Elections24 Check: One fifth of false claims about migrants in Europe seek to criminalise them

A fifth of the false messages detected and disproved by European fact-checkers on immigration portray foreign nationals as criminals, according to a database created for the EU elections.

EFE Verifica, part of a coalition of 40 fact-checkers collaborating in the Google-funded Elections24Check project, has found that 21 of the 106 false claims about immigration collected in the database since January fuel this unfounded bias.

The initiative, launched by the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), records how EFCSN members have repeatedly checked such misleading messages.

The data illustrates the way in which misinformation about migrants seeks to present these citizens as a danger to European societies security, as corroborated by experts consulted by EFE Verifica. 

EXTREME VIOLENCE

“The streets of Barcelona are stained with blood. It looks like a South American country”. With this message, a video circulated on social networks in Spain with extremely harsh images in which an immigrant of North African origin was allegedly seen stabbing a citizen in the face in broad daylight in Barcelona.

In this way, the claim attacked two foreign groups at the same time, South Americans and North Africans, despite the fact that the video was actually filmed in Turkey and not in the Catalan capital.

The images also spread like wildfire in Germany and Belgium, along with publications claiming that it was an attack perpetrated by an immigrant in Barcelona, despite the fact that it had already been verified in Spain.

“Anti-immigration narratives focus on the security danger, and this is where misinformation emerges, generally exaggerating the potential danger that immigrants pose to native society,” explains Patrik Szicherle, a researcher at the Centre for Democracy and Resilience and an expert on hybrid threats.

For the most part, these discourses, Szicherle notes, seek to implant the idea that migrants have a “much higher probability of becoming a criminal than the local population”.

COMMON TRENDS IN EU COUNTRIES

In addition, they follow “common and general trends” that are promoted throughout the EU, explains Alberto-Horst Neidhardt, head of European Migration and Diversity and policy analyst at the European Policy Centre (EPC).

The immigration specialist explains that these disinformation narratives are often closely related to “issues that are high on the political agenda or in people’s minds”, so in a context where security and welfare are at the forefront of public debate “there is a greater risk that people will be exposed and pay more attention” to such false content.

For example, according to data compiled by the same database, in Sweden, widely disseminated messages in March claimed that almost nine out of ten crimes were committed by individuals of foreign origin.

On the other hand, in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, the third most populous in the country, a video from 2021 was passed off as current, blaming immigration for last year’s rise in crime.

In the meantime, “a certain playbook has emerged that suggests that disinformation actors are able to strategically use narratives in a way that is more familiar to Europeans, depending on what their most salient concerns and anxieties are”, explains Alberto-Horst Neidhardt.

FAKE AND DECONTEXTUALISED VIDEOS, A COMMON STRATEGY

An analysis of the disclaimers on this topic hosted on the Elections24Check repository reveals that a significant number of these publications use false or decontextualised images of acts that have either occurred in a different country or have been committed by nationals.

In this regard, French web users disseminated a video on social media that allegedly showed foreigners vandalising a police station in Marseille, although it was actually filmed in another location and the attackers were locals.

Similarly, in Spain, following a controversial arrest of two immigrants in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, videos of fights in the US and other countries went viral as if they had occurred in Madrid to justify police action.

These contents also have their own slang that they have developed to ridicule this group. Thus in Spain, a simple search on different social networks for the concept ‘jovenlandés’, which these profiles use to refer to any person who does not comply with a European archetype, yields dozens of videos of vandalism or violent acts which, without evidence, they relate to immigrants.

In this regard, the Real Academia Española explains that “on Internet pages and networks, ‘Jovenlandia/jovenlandés’ circulates as an ironic toponym, to allude to young people of foreign origin who appear in the news, generally as (alleged) perpetrators of crimes, and whose nationality is not known”.

DISINFORMATION ADAPTS TO LOCAL CONTEXTS

In addition to the common messages and narratives circulating in different EU countries, disinformation also exploits local contexts and the political and public agenda of each place, agree Alberto-Horst Neidhardt and Patrik Szicherle and note the examples collected in the Elections24Check database.

Bulgaria’s partial accession to the Schengen area in March flooded social media with anti-immigration narratives warning that the country would become a “colony for criminals, murderers and rapists”, a narrative that was exploited by the national far right, which preached the idea that in countries such as Germany or Austria the crime rate had been multiplied by Afghans and Syrians.

As the Bulgarian fact-checker Factcheck explained, Germany does not have crime data by nationality and in Austria most foreigners who committed crimes in 2023 were from European origin, so this claim is false.

“Disinformation can be stronger or more impactful if it is adapted to the contexts of each country, if it is translated into the widely understood language of local concerns, or if it is disseminated through local channels or presented as such,” says Neidhardt.

Szicherle, for his part, points out that these disinformative narratives have more influence in countries with more migratory pressure, such as Italy, France and Spain, than in other states such as Hungary, which, despite the strong anti-immigration discourse of its government, are not targets of these movements.

However, despite the discursive differences in different countries, this specialist points out that anti-immigration disinformation usually has a common scapegoat: international institutions and, to a large extent, the European Union.

“It is believed that they want to replace the European population with foreigners”, he points out, referring to conspiracy theories related to the Great Replacement, which sow the idea that the arrival of immigrants is a plan to replace the native population.

ELECTORAL WEAPON

In the European election campaign, which took place from 6 to 9 June, immigration was one of the hottest topics, in line with the fact that concern about this issue has increased in recent years among EU citizens, according to Eurobarometer.

In this context, the discourses of some political actors are “perfectly aligned with the hostile narratives promoted by disinformation”, producing a feedback effect, Neidhardt notes.

In France, right-wing and far-right candidates in the European Parliament elections have misrepresented official data from the Ministry of the Interior to portray foreigners as synonymous with insecurity.

According to a study by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), immigration and climate change are the issues most mobilised Europeans to vote in these elections.

Jorge Ocaña (EFE Verifica)