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

🍃 New denial narrative targeting renewable energy. In addition to the classic climate denialism, new disinformation narratives focus on discrediting the responses to the crisis rather than its existence. In recent months, especially in the Nordic countries, false narratives about wind farms claimed that wind turbines are dangerous or polluting. Similar false content is now spreading into other countries such as Italy, Germany, Latvia, Slovenia, and others. Moreover, in Bulgaria, it was recently claimed that a huge solar farm was being built on cultivable land. The claim was false but sponsored on social media, a dangerous tactic that could be used in the run-up to the EU elections. So far, false stories about renewable energy have been detected in almost all of the EU countries.


🗳️🇪🇸 Disinformation about the Basque elections. On April 21, elections were held in the Basque Country, one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities. In this context, it was claimed that a national television station allegedly discredited some political forces in favor of others, while a video on social media purported to show an alleged vote manipulation by a polling station member, who supposedly changed the vote of an elderly woman. Both claims are false, but they show that even smaller elections are affected by disinformation targeting the integrity of the electoral process, one of the most common narratives in the context of elections. It is highly possible that this type of disinformation will also affect the European voting.


🏳️‍🌈👨🏼‍💼 Anti-LGBTQ+ false stories are being used to target political parties. Trying to link LGBTQ+ people to sexual abuse is one of the most common disinformation narratives targeting this community, with false stories often alleging their willingness to indoctrinate children. Recently in Belgium, false information claimed that the youth of a political party proposed to teach pedophilia in schools, in what seems to be an attempt to directly discredit a political force and capitalize on this false narrative in the electoral competition.

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

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.