In May, the Baltics experienced a perfect storm of events capable of fuelling public anxiety. There were repeated emergency alerts about Ukrainian drones entering airspace, some of them hitting an empty oil depot in Latvian town close to the Russian…
With parliament elections approaching, populist politicians and their supporters are increasingly fanning hatred against arrivals from third countries.
With growing efforts to curb climate change and the introduction of new environmental requirements for agriculture, misinformation about these issues is also on the rise. Both social media disinformers and populist politicians are exploiting the topic, mainly by spreading fear that farmers will be unable to meet these requirements, supposedly leading to food shortages. Why are such messages becoming increasingly widespread?
Several anonymous social media profiles are spreading a video claiming that the drones that entered Poland in September were in fact launched by Ukraine, not Russia. Allegedly, this was part of a larger plan to divide Ukraine. There is no basis for such claims. The drones that entered Poland were Russian.
Several thousand people have shared a fabricated video in which the well-known doctor Ludmila Vīksna allegedly makes alarming claims about Covid vaccines. The video was created using artificial intelligence to attract buyers for an unregistered dietary supplement or miracle cure.
Russian-speaking Latvians should be pitted against Ukrainian refugees, while convincing others that confrontation with Russia leads to poverty. These plans were revealed in recently leaked documents from the Social Design Agency (SDA) — one of the commercialised “troll factories” that worked on behalf of the Kremlin. Latvia is the only Baltic state for which documents are found in this dataset. The planners of the information operations expressed disappointment in Latvia’s Russian speakers for being too negative in their reaction to Russia’s invasion. They called for using social media to build momentum, eventually leading to real-life action.