Our vision & FAQ
About Display Europe
Your gateway to multilingual news & cross-border conversations in Europe
Display Europe is a multi-lingual news hub with social media interactivity. Designed as a next-generation content distribution platform to support media organisations, Display enables users across multilingual Europe to follow, comment on and engage with their favourite news sources – all in their preferred language.
Displayeurope.eu showcases a wide range of content from European media outlets. The platform harnesses the power of AI for translation, recommendation and contextualisation, and does this by centring the needs of its media partners. Our goal is to recover lost traffic as old social media platforms deprioritize news, and extend content distribution beyond borders and languages, unlocking new audiences for European media outlets.
Anchored in public values and inclusivity, Display Europe is based on open‑source software and breaks away from the unethical data collection practices of Big Tech.
Our vision
We believe in a European media, grounded in public values and inclusivity.
We contribute to a shared European media space, because forces that move across borders shape Europeans’ lives. We build a space, independent from governments as well as commercial influences, where Europeans – regardless of their background – can connect, share ideas, debate opinions, and find reliable information to hold the powerful to account.
Free and Trustworthy
Display Europe aims to support citizens across the continent in discovering trustworthy information and perspectives often overlooked by mainstream and national media. By focusing on translation and syndication, Display Europe seeks to offer a comprehensive view of Europe, from Cape Roca to the Ural watershed. It will serve as a free, central portal for diverse stories, searchable and translatable into more than 15 European languages.
Safe and Ethical
As a network of existing platforms, Display Europe uses open‑source software and open protocols based on privacy‑friendly processes. The platform is built on a sovereign, self‑governed, open‑source digital infrastructure, steadily building up independence from Big Tech social media and streaming platforms. Display only collects personal data when given the green light, and users can opt out of data collection entirely.
Frequently asked questions
How does Display Europe work?
Display Europe is a crucial piece of digital infrastructure that connects and provides access to a whole new layer of content across media outlets, publishing and broadcasting formats, regions and languages.
We unlock European journalism with AI‑powered media distribution. Display seamlessly integrates diverse media content into its search and newsfeed, combining technology with ethical human oversight. AI‑generated article teasers are automatically produced and translated into multiple European languages, making stories more accessible to international audiences. Users can engage with the news — by liking, following, commenting, and sharing — to build a dynamic community around quality journalism.
Display’s main goal is to send readers back to where journalism belongs – to the original source. Users can engage by liking, following, commenting, and sharing, fostering a dynamic community. Display will expand your reach, amplify engagement, and bring your journalism to the world!
Who manages Display Europe?
The platform is developed by the Display Europe Cooperative:
Display Europe
c/o OKTO.TV
Missindorfstraße 19
1140 Vienna
Austria
E‑mail: coop@displayeurope.eu
Is Displayeurope.eu free?
Content on the portal is freely accessible without any paywall. However, recommendations and newsfeed items may also direct you to quality content behind paywalls on partners’ own webpages. This will also allow partners to promote their content via the platform.
Where does funding for Display Europe come from?
Display Europe has been developed with funding from the European Commission and receives funds from the Austrian Broadcasting Union. It is actively seeking alternative sources of funding to continue its growth without over‑reliance on EU funding.
Can I join it?
Yes you can. Display Europe provides an active public forum where European media outlets and citizens are encouraged to share and experience information.
On the longer term, Display Europe’s community engagement will evolve around a dynamic content model that encourages users to share their perspectives on Europe.
It is free to register an account and we invite all users to react and share their thoughts about the journalism they discover on the platform.
What is different about Display Europe compared to other news aggregators or social networks?
Display Europe is built by civil society and has no other interest than empowering the European democracy.
- Display Europe is based on open‑source technology which can be used by others.
- Display Europe breaks away from the unethical data collection practices of Big Tech.
- Display Europe is available in 21 languages and growing.
In which languages is Display Europe available?
In its initial stage, Display Europe is available in the following languages
- Bulgarian
- Croatian / Bosnian
- Czech
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Serbian
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Russian
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
In later stages more languages will be added.
What is the backstory to Display?
In response to the growing need for a public sphere that transcends economic, social, cultural, or national backgrounds, the European Cultural Foundation conducted a series of online and offline workshops in 2020 and 2021. These workshops brought together journalists, researchers, and citizens to envision a networked European media model, free from market and government influences. After an Open Call in 2021, the European Cultural Foundation issued several grants aimed at fostering journalistic cross‑border collaboration and the development of a digital infrastructure based on public values.
In parallel, a group of media activists, researchers and initiatives formed in 2020 the coalition Shared Digital European Public Sphere (SDEPS.eu). The discourse within the coalition and an outlook of a possible architecture was summarized in the publication “ Building a European Digital Public Space”, Strategies for taking back control from Big Tech platforms (2021) https://www.irights-lab.de/publikationen/dps. Building upon these discussions, a hackathon took place 2022 in Linz https://cba.media/building-a-european-cultural-backbone.
Collaboration between ECF’s grantees and the network established at the hackathon culminated in the creation of Display Europe.
The platform aims to provide a pan‑European perspective and a space where shared European interests can be discussed. It wants to counteract the loss of trust in public discussions and media, and stand against fact‑free populist ideas and the exclusion of certain groups in traditional media.
Display Europe has the potential to contribute to a crucial digital infrastructure for Europe, levelling the playing field for media outlets and content creators. Its launch signifies not only the introduction of a new media platform, but also a new era in European media where diversity, inclusivity, and public values take center stage.
What is the governance structure of Display Europe?
Display Europe is administered by the Display Cooperative and respects the legal requirements of a media platform/host provider under the Digital Services Act. Find out more about this and about how to express complaints in our Terms of Services.
Are you 100% open source?
We are an open‑source platform and promote the use of open‑source social media practices such as PeerTube and Mastodon; however, for the initial promotion of the project we are using social media accounts such as Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. For the initial development phase, we use Open AI to provide quality translations and create content teasers. To do this, we use our own API and, according to Open AI, the data processed is not shared with Open AI or used to train its language model. Read more about Open AI privacy here. We are advocating for using the open‑source social media accounts and AI with ethical standards.
Which open source technologies do we use?
We prefer using frameworks that speak ActivityPub, which is the protocol for the Fediverse. That allows us to exchange content very easily in any direction.
For other infrastructure parts we solely use Open Source tools such as
- Keycloak (Single Sign On) https://key.displayeurope.eu
- Minio (Storage & CDN)
- kubernetes (cloud computing)
- Matomo (Statistics)
- Listmonk (Newsletter)
- Nextcloud