U.S. groups have target European elections to try out misinformation tactics ahead of November
Over the past three years, American activists have butted into European online debates ahead of major elections with doctored photos of politicians and inflammatory online posts around hot-button issues like immigration and climate change. They’ve created misleading partisan websites pretending to be news outlets, honed their social media trolling tactics and encouraged local voters to share misinformation, including about the novel coronavirus.
“It’s a definite paradox,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a social media analytics firm that tracks these campaigns. “The U.S. far right, a nationalist and racist movement, is now trying to go global itself.”
The effort’s impact — to the extent that it can be measured — has not always matched its ambition.
Despite a groundswell in the volume of American-made misinformation in Europe, activists’ efforts largely failed to sway public opinion, according to online campaign analysts, hate-speech experts and policymakers who have tracked the growth of American digital activists operating in the EU over the last four years.
But that was hardly the point. For the most part, these groups had another audience in mind: Americans back home.
In boosting a populist European candidate, or getting a particular social media hashtag to trend ahead of an election, U.S. activists sought to piggyback on European political debates and divisions to create online propaganda to boost their world view for voters in the U.S.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/24/american-nationalists-european-vacation-278246
