In the run-up to June's European elections Slovakia and other EU member states have become hotbeds for pro-Kremlin disinformation campaigns. Bryan Carter went to country to investigate.
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00:00 In recent weeks and months, the following news spread online.
00:06 In Spain, the police violently repressed a farmer's protest this year.
00:10 The French president announced the end of the Christmas holiday.
00:14 In Germany, the Greens trashed their own party conference venue.
00:18 Across the EU, toilet paper will be banned for environmental reasons.
00:22 And in Slovakia, the main opposition party to Prime Minister Robert Fico is behind his
00:27 assassination attempt.
00:29 The problem is, all this information is false.
00:32 It's disinformation.
00:35 Disinformation is like a poison to the soul that is changing what humans are and it makes
00:40 us less and less capable of holding such complex and free system as a liberal democracy.
00:47 Disinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories are rampant in Slovakia, especially during
00:53 elections.
00:54 It's very cheap to influence big masses, especially now in society where a lot of people consume
01:00 information from various social media platforms.
01:04 The dangerous part about spreading of disinformation is that it does not spread only information
01:09 but especially emotions.
01:11 I'm here to meet those at the front line of the resistance against disinformation and
01:15 understand the implications for the rest of the continent as Europeans head to the polls.
01:19 I'm constantly checking what is trending, what are the new narratives being spread, what
01:45 are the repetitive ones so we can basically debunk them.
01:50 Trending is obviously the Western influence, like that they are through CIA and non-government
01:58 organizations in Slovakia, that they are somehow connected and they are influencing what is
02:03 happening in the country and old time classics, for example, like the moon landing didn't
02:07 happen.
02:08 Slovakia, an EU member state in Central Europe of five and a half million people, grapples
02:14 with a history of Soviet influence, leaving its population strongly divided between pro-Western
02:19 and pro-Russian sentiments.
02:22 This has made it a prime target for the Kremlin's propaganda, especially since 2014 with the
02:27 annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, according to this analyst.
02:33 At that time, we really saw that a lot of disinformation and information operations
02:38 trying to undermine Slovakia's Euro-Atlantic orientation, the membership of Slovakia and
02:44 EU and NATO were really driven by actors that were pro-Kremlin or had some connections to
02:53 Russia.
02:56 The COVID-19 pandemic and media bashing by Slovak leaders fueled the surge of lies and
03:01 conspiracy theories.
03:05 But the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 propelled Slovakia's disinformation network to a whole
03:10 new level.
03:12 Thousands of news outlets, Facebook pages and telegram channels now echo pro-Russian
03:17 narratives, sometimes directly at the behest of Russian officials.
03:21 There has been a video of former Russian military attaché in Slovakia bribing basically a contributor
03:27 of one of the main disinformation outlets for providing them contacts, providing them
03:32 information and interconnecting them with other people willing to cooperate with Russia.
03:37 For many Slovaks, disinformation and the resulting toxic political climate are largely to blame
03:42 for the attempted assassination on May 15, 2024 against pro-Moscow Prime Minister Robert
03:49 Fico.
03:50 The fact of Russian disinformation running in the face of the Russian authorities is
03:58 still met.
04:09 Viktor is a former Slovak war reporter and military adviser now specializing in countering
04:14 foreign influence.
04:16 Over time, he says, pro-Russian narratives and media outlets have moved from the fringes
04:20 of the Internet to the highest levels of the Slovak government.
04:24 The narratives from Russian mainstream media being parroted have been normalized in a way
04:31 that it not only stopped to be toxic for publicly known individuals, politicians running for
04:38 office to be associated with them, it has become impossible to win elections without
04:43 their help.
04:47 When I was in Slovakia in April, the country was gearing up for the second round of the
04:50 presidential elections.
04:52 Ivan Korchak, a pro-Western diplomat, eventually lost to an ally of Robert Fico, Peter Pellegrini,
04:59 who will take office in June.
05:00 In the lead-up to the vote, a barrage of disinformation targeted Korchak.
05:05 Fake images portrayed him as a U.S. passport holder and someone close to billionaire George
05:10 Soros, while members of Pellegrini's party, opposed to helping Ukraine, shared a doctored
05:16 photo of an elderly woman embracing a soldier with the caption, "Don't let Slovak sons and
05:21 grandsons die in the war."
05:22 Ironically, the original picture was taken in Ukraine.
05:27 It doesn't matter to make people believe in a certain story, but to simply erode that
05:34 trust in whether what they read and what they see and what they can see around themselves,
05:39 whether it is true or whether it is everything is a bit unreliable and you can trust no one.
05:45 Veronica runs a fact-checking website and collaborates with Meta to flag problematic
05:50 content on Facebook, the most popular social network in Slovakia.
05:54 However, Meta's policy prohibits fact-checkers from labeling statements made by politicians.
06:01 It means that a lot of disinformation is allowed to spread precisely because we cannot label
06:07 politicians' words as untrue, false or with missing context.
06:12 I think that fact-checking is still important.
06:15 Its greatest disadvantage is that it is always a reaction to disinformation.
06:20 It often takes us days before we are able to label it and by then it's yesterday's news.
06:28 That time gap between false information and its debunking is causing alarm across Europe
06:33 as the June European elections approach.
06:36 Disinformation could flood in days or even hours before the vote.
06:40 French security services recently uncovered nearly 200 websites spreading Kremlin propaganda
06:45 in the European Union.
06:47 Another Russian network mimics well-known news websites to spread fake articles.
06:51 And several EU far-right lawmakers are being investigated for allegedly accepting money
06:56 to repeat pro-Russian talking points.
06:59 Many of the disinformation stories are stuck on fear, anger.
07:04 So of course many of these narrative stories tend to also implicitly help far-right narratives.
07:14 In Brussels I spoke to Giovanni Zagni, who leads a task force on the European elections
07:19 for an EU-funded academic organization.
07:22 He has been warning against major trends of disinformation lately, increasingly powered
07:26 by a new tool, artificial intelligence.
07:29 You can produce pictures and possibly in the near future even videos of things that are
07:35 completely made up.
07:37 Ahead of the EU elections we are seeing a few major disinformation trends and narratives.
07:42 One has to do with the electoral process.
07:44 So the electoral process is unfair, ballots are tampered with, people that shouldn't vote
07:50 are given the right to vote.
07:51 Then there is, for example, the issue of climate.
07:54 So all the tools that are the legislative measures that are taken to counter the climate
08:00 crisis, for example, are actually a way to controlling people and deeply change our way
08:06 of life.
08:07 And another one is the issue of immigration.
08:11 The EU has taken measures to counter disinformation by trying to regulate artificial intelligence
08:17 and social media companies.
08:19 But many experts stress that education remains paramount in combating disinformation.
08:24 In Bratislava, Thomas is among those dedicated to this mission.
08:30 We can do something about the polarization in society by creating this culture where
08:34 we don't really care about how we communicate with each other.
08:38 There are many cases when young people are actually, for instance, radicalized through
08:42 online platforms, even like the Chinese platform TikTok, which provides them with content that
08:47 in the end turns them into people who are actually far more, I would say, far right
08:51 or misogynist.
08:53 Education should be the bedrock of how we are engaging with this problem as a society.
08:59 I do believe that everyone benefits from courses like these because it gives you better preparation
09:04 and adaptation for the reality of the current world.
09:10 In April, Robert Fico and his far right culture minister, a well-known conspiracy theorist,
09:15 intensified their efforts to control information by pushing a law undermining the independence
09:20 of the state broadcaster, despite widespread opposition to the reform.
09:27 While both refused to be interviewed for this report, they will likely have to continue
09:30 answering to the people of Slovakia, as well as to those fighting against the idea, induced
09:36 by this information, that truth no longer exists.
09:40 One of the biggest challenges is making people believe that what I'm saying is true, and
09:45 the other part is making sure that they don't think I'm part of the conspiracy.
09:49 [MUSIC]