The fury of European farmers is more than just a major issue in elections across the continent this week — it’s also one of the primary subjects of disinformation timed to the vote.
In Italy, inaccurate claims circulated on social media that the European Union was banning animal breeding; a rumor making the rounds in Spain claimed that the government was causing droughts by demolishing dams.
Those claims are part of an abundance of deceptive content aimed at voters electing a new European Parliament, spread by far-right politicians, information operatives based outside Europe and others, according to disinformation researchers. It is coming in the form of recycled videos and photos presented as current, misinterpretations of policy proposals and inflammatory political ads, addressing topics like agriculture, climate change and migration. Foreign propaganda, even content explicitly prohibited by the European Union, continues to seep into the information ecosystem.
In recent weeks, disinformation about the 27-nation bloc reached its highest level since tracking began in 2023, according to the European Digital Media Observatory, a collaboration among fact-checkers, academics and others focused on disinformation.
Many of the false narratives now reaching the electorate are far from new. Instead, they are reconstituting old prejudices and misconceptions to fit current events, said Alexandre Alaphilippe, the executive director of the EU DisinfoLab, an independent research organization in Brussels.
“We do see always the kind of base line of ‘Don’t trust anything out of the E.U.’ and ‘Go back to more nativistic or nationalistic stances and try to take back control,” he said. “This is all playing on the complexity of European lawmaking, trying to blame on somebody or put together issues that have nothing to do with each other beyond some convergence of anger.”
In some ways, Europe is better positioned than the United States to beat back false narratives and conspiracy theories. European disinformation researchers said the political pressure to avoid censorship that unnerved their U.S. counterparts was less prevalent in the European Union, whose countries have passed laws, set up digital defense agencies and pursued investigations in recent years to address the threat of coordinated influence campaigns, artificial intelligence and lax content moderation online.
Disinformation, however, persists, fanning out across borders ahead of the elections, which started Thursday. Enforcement of policies designed to restrict propaganda and false narratives is nascent and inconsistent, and must contend with a dangerous sense of complacency, Mr. Alaphilippe said.
“Should we all get relaxed because we don’t actually have fascists or Nazis in the streets right now — they’re just at the corner?” he asked. “That’s my main concern right now.”
A report this week from two fact-checking groups, Newtral in Spain and Science Feedback in France, tracked false narratives in six languages that were linked to the farmer protests. There were unfounded claims that the European Union was deliberately destroying crop fields, forcing reductions in agricultural production and trying to replace farmers with A.I. robots. The claims appeared to resonate with audiences far more than general climate criticism did, researchers said.
They found that many of the false narratives — for example, that governments were promoting lab-grown meat and insect consumption to combat environmental pollution — helped fuel existing distrust toward Brussels and its climate policies. Nearly 82 percent of the social media posts reviewed by researchers were shared by far-right politicians.
Government ministers and other political figures were also disseminating xenophobic conspiracy theories about immigration ahead of the vote. Spanish fact checkers debunked a video of an assault and robbery against an older man — it was filmed in Los Angeles, not Barcelona, they said — and punctured its claim about the race of the perpetrator, which the police did not disclose. Amid opposition to housing plans for asylum seekers in Ireland, local fact checkers determined that an image shared on social media showing the national police confronting protesters had been generated by artificial intelligence.
Influence operations from Russia and other state actors are a major concern in the election, experts said. European Union members such as Bulgaria and Slovakia are especially vulnerable, according to local fact checkers, who cited studies showing that fewer than half of citizens in those countries believe that Russia was responsible for the conflict in Ukraine, which it initiated.
Smear campaigns against Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, have surged in recent months, according to the East StratCom Task Force, a group of disinformation experts empaneled by E.U. officials. A Russian propaganda outlet was linked in February to an A.I.-generated deepfake of a French news anchor falsely claiming that Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, opted against visiting Ukraine while there were assassination fears.
Brussels has tried to block propaganda from Moscow, but European audiences are still exposed to it. Researchers from Sodertorn University in Sweden and the civic group Alliance4Europe said that, as recently as Tuesday, at least 29 TikTok channels from banned Russian entities or their copycats were accessible within the bloc, including one account with nearly three million followers.
TikTok said in a statement Thursday that the relevant accounts were now blocked and that it was conducting a review “to understand an issue that affected the block TikTok applies to some state-controlled media accounts in Europe.”
A Spanish fact-checking group, EFE Verifica, said last month that it was among the targets of a pro-Russian operation that had tried for months to distract journalists and fact checkers with false alerts. The campaign, alternately nicknamed Operation Overload or Operation Matryoshka, after Russian nesting dolls, used email accounts and social media profiles on X to blast already overburdened disinformation experts with frivolous requests to debunk content. EFE said it alone had received 50 emailed pleas since December to investigate text messages, photographs and videos.
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