There was a bizarre European conspiracy doing the rounds on far-right platforms in the hours leading up to the US #CapitolHill riots earlier this week, inexplicably drawing in one EU member state to the 'fraudulent' election claims. Bear with me on this one...
I spent some time trawling through social media networks as well as some of the more fringe platforms, and stumbled upon an outlandish story that had garnered a lot of attention from far-right extremists online.
This was the claim that an Italian civil servant, 'Stefan Serafini,' based in Rome, had colluded with former President Barack Obama, ex Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi & Leonardo SPA (an Italian aerospace defence contractor), to rig the 2020 US elections.
The claim had originally surfaced from ‘Nations In Action,’ a website run by former Georgia lobbyist Maria Strollo Zack. Nations In Action says that one of its central purposes is to uncover the ‘greatest election fraud in American history.’ nationsinaction.org/2021/01/press-…
An audio recording of Strollo Zack appeared on a YouTube video, in which the allegations of Italian collusion in the election were detailed:
The story had caught the attention of fact-checking organization @LeadStoriesCom - who wrote up a brilliant refutation of the claims: leadstories.com/hoax-alert/202…
Despite the efforts of the fact-checking community, the virality of the material hasn't been subdued. On @YouTube the above video has been viewed nearly 200,000 times. @Facebook placed a ‘False information’ tag on NiA's post, which has nevertheless received 2,500 shares.
Why was Italy chosen as a node on the trajectory of this particular conspiracy? Maybe: Large far-right following in the country, PM Conte under mounting COVID pressure, speculation as to a possible Lega-Fratelli d'Italia governing coalition should elections come forth in 2021...
Either way, no western liberal democracies are immune from the infowar that sparked the violent protests this week. Brussels should take note of the Transatlantic tactics playing out, and necessarily safeguard against any malicious attempts to undermine democracy here.
EU nations are aware of the risks. The Dutch 🇳🇱 have a general election mid-March. Despite @MinPres VVD leading the polls, Geert Wilders' far-right PVV are garnering more support by the day...
The Dutch are aware of the risk of disinformation impacting the elections & has put in place measures to tackle disinformation in the run-up to the elections, including a Code of Conduct: rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws…
The other big 2021 general elections are of course in Germany, and with Merkel on the way out, this leaves a leadership vacuum for the CDU to fill. But again, the country is no stranger to the havoc that conspiracy theories and disinformation can wreak for electoral processes.
In Germany's non-paper penned ahead of the EU's landmark Digital Services Act, the country noted how regulation should go beyond 'illegal' content, and present a more rigorous framework for tackling disinformation. See: euractiv.com/wp-content/upl… 
It would be remiss to assume Europe can so nonchalantly evade the infowar that has crippled America's democracy. 2021 will have much more in store. Watch this space...
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