Latvia’s social media users recently encountered an unprecedented attack of bots. During it thousands of accounts suddenly started to speak rudimentary Latvian and defend hockey players who had played tournament in Russia despite the ban. This was the first operation of such scale in one of the Baltic languages and has led to speculation that it could be a test-run before European Parliament elections.

^{Illustration by James O’Brien, OCCRP}

The authorities have accused Temirov Live, a respected investigative outlet, of inciting mass unrest, and jailed nearly a dozen of its current and former employees. A palpable sense of fear has descended on this country, once known as the freest in the region.

January 16 was Aike Beishekeyeva’s twenty-third birthday — her mother Nazgul Matanayeva said they had planned to go shopping for a cake to share with her colleagues. 

Our children will be taught to have sex and become gay at school. Minors will have their sex changed without their parents’ consent, and the people enforcing the Istanbul Convention will remove children from their families. In the second half of 2023, the scaremongering about what disinformation spreaders describe as “gender ideology” returned to the political scene in Latvia.