If we are serious about tackling online harms and building democratic resilience in Europe, we must follow the money. The Atlantic Council's Democracy + Tech Initiative (DTI) has published a new paper drawing on national stakeholder workshops held across multiple EU member countries, which were organised by the DTI and The Global Disinformation Index. This research maps the financial architecture of the EU's next major funding cycle to ask whether it is fit for purpose.

The answer, based on the evidence, is not yet.

The EU's proposed 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) includes AgoraEU, a flagship programme with a proposed budget of €8.6 billion, more than double the current cycle. The ambition is real. But a first-of-its-kind analysis of the full 2021–2027 MFF dataset, covering funding flows across internet governance, fact-checking, independent media, information integrity, defence, and digital rights, reveals a structural distortion: money is flowing through short-term, project-based instruments that produce one-off outputs, not durable institutions.

The national stakeholder workshops brought together national ministries, philanthropic funders, civil society organisations and academics under the Chatham House Rule. The findings were consistent: digital-focused civil society organisations are no longer peripheral to the EU's democratic project. They are evidence-based. They monitor regulatory compliance under the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the AI Act. They track Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) threats. They sustain citizens' capacity to participate in and trust democratic processes.In doing so, however, they absorb the significant burden of frontline exposure to harmful content, such as tracking evolving forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence and other online harms that threaten public safety and social cohesion.

The economic model that currently funds this work is broken. Short grant cycles, fragmented instruments, and the absence of long-term institutional funding mean these organisations cannot build the sustained expertise, operational capacity, and credibility that resilience requires. The EU has invested heavily in regulatory infrastructure. That infrastructure is only as strong as the civil society ecosystem with the resources to monitor and enforce it.

These workshops, together with this report, set out what needs to change:

• Redirect funding from one-off projects to long-term institutional capacity. Resilience is not a deliverable. It is a condition and requires structural, multiyear investment, not annual sprints.
• Match the scale of regulatory ambition with the evidence base to enforce it. Financial transparency is foundational to a credible digital rulebook. Yet that evidence is inert without civil society institutions resourced to act on it.
• Close the gap between political intent and budgetary reality. Government officials across every workshop expressed a genuine appetite for stronger civil society roles in resilience and competitiveness. That appetite must translate into the MFF before negotiations conclude in 2027.

The internet's economic architecture currently rewards adversarial content. The EU has a once-in-a-decade opportunity, through the MFF, to actively redirect that architecture toward democratic resilience. The evidence is there. What remains is the budgetary commitment to act on both.