorial liability with regard to the content produced for users.

• The second challenge is the collapse of the news media business model. Our recent study (conducted jointly with the DGMIC) on the cost of information showed that more than half of all news-producing media would be loss-making by 2024. And the deterioration in the situation has accelerated since then. Levers have been identified to protect them: better remuneration of neighboring rights; enabling the economic consolidation of players, both public and private, while providing the necessary guarantees of plurality, within the framework of modernised merger monitoring; establishing fairer conditions of competition with digital players and better ensuring the visibility of professional media supplies. For all these challenges, national and European legislative and regulatory changes are necessary and increasingly urgent.
  
• The third challenge is the very future of audiovisual regulation. Historically, regulation has been associated with the allocation of terrestrial frequencies, in return for commitments and obligations on the part of broadcasters. The liveliness of recent debates has shown that these frequencies remain important, even if they are now the exclusive means of access to television for only 15% of households. And while free-to-air TV channels remain the most popular source of video programming for the French, they have been overtaken by social networks and video-on-demand services for the under-35s, and by video-sharing platforms alone - YouTube - for the under-25s. 44% of our fellow citizens now get their daily news from social networks. Of course, these platforms have offered many talented people a formidable space for expression and diffusion, but they remain outside the guarantees that audiovisual regulation supplies to the public and the constraints imposed on the historical media. These rules reflect an ambition that must not be abandoned, but which must be adapted to digital spaces. This is one of the central challenges of the revision of the Audiovisual Media Services (AVMS) directive, which is due to get underway in the second half of 2026.

The aim is not, of course, to fight agains t developments in usage, but on the contrary to support them by creating the conditions for a free and secure information space, enabling the identification, enhancement and diffusion of quality editorialized information. A space in which our public audiovisuel must continue to play an essential role, while at the same time transforming itself.

To meet these and other challenges, Arcom has drawn up a strategic plan for the years 2026 to 2028, which will be made public on May 19.