Russia’s war against Ukraine has opened a brand-new front for disinformation and influence operations. A major influx of refugees in neighbouring countries is creating avenues for exploitation of local nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Western narratives, already on the rise. GlobalFocus Center (Romania) has partnered with Political Capital (Hungary) European Western Balkans (Serbia) and Reporters’ Foundation (Poland), in a joint effort to check out how Ukraine-related disinformation is reflected and used within the far-right, ultra-nationalist and extremist communities to advance goals consistent with Russian interests.
An analysis of 4,741 public pages populating Romania’s Facebook universe has revealed that the rather limited influence of overt pro-Russian outlets in Romania has not discouraged the Kremlin from speculating local, like-minded individuals and organisations in promoting a divisive narrative targeting mainly our trans-Atlantic orientation and EU membership.
Mon
May
10
The digitalisation of political campaigning has rapidly transformed the democratic political processes. Online political advertising has not only opened up new possibilities for democratic dialogue and creative engagement, but it has also become a relatively cheap and easy way of amplifying information manipulation.
GlobalFocus Center partnered again last year with Globsec (Bratislava) for the fifth edition of GLOBSEC Trends 2020, assessing current perceptions in Romania towards a wide range of issues: from Covid-19 health crisis, all the way to the nature of relations Romania entertains with international powers like US, Russia or China.
As disinformation became more prevalent during the pandemic, a certain lack of coherent policies addressing it became more visible. We found out that 39% of Romanians are believing in one or more Covid-19 related conspiracies. We have also found out that only 26% of the Romanians are believing to be represented by the traditional political elites*.
Thu
Dec
17
“Disinformation about Romanian-Hungarian relations as presented in Romanian mainstream and social media is primarily an illustration of home-grown mistrust between two communities lacking proper dialogue and knowledge of each other, a mistrust that, in addition, was historically cultivated as an instrument of manipulation during the decades of communism”