This week in Paris, ten people went on trial for cyber-bullying Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, by spreading a conspiracy theory as grotesque as it was absurd. For the most serious offenses, prosecutors sought suspended sentences ranging from three to twelve months. Yet Brigitte Macron herself has, in a sense, been […]
Born in 1936 in Haynau (Silesia), Mahler grew up in Berlin after his family was forcibly displaced in 1945. A brilliant legal mind, he studied law at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he became active in left-wing politics during the 1960s. Initially a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), he mingled with figures such […]
For almost a century, right-wing extremists have been trying to introduce their conspiracist ideas into popular discourse. Through a number of central concepts, they want to dominate and distort political discussion and public opinion. ‘Umvolkung', a term used by the Nazis for the ‘re-Germanization’ of the diverse populations of Eastern Europe, has more recently been […]
It often takes just one offhand remark, misinterpreted picture, or joke that doesn’t land to start a conspiracy theory that subsequently never goes away. We’ve seen it happen time after time – World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein’s comment that the firefighting team working to save WTC 7 should be “pulled” serving as “proof” that […]
In the first edition of the DFRLab’s Narrative Warfare series, released on the first anniversary of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we examined narratives that claimed Ukraine had developed biological weapons that were sponsored by the West. Now, on the third anniversary of the war, we reexamined this narrative and found the conspiracies and false […]
Jean-Marie Le Pen's lifelong obsession with Holocaust denial was strictly off the agenda at his carefully staged funeral and burial. A few days after the January 7, 2025 death of France's extreme right patriarch at the age of 96, Le Pen's clan assembled in La Trinité-sur-Mer. It was the village where the Front National founder […]
Prominent Flemish author Herman Brusselmans has gained international notoriety and opprobrium since he wrote a column for Belgian weekly Humo in which he let his emotions run wild in response to the atrocities in the war in Gaza. Brusselmans wrote that he would like to stab any random Jew he met on the street with a […]
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 […]
