Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) was expected to become a tool that would force social media giants like Facebook and TikTok to follow their own rules and make the online space safer. However, an experiment reveals that, in practice, platforms often treat user complaints about illegal content as a formality. In the Baltics, they respond almost exclusively to regulators’ requests, if at all.
Last week, MP Mārcis Jencītis (Latvija pirmajā vietā party) scared his Facebook followers saying that the World Health Organisation's (WHO) pandemic agreement, which is still in the making, threatens national sovereignty. Similar claims have been made for several years, but without any evidence.
On Thursday 14 December, MEPs will vote on a EU Council legislation aimed at preventing cases where one EU member state recognises a child's parental rights but others do not. With the vote approaching, the website NRA.lv published a misleading article stating that the European Parliament would abolish the concept of a "father" and a "mother".
At the beginning of December, Munich was paralysed by a snow storm. A video of a small private plane being cleared of snow by rescue services at the Munich Airport was widely shared on social media. The video was accompanied by a claim that the plane was frozen to the ground and, ironically, was scheduled to fly to the UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai. But none of this is true. The plane was not meant to go to Dubai, it was not frozen to ground, and even if it had been, that would not prove that climate change is not real.
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.