WebWatch is Defend Democracy’s new tech watchdog. Its first project focuses on digital and information integrity around the upcoming elections in the Netherlands. We actively monitor social media platforms for signs of covert manipulation, foreign interference and coordinated disinformation campaigns in the run-up to the elections on 29 October 2025.

  • Is there deliberate online deception of voters?
  • Is there improper influence on public debate?

WebWatch monitors, analyses and publishes reports on whether and what is going wrong. The aim is to reduce the effect of manipulation, deception and disinformation on the election, while at the same time increasing digital literacy.

Important: WebWatch does not tell you what is true or false; we show you HOW deception and manipulation work via social media.

Our principles:

  • Monitoring is content-neutral and impartial.
  • Explicitly without preference for left, centre or right.
  • Independent and non-partisan analysis.
  • Transparency and public reporting.

Sign up for the WebWatch newsletter (for now in Dutch).

After the Dutch elections our WebWatch will switch its website to English and will develop broader tech watchdog activities and publications about technological threats to democracy.

Digitisation: opportunities and risks for our democracies

Democratic processes, including elections and our public debate, are more digital than ever before. Not only because we have started to use social media even more, but also because the pandemic was forcing us to live our lives even more online. This confluence of events presents our democracies not only with opportunities, but also with risks. Since the outbreak of the 2020 pandemic, disinformation and conspiracy theories have spread more rapidly from the margins of the Internet to the mainstream media, thereby gaining greater reach than before.

Experts expect that foreign and domestic information manipulation campaigns and foreign interference will try to disrupt the integrity of ever more elections and other key events in our societies. This is part of a broader trend of undermining the Western democratic legal order and democratic processes (such as elections), institutions and societies, partly through malicious, coordinated manipulation and disinformation campaigns.

Several of WebWatch (and its precursor)’s publications are already available in English, including: