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

🪖 🇪🇺 The false story about the bodies of French soldiers returning to the country after their alleged death in Ukraine. An old image recently circulating on social media, including Facebook and X, has been recaptioned in French with false claims that it shows French soldiers killed by Russian forces in Ukraine. In fact, the photo depicts the coffins of 13 French soldiers who died in a helicopter crash in Mali in 2019. The false story is consistent with a widespread false narrative alleging the direct involvement of EU countries’ armies in ground operations in Ukraine, which has been one of the major disinformation incidents in the last months throughout the EU. Other baseless claims circulated in recent weeks on this topic often used old or unrelated content purporting to show EU troops on the battlefield or their bodies being brought back after allegedly being killed in military operations in Ukraine.


🗳️ 🇪🇸 Disinformation about the EU electoral process was also detected in Spain. After the recent cases in Germany, false claims have been recently identified in Spain that marking percentages for parties on ballots is a valid method of “double voting” in the upcoming European elections. These claims are false and similar to those debunked in Germany, aimed at encouraging people to write strange marks on the ballots, thus invalidating the votes and their legitimate choices.


🤖 OpenAI reveals covert influence campaigns by Russia and China using its AI technology. In a report published on May 30, OpenAI – the company that owns ChatGPT, the most popular chatbot – disclosed that its AI tools were exploited by state actors from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel in covert online influence campaigns. These campaigns used AI text- and image-generation tools to generate social media posts, translate and edit articles, set up chatbots on Telegram, and support geopolitical narratives. However, the campaigns struggled to gain significant traction, according to OpenAI.

“People acting on behalf of Doppelganger used our models to generate comments in English, French, German, Italian and Polish that were posted on X and 9GAG; translate and edit articles in English and French that were posted on websites linked to this operation; generate headlines; and convert news articles into Facebook posts”, the tech company says. This marks the first disclosure by a major AI company of its tools being used in such operations, highlighting concerns about AI’s role in online disinformation. Read the report by OpenAI here: Disrupting deceptive uses of AI by covert influence operations .


🎯 Check out the latest issue of the EDMO Weekly Insights and Early Warnings ahead of the June elections. This week’s edition looks at disinformation narratives about major topics constantly targeted by false stories, such as climate and immigration. It also includes early warnings on what kind of disinformation to expect as the election days approach, after US President Joe Biden allowed Ukraine to use US weapons in strikes on Russian territory and unproven claims alleging that the EU elections are rigged emerged in Germany. It also includes an assessment of how Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts could be exploited by disinformation in the EU. Read the full text here: WEEKLY INSIGHTS and EARLY WARNINGS, n. 8.

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

What is a “disinformation narrative”? Please find here a short methodological note about the definition used by the EDMO fact-checking network.

The Disinfo Bulletin 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.

Image generated using OpenAI's DALL-E image generator tool