Predicting disinformation themes ahead of the 2024 European elections

The ‘Connecting EU’ series organised a seminar titled European elections 2024: Why vote? last year. One of the talking points was the impact disinformation will have on the 2024 elections. We have seen how disinformation and fake news have polluted the information landscape leading up to significant voting events. 

The US presidential election campaign in 2016 and Brexit are two examples where fake news has distorted the truth and manipulated the voters’ sentiments. One of the most prominent disinformation claim leading up to Brexit was the UK’s ability to save £350m weekly once they leave the EU. Despite many organisations correcting this statement, it impacted the British citizens’ decision to vote to leave. 

Disinformation seen in European elections in 2023

The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) is a hub that brings together fact-checkers and academics to combat disinfomation in Europe. Last year they published Disinformation narratives during the 2023 elections in Europe which gave a comprehensive view of the various disinformation themes seen during national elections across Europe in 2023. They studied 11 elections in 10 countries, of which 8 were EU members and 2 were candidate countries. 

Disinformation about Russia’s war against Ukraine and immigration was prominently found in many countries. Climate change was another topic filled with disinformation in Estonia, Finland and Spain. In Spain, the issue manifested itself in climate change denialism and resulted in a surge of conspiracy theories. 

Another topic that encountered disinformation is countries’ security and defence. The fake news often included getting influenced by external players. For instance, fake news about the USA interfering in the Bulgarian Parliamentary election and Morocco asking its citizens in Spain to vote for a certain party during the Spain Parliamentary elections. 

Fake news on LGBTQ+ issues was found in Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, Slovakia and Poland. Disinformation was also found on countries’ quality of life and life expectations. False claims about the vaccine in Poland and the subfertility phenomenon in Greece were circulated leading up to the elections.. 

The report also looked into the candidate countries like Turkey and Montenegro’s experience with disinformation. In Turkey, there was disinformation regarding religion and during the Montenegro presidential election, they found false claims of excluding the minority party group. In Montenegro’s parliamentary election, they found disinformation surrounding issues related to border countries and having fake polls. 

The report was able to discover a unique category of disinformation theme that only related to the elections. The Chair of the EDMO Task Force who came up with the report Giovanni Zagni told The Fix, “What we found particularly interesting and also new with regards to the recent past is that during national elections in 2023, there was a lot of disinformation about the electoral process in itself.” 

In Spain for instance, there were false claims of voter fraud. Other election-related disinformation included ballot tampering, false counting of votes and attempts to tamper with the election process were seen in many other countries. 

He continues, “Here we can see a new European trend emerging under the influence of what is going on in the US since 2020, and it was even picked up by some national politicians in the EU. We will see something similar during this year’s EU elections.”  

Trends we’ll see in 2024 

Seeing these trends in the various elections that took place in 2023 in Europe equips us to predict what disinformation trends will be dominant in the upcoming European Parliament elections in 2024. 

Unique themes of disinformation particularly, Zagni states, for the election of 2024 “will be the war in Ukraine, issues related to immigration and refugees, and climate change.” These are the themes that already attracted a lot of disinformation in various elections in 2023.

He also highlighted that the field of disinformation is volatile and dynamic. “Something we have learned from many years of disinformation debate is that disinformation trends generally follow what is discussed in mainstream media and in the public debate.”

Regional differences 

The other problem fact-checkers face is the scope of disinformation present and the multiple languages it is found in Europe. Zagni adds, “it should also be noted that there are strong regional differences across Europe and the EU elections are still mainly the sum of many national ones, so hot topics in Poland and Hungary won’t be the exact same ones as those in Spain and Portugal.”

Medium of disinformation

Speaking on which medium would be the vessel of the disinformation, Zagni states that “a lot of communications between users has moved towards closed groups and private chats, and those channels are largely outside the possibility of monitoring what is going on there.”

Going forward more news publishers are going to focus on private ways to publish news. Nic Newman’s latest report for the Reuters Institute found that publishers will focus the most on WhatsApp, as WhatsApp Channels is now available. Getting news from publishers to readers via WhatsApp might help lower the influence of disinformation. 

Countering election disinformation

The EDMO Task Force was founded last year to monitor and counter attempts of disinformation before the upcoming election. It consists of 20 members from 14 regional hubs that work towards debunking disinformation. Zagni, the Chair of this Task Force says that it would not be possible for them to debunk every fake claim that circulates online.  

Instead, “The main way we can contribute to limit the spread of misinformation is to promote interesting initiatives and best practices that are already present in Europe in the fields of fact-checking, media literacy and, more broadly, user empowerment. There is a lot going on, but many of those initiatives are not really well-known.”

One such initiative is the Repository of Fact-checking articles. This site hosts articles that have been fact-checked and/or debunked by one of the 14 regional hubs of EDMO. It is a good resource for journalists to find the right information amidst the chaos of disinformation. 

Stamos Archontis a part of the Task Force and the Editor in Chief for FactReview told The Fix that the Task Force is “also in the first stages of implementing a digital literacy campaign that will help inform the public, specifically young people of voting age, about what the EU does, the role of the EU parliament, and therefore why the elections play a significant part in their lives.”

Source of the cover photo: https://unsplash.com/

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