A relentless Kremlin campaign of disinformation and destabilisation aimed at bringing Marine Le Pen’s pro-Putin extreme right party to power in France has failed - for the moment. The upset result in the snap legislative elections placing the Rassemblement National (RN) in third place among parliamentary parties is a significant blow to Russian interests. Even […]
As France prepares to vote in the snap legislative elections’ runoff, with Marine Le Pen’s extreme right, Putin-admiring movement pushing at the gates of power, conspiracy theories are running amok. A clutch of notorious propagators of narratives spanning pro-Kremlin conspiracies, anti-vax theories, climate change denial, QAnon, and Holocaust negation have already been elected outright in […]
It only took a few minutes. Following the assassination attempt on Slovakia's pro-Russian Prime Minister Robert Fico on May 15, the Kremlin swiftly grabbed the opportunity to launch a massive online disinformation and destabilization campaign. The target? Ukraine, Slovakia’s neighboring country. Unfounded accusations blaming Kiev for the attack proliferated across a galaxy of pro-Moscow Telegram […]
A unique product "100 per cent Made in France" has gone global. Except there is no cause for celebration in Paris. The successful export is a vile slander, catapulted across social media by an international extreme right cabal that spans the Atlantic and specializes in French-bashing. Picking up on the repugnant falsehood accusing Brigitte Macron, […]
On Wednesday, the House passed a bill with large bipartisan support that could potentially result in the popular social media app TikTok being banned from use in the United States. Former President Donald Trump, who has previously supported banning TikTok, seemingly reversed his position on the issue after meeting with a Republican donor invested in […]
George Galloway has staged another comeback to the British parliament, garnering the usual labels of “left-wing firebrand” and “maverick” with a fondness for “inflammatory language”. Yet the fedora-wearing Scotsman, who has just been sworn in as the new Member for Rochdale, is much more sinister than a mere “controversial figure” or “renegade”. Galloway is a […]
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is grappling with online attacks targeting him from multiple directions. The DFRLab identified a cryptocurrency scam that impersonated a French newspaper Libération to publish a fraudulent article critical of Attal, which was boosted via Meta ads. It also appears that Russia activated its Doppelganger disinformation operation against Attal, employing suspicious X accounts to amplify […]
The Labour candidate for the 29 February Rochdale byelection, Azhar Ali, has “apologised unreservedly to the Jewish community” for comments which he described as “deeply offensive, ignorant and false.” After comments emerged in which he suggested Israel had allowed the 7 October to happen in order to have a pretext to attack Gaza, he said […]
Tucker Carlson’s much-hyped interview with Vladimir Putin was touted by the former Fox news anchor as a serious journalistic endeavour. But it principally offered the Russian President a cosy global platform on Elon Musk's X to promote some of his most-favored conspiracy theories, notably about Ukraine and its western allies. The Russian leader surpassed even […]
You’d have to go back to the peak years of Bob Dylan’s cultural relevance, when one critic cum stalker started searching the songwriter’s garbage for clues about his lyrics, to find a musician who attracts as many amateur code breakers as Taylor Swift does. Swift has fed the frenzy by declaring that her songs, her […]
