Reflecting on 2025 at Europinion

In a political climate that increasingly rewards sensationalism, echo chambers, and polarisation whilst punishing nuance, Europinion was founded back in 2023 with a simple mission: to facilitate pluralistic discussion, to provide a platform for serious, accessible discussions, whilst pertinently open to disagreement without falling into antagonism. Two years on, 2025 has been the clearest demonstration yet of why that mission matters, and of what an independent organisation can do when it is stubbornly committed to dialogue and civic empowerment. 

This year, Europinion has published 358 articles (and counting) from commentators the world over. Such a number is not a vanity metric. It represents hundreds of conscientious interventions from our political commentators, editors, and researchers, into the convoluted and complex realities of contemporary politics, information environments, and democratic life. In an attention economy that increasingly prefers sensationalism to substance, sustaining such a platform for thoughtful argument is harder than it should be. The volume of our output matters only insofar as it reflects real variety of opinion, a growing community of contributors passionately willing to write across divides, and readers willing to engage with complexity rather than simplified soundbites. 

Yet 2025 has not been defined solely by publications. Pertinently, it has been marked by a deeper shift in Europinion’s work from diagnosing the information disorder to advancing practical, informed responses to it.

On 8 April 2025, Europinion addressed the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education (CULT), contributing to discussions on strengthening media literacy in the digital age. We emphasised a point that has become central to our research and advocacy: resilience to disinformation must be built with young people, not merely for them. Too often, media literacy is framed as a parochial corrective, an institutional message delivered to a passive audience. But young people do not encounter information as a syllabus. They navigate it as a lived environment that is simultaneously algorithmic, social, emotional, and deeply entangled with identity, trust, and belonging. If our goal is democratic resilience, then young people must be treated not as targets of instruction, but as active civic actors with agency, insight, and expertise about their own digital realities.

This principle shaped our flagship publication of the year: Navigating the Information Disorder: European Youth in the Age of Digital Disinformation. The report examined how disinformation shapes civic life, and what meaningful responses look like when they are participatory, contextual, and rooted in lived experience. Our findings point in a consistent direction that young Europeans are not uniformly naïve, nor uniformly cynical. They are often discerning, but increasingly fatigued, oft aware of manipulation, yet still vulnerable to its inherent cumulative effects. Disinformation is not only about believing falsehoods, it is about eroding trust, fragmenting shared realities, and reshaping political engagement over time.

Crucially, the report also shows the limitations of one-size-fits-all approaches. Media literacy cannot be a single toolkit dropped into radically different cultural, linguistic, and political contexts. The most effective interventions are those that are co-created, locally grounded, and designed to scale without flattening differences. That is why our recommendations focus on youth-led strategies, civic empowerment, and collaborative models that bring policymakers, educators, civil society, and young people into sustained partnership.

Following the publication of Navigating the Information Disorder, Europinion met with the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield (EUDS) on 5 June 2025 at Europe House in London, as part of the committee’s fact-finding mission to the United Kingdom. The discussion centred on how young people consume information and how digitally native generations are exposed to disinformation. We were pleased to be joined by our partners, the Oxford Computational Political Science Group (OCPSG) from the University of Oxford, reflecting our commitment to bridging academic research, policy engagement, and lived realities with providing a platform for the exchange of variegated, informed opinions.

Combined, our work in 2025 points to a larger conviction that has guided Europinion’s mission and direction. In an age defined by disinformation, polarisation, and algorithmic overload, media literacy is not a peripheral skill. It is a cornerstone of democratic resilience. If democratic citizenship requires participation in shared public life, then the capacity to interpret, evaluate, and contest information becomes a civic imperative, not an optional responsibility. 

I am truly grateful for the opportunities this year to bring Europinion’s work to the forefront of both academia and policymaking. I am equally grateful to the people who make Europinion possible on a daily basis. 

To our contributors, you are the engine of Europinion’s pluralism. The writers and thinkers who refuse easy binaries and insist on clarity, evidence, and argument, even when the wider climate incentivises performance over substance. Your work is what brings this platform alive, one that is contested yet intellectually honest. Thank you.

To our editors, you are the guardians of quality and the quiet architects of our credibility. You bring discipline to ideas, precision to prose, and coherence to a genuinely diverse range of voices, ensuring that Europinion remains both accessible and rigorous whilst staunchly independent. Thank you.

To our researchers, you ensure that our interventions do not float free of reality. Your work grounds our writing in method, data, and field insight whilst sharpening our claims, testing our assumptions, and keeping us oriented towards what can actually be known, and therefore what can responsibly be recommended. Thank you.

To our partners, thank you for treating Europinion as a meaningful collaborator in promoting pluralistic discussion. This year’s engagement, particularly alongside the Oxford Computational Political Science Group and within European policy spaces, has strengthened our capacity to connect research, practice, and impact in ways that matter to readers across the globe.

Crucially, to our readers, thank you for choosing depth over drift. In an information environment that all too often rewards speed, outrage, and certainty, you have made space for argument, evidence, and uncomfortable complexity. Your attention is not passive consumption. It is the condition that makes pluralistic discussion possible, and the reason Europinion can keep publishing with confidence and purpose.

On a personal note, I am particularly indebted to Maxime Zigrand, our tireless Editor-in-Chief, whose conscientious stewardship has done more than refine our voice, rather helping define it. His formidable attention to nuance, structure, and tone helps Europinion remain as accessible yet insightful as possible. I am equally grateful to Will Allen, whose visual imagination has given our ideas shape and presence, translating complex themes into compelling design that invites engagement rather than intimidating it.

Looking ahead to 2026, Europinion enters the year with momentum and purpose. The challenge of disinformation shows no sign of abating. The information environment is becoming more crowded, more emotional, and more strategically contested. That only deepens our commitment to building media literacy as a civic capacity, championing youth agency as a democratic necessity, and creating space for pluralistic debate that is evidence-led, human, and unafraid of complexity. We will continue publishing widely, researching carefully, and engaging directly with the institutions and communities shaping Europe’s democratic future, because the work is urgent, and because the alternative is an information landscape where louder simply means ‘truer’.

Image: Will Allen/Europinion

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