However, the changes in the production and consumption of election-related content pose challenges for established institutions and principles of regulation of election communications such as freedom of association, spending limits and regulation of political advertising. They undermine the ability of existing regulation to maintain the level playing field in electoral communication between new and established, rich and poor, corporate and civil society campaigns. New intermediaries and platforms now occupy the important gatekeeper positions once occupied by journalists, but have not yet adopted the ethical obligations of the media. This presents a threat to elections and potential for corrupt practices to emerge. The CoE Election Study 2017 identifies a number of concerns for the fairness and legitimacy of electoral processes, such as the lack of transparency of campaigning, spending, messages and algorithms used in digital advertising, large-scale invasions of privacy, lack of journalism filter to fact-check political messages, the increased amount of disinformation, and lacunas in electoral campaigning regulation (e.g. impossibility to enforce silence periods), and which concludes that “the current regulatory framework no longer suffices for maintaining a level playing field for political contest and for limiting the role of money in elections.”