Welcome to Disinfo Bulletin, your daily update from the EDMO network. Today's most relevant stories: 

🇪🇺 📈 In April, EU-related disinformation reached its highest level since EDMO’s dedicated monitoring began. According to preliminary findings of the new EDMO Brief, which will be published by the end of the week, disinformation on EU policies or targeting its institutions amounted to 11% of the total detected disinformation. The share is the highest percentage in April among the topics constantly monitored by EDMO, and the highest value for EU-related disinformation since our dedicated monitoring began in May 2023.




🕵🏻‍♂️ 💣 Espionage and bomb threats in Central Europe. Central European countries, particularly Poland and Slovakia, faced intensified threats last week. Poland reported a bugged cabinet meeting room. Though it is unclear exactly who planted the devices, or how long they have been there, these discoveries follow the uncovering of a suspected Russian spy network in March, and reportedly Russian cyber-attacks against Polish government networks in the first week of May.

At the same time, Slovakia experienced a wave of 1,000 bomb threats from a Russian email address, targeting schools, banks, and electrical stores, with the sender labeling these entities as “enemies of Islam”. Slovak police are treating this as a terrorist act, which has caused significant psychological distress to the population.


📊🇪🇺 Eurostat data service launched for European Elections. Eurostat has introduced a temporary data and fact-checking service to assist media and fact-checkers with European Union statistics and data inquiries, which will be operational until June 15, 2024. The service, which prioritizes election-related requests, promises to respond as quickly as possible and provide useful data within its databases in just one hour (but complex queries could take longer). Read more here: Eurostat launches data and fact-checking service for the European elections.

If you have suggestions, comments or requests about this newsletter, you can write to edmo.tfeu2024@eui.eu

Please find here a short methodological explanation about the "disinformation narrative" definition that the EDMO fact-checking network uses.

This tool gathers material from the inputs of the EDMO fact-checking network, as well as a recently launched public database from the EFCSN network (Elections 24 Check), and the various national EDMO hubs, including community initiatives and insights from individual fact-checking organizations.