One Business Model, Two Faces: How Europe’s Information Crises Converge
At first sight, nothing connects a tragic mass drowning off a Moroccan beach, a German school curriculum dispute, and a synthetic doctor selling prostate supplements on YouTube. But in the latest editions of the European Digital Media Observatory’s Weekly Pulse, such diverse issues converge with uncomfortable precision. In the online information space, all of them are blowback from one business model applied to different kinds of vulnerability. That model has two faces. One sells a future that will never happen: the open border, the hidden cure. The other sells a past that never existed: the heroic general, the golden empire, the innocent nation. Merchants of false hopes and counterfeiters of historical memory are the same trade, working opposite ends of the same human need to believe that things could be otherwise. The raw material is desperation, not stupidity. Facing the gravest danger, people cling to whatever offers hope. The perfectly rational person who laughs at conspiracy theories on Monday can, after receiving a diagnosis on Tuesday, tumble into a rabbit hole of miracle cures. Apply that insight to Ceuta and the parallel is exact. The young Moroccans who swam around the breakwaters on 30 July were not credulous fools. They were people for whom the claim that Spain had opened a door was worth staking a life on, because the life being staked already felt unbearable. Spanish fact-checker Maldita.es traced the most important trigger: a genuine Spanish Supreme Court ruling of 29 June, published on 8 July, establishing that summary returns cannot be applied to those who swim across, since they have crossed no physical barrier, and that a return procedure must instead be opened within seventy-two hours. The ruling authorised nobody’s stay. Online, however, it became “there will be no immediate expulsion,” which in turn became “Ceuta is an open door.” Between 8 and 28 July the distortion circulated with little traction. Then, on 30 July, hundreds of posts carrying identical Arabic text appeared on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Some users published the same message ten times within minutes, and one of the earliest amplifiers was a presenter on Moroccan state television with 1.3 million followers. Beneath one post, Moroccan users wrote: “I’m going to leave the country too.” Nearly a hundred people died. This is not misreading a legal text. This is hope reverse-engineering a legal text until it says what it must say. The fake oncologist works identically, offering the cancer patient a version of reality in which the cure exists and is merely being suppressed.
The third case, ultra-nationalism, targets a subtler desperation: the wish not to be ashamed. A nation that feels diminished wants a past worth belonging to. So Ratko Mladić, convicted of genocide, is mourned as a hero unjustly condemned by an anti-Serbian Western plot. So the Alternative for Germany, having taken over 40 percent of the votes in Saxony-Anhalt, proposes reducing the weight of Holocaust and Nazi teaching in school curricula and abolishing the civic-education agency that funds visits to Holocaust memorials, while substituting a romanticised Bismarckian Kaiserreich for post-war remembrance. Calin Georgescu’s 2024 presidential campaign did the same in Romania with Dacian mythology, glorifying Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Marshal Ion Antonescu for their “good deeds.” The product on sale is dignity, and the price is the hopeless surrender to a lie. None of these operations emanates from nothing. Each takes something true and strips away the part that makes it inconvenient. The Spanish Supreme Court ruling was real; what circulated on social media omitted the return procedure. The German migration statistics debunked by fact-checkers at GADMO were real; the influencer simply set 22,787 deportations against 1.48 million “new immigrants”—a figure that includes nearly 192,000 returning Germans and over 457,000 EU citizens, while Afghans and Syrians together accounted for only 5.2 percent of arrivals. The mebendazole patent held by Johns Hopkins University is real; the leap to “the cancer industry is hiding the cure” is not. Children with ADHD do show, on average, lower magnesium levels; the inference that magnesium treats ADHD does not follow, and the studies conflict. This matters enormously for defence. A detection regime built to catch fabrications will catch almost none of this. Decontextualisation leaves no forensic signature. The lie is not in any individual proposition but in the frame—and frames cannot be fingerprinted.
Where fabrication is needed, generative AI now supplies it at a scale that changes the nature of the problem. Fact-checkers at TjekDet documented over a thousand AI-generated “doctors” on YouTube producing roughly 100,000 misleading videos in thirty languages—fictional practitioners such as “Sofie Larsen” dispensing advice to older Danish men, with some channels going so far as to impersonate the branding of renowned hospitals to manufacture credibility. IBERIFIER and Chequeado traced the migration equivalent of the same manipulation: AI videos of collapsing migrant-dominated London neighbourhoods, a fabricated Muslim mayoral candidate in Germany invented to provoke racist reactions, false AI images of Venezuelan migrants looting in Mexico. The historical variant may be the most vertiginous: Provereno Media found Facebook pages publishing AI-generated Holocaust victims, both faces and biographies invented, harvesting engagement from grief. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum called it falsification of history, and fact-checkers flagged the second-order danger explicitly: if some victims can be shown to be fake, Holocaust deniers acquire a tool for casting doubt on the real ones. That is the endgame of synthetic authority. It does not merely add false claims to the record; it corrodes the possibility of a record. EDMO BELUX’s media-literacy work on AI-generated “archive” images of concentration camps addresses precisely this: what becomes of historical evidence when images of the past can be conjured on demand? The motive is often money, and platforms take a cut. It is tempting to read all of this ideologically, but behind the AI doctors sit scammers selling remedies, plus influencers who spread identical lies simply because the content goes viral and platform monetisation converts virality into income. Behind xenophobic AI slop sit some politically motivated actors, but also content farms monetising sensationalism. Behind the invented Holocaust victims sit pages driven by likes, shares and advertising revenue. Ideology and greed are not rivals here; they are partners. The ideologue supplies the narrative, the profiteer supplies the distribution, and the platform supplies the incentive and collects a fee. Platforms do not merely fail to react properly to crises, they fail on a daily basis, refusing to invest anything close to the resources needed to protect their own users while profiting from demonstrably false viral content. EDMO Ireland’s analysis of the 2025 Irish presidential election quantifies it: 77 percent of flagged misinformation went unaddressed, and 87 percent of non-AI election disinformation was ignored entirely.
The single most important analytical insight across these editions of the Weekly Pulse is that disinformation narratives do not derive their power from intense campaigns during elections or crises. They derive it from the daily circulation of false content, like constant dripping wearing away the stone. Crises are exploited by disinformation to reinforce pre-existing narratives, not to create new ones. Watch the sequence after Ceuta. First migrants portrayed as zombies by far-right influencers. Then migrants eating cats—a narrative recycled straight from Donald Trump’s 2024 Springfield claim. Then burning churches: a 2025 lightning strike on a church in Saint-Ours, Quebec, recirculated in Polish, French, English, Spanish and Vietnamese as arson by a Muslim migrant, and further amplified in Poland by MPs from the Law and Justice party. Then Britain supposedly accepting 4,000 Moroccans from Ceuta, with invented murders attached. Then the phantom “second wave” of 15 August, built on footage of Fnideq from 31 July, promoted by Tommy Robinson in the United Kingdom, a Chega MP in Portugal, and an AfD politician in Germany. Millions of views each. Not one of these required the Ceuta crisis to exist. Ceuta merely provided an occasion to water a crop already planted. The cumulative message is that these “barely human beings” are incompatible with European societies and drastic measures are therefore welcome. The opinions themselves—zero tolerance for illegal migration—are entirely legitimate. The problem is that the ground on which opinions form has been poisoned. Foreign powers wait downstream. Spanish fact-checkers found no evidence that foreign interference triggered the Ceuta crossings, and the European External Action Service found no conclusive evidence that foreign state actors caused the crisis. What they found was exploitation afterwards: the Pravda network recycling a photograph of PSOE ministers at the Moroccan embassy as though it had been taken during the crossings; pro-Israel accounts pushing #FreeCeuta to reframe Ceuta and Melilla as colonies; Russia-linked networks promoting the theory that Spain let the crisis happen deliberately. Hostile actors, in other words, need originate nothing. They need a society already primed by daily dripping, and a platform economy that rewards whoever arrives with the most inflammatory framing. This is why the memory question is a security question. Rewriting European history ultimately benefits powers outside Europe—Russia has much to gain from an AfD government, and it is no longer alone in cheering one on.
What follows? EDMO’s first proposed remedy is unglamorous but correct. European fact-checkers, working with counterparts in neighbouring countries—in the Ceuta case, African organisations working in Arabic—should systematically monitor platforms and local-language content, and issue early warnings that public authorities could convert into preventive communication. The expertise exists; the independence is guaranteed by European Fact-Checking Standards Network and International Fact-Checking Network standards. What is missing is money and people. Someone should have been watching the Arabic-language Facebook feed between 8 and 28 July, when the distortion was circulating without traction. The fuse was visible for three weeks before it was lit. EDMO is actively extending its network of fact-checkers to organisations in EU candidate, potential candidate and neighbourhood countries, despite its limited resources. This is a path that will be pursued further. But more is needed. Lack of adequate and predictable funding is one problem. The other is the absence of a dedicated EU operational structure with the authority to coordinate resilience-building activities and rapid response and escalation mechanisms connecting national operational capacities to EU-level coordination. Both problems have been acknowledged by the European Parliament in a resolution of 15 September 2026, endorsing the recommendations of the Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield. In July, another Parliament resolution, pledging a new strategy for media literacy and digital learning, called for strengthening EDMO activities on media literacy to support cooperation among member states. The second remedy, therefore, is about strengthening the institutional framework. In her State of the Union speech of 16 September, President Ursula von der Leyen expressly referred to the need to step up the “collective capacity to anticipate, detect and respond” to cognitive warfare. EDMO stands ready to pilot test the Stakeholder Platform that will operate within the newly established Centre for Democratic Resilience. But the upcoming EU Multiannual Financial Framework must also address the long-term sustainability of such efforts. The third remedy is harder. Regulating American tech giants is now more politically difficult and economically inconvenient than ever for the EU. But it remains the right thing to do, and “it can literally save lives”—a phrase written about fake doctors in the 17 September Weekly Pulse, but earned just as fully on a beach in Ceuta. Today the targets are migrants, cancer patients, and the murdered dead who cannot object to being forgotten. But what about tomorrow?
