Government ministers and other political figures were also spreading xenophobic conspiracy theories about immigration ahead of the vote. Spanish fact-checkers debunked a video of an assault and robbery against an elderly man (they said it was filmed in Los Angeles, not Barcelona) and debunked its claim about the perpetrator’s race, which police did not reveal. Amid opposition to housing plans for asylum seekers in Ireland, local fact-checkers determined that an image shared on social media showing national police clashing with protesters had been generated by artificial intelligence.
Influence operations by Russia and other state actors are a major concern in the election, experts said. European Union members like 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 Russia was responsible for the conflict in Ukraine, which it started.
Smear campaigns against Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, have increased in recent months, according to the East StratCom Working Group, a disinformation think tank made up of EU officials. A Russian propaganda outlet was linked in February to an AI-generated deepfake of a French news anchor that falsely claimed that Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, chose not to visit Ukraine while fears of assassination existed.
Brussels has tried to block Moscow’s propaganda, but the European public is still exposed to it. Researchers from Södertorn University in Sweden and the civic group Alliance4Europe said that as recently as Tuesday, at least 29 TikTok channels of banned Russian entities or their imitators were accessible within the bloc, including one account with nearly three million followers.
TikTok said in a statement on Thursday that the relevant accounts were now blocked and that it was conducting a review “to understand an issue that affected the blocking that 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 dubbed Operation Overload or Operation Matryoshka, after Russian dolls, used email accounts and social media profiles on EFE said it alone had received 50 email requests since December to investigate text messages, photographs and videos.