A video showing hygiene products with the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Systems (PEFC) logo was widely shared on social media. The video implies that the label means that the products contain a certain "chemical" and are dangerous. At the end of the video, its creator says that people are going to be exterminated. There is no basis for these claims.
Executioners and fascists. These are the words that the most active disinformers on social media have used to frighten the public with the supposedly imminent forced vaccination by the World Health Organisation and general practitioners. There is no basis for their scaremongering. The prevalence of Covid-19 is low, there are no new threats at the moment and no restrictions that would suggest "forced vaccination" are currently planned.
In early August, Facebook users, including two members of the political party Latvia First (Latvija pirmajā vietā, LPV) , shared a video of blogger Edijs Gribusts where he was lying about the rights of transgender children in the US state of California. He said that parents can supposedly lose custody of their child if they do not pay for the child's gender reassignment surgery. Gribusts' claim is completely fabricated.
The presence of Mārtiņš Staķis, the Mayor of Rīga, at the opening of the LGBTQ-friendly club Skapis has alarmed Kremlin propagandists. As on other occasions, they distorted the news and added completely fabricated claims to create more resonance.
The events organised by anti-vaxxers and Covid-19 restriction deniers, begs the question – who is paying for all of this? Until now it has been hard to find sources of organised, external funding so Re:Baltica looked into the main disinformation spreaders and the way that they live.
The pandemic has escalated online harassment, especially aimed at journalists and healthcare workers. Yet in all three Baltic countries police don't consider even publicly shared death threats as real enough, therefore action against perpetrators rarely follows.