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Disinformation campaigns about LGBTI+ people in the EU and foreign influence

Introduction

Digital communication facilitates non-democratic actors’ access to and control of public life in their own country, as well as the opportunity to operate undetected outside the country of origin. There is concrete evidence that the European Union’s (EU) democratic processes are being targeted and interfered with by disinformation campaigns aiming at challenging democratic ideals and agreements on rights and responsibilities inside the EU (Makhashvili 2017). Based on a systematic review of 11 countries’ secret service reports, the Russian government is repeatedly identified as the main foreign actor when it comes to attempts ‘to influence European politics and decision-making most, and more so than China and other states’ (Karlsen 2019: 1, Roguski 2019). But the EU is also targeted by other foreign non-state actors (Archer & Provost 2020, Stoeckl & Medvedeva 2018, Stoeckl 2018, 2020). The Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union (INGE) was created to analyse attempts by both state and non-state actors to interfere in the functioning of democracy in the EU and its Member States and to make recommendations for strengthening the Union’s capacity to respond.

The Russian government’s interference is motivated by a desire to ensure long-term regime security and the resurrection of its world-power status, which are contingent on a weakened EU and NATO (Karlsen 2019). The West and Europe is consequently targeted using a divide-and-rule approach, where identifying and exploiting divisive social issues is a core strategy. Equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people (LGBTI+) appear to have been singled out as a particularly opportune topic to sow friction and disunity between EU Member States. Although the Russian government is a key actor, it is important to understand that it is not the sole actor with an interest in challenging the last decade’s expansion of rights. Russia’s interests in destabilisation overlap with those of other actors driven by ideological agendas.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/653644/EXPO_BRI…

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