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As Slovakia heads toward parliamentary elections on Saturday, the country has been flooded with disinformation, ranging from pro-Russian propaganda, lies about the situation in Ukraine and the spread of anti-migrant hate speech.
Slovakia has been coming under a barrage of online disinformation. Days before the parliamentary elections of September 30 that could lead to closer relations between this country of 5.4 million people and Moscow, voters have been flooded with disinformation from home and abroad, especially Russia.
“The disinformation ecosystem in Slovakia … is reaching its zenith today” ahead of the vote, said Peter Duboczi, editor-in-chief at Infosecurity.sk, in an interview with AFP.
Reset, a London-based non-profit, said it had registered more than 365,000 election-related disinformation posts on Slovak social media in the first two weeks of September. The posts violating social media terms of service and containing disinformation had generated more than five times as much exposure as an average post, according to the non-profit.
Unrestrained public discourse
The biggest spreaders of disinformation by far are Slovak politicians themselves – rather than influencers, Russian trolls or conspiracy websites, said Peter Jancarik, co-founder of the Konspiratori.sk project, a public database of Czech and Slovak disinformation websites.
He said the biggest victory for disinformation websites is not having more online visitors or becoming more popular but seeing their rhetoric taken up by politicians in the public sphere. “For many Slovak politicians, disinformation has become an everyday communication tool.”
Former prime minister Robert Fico – a populist with pro-Russian leanings and a favourite in the polls, whose videos are among the most popular in Slovakia on Facebook, YouTube and Telegram – is a prime example.
“Robert Fico manipulates disinformation to such a degree…
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