Anti-European narratives related to key issues currently relevant for the EU27, and by extension for Romania, are gaining audience and impact. Their authors are increasingly active online, with worrying consequences and trends: trust in the European project is declining, Euroscepticism is growing, and democratic values are being challenged.
Across many EU countries, we are witnessing a surge in populist, anti-European, and extremist rhetoric, alongside growing public sympathy for nationalist and sovereigntist approaches. Conspiracy theories are spreading more and more. Faced with an information war where disinformation is gaining ground, trust in the media is collapsing, and public communication is slow and ineffective, citizens become victims, losing both trust and the ability to make decisions based on real facts.
These anti-European narratives are part of a broader anti-Western discourse that is not new, but the intensity with which they are spreading is unprecedented. The impact on public perception is already visible: recent national and European barometers confirm that Romanians’ trust in the EU is decreasing. Anti-European narratives now target the general public, fostering distrust in products and services, consumption, the free market, technology and digital services, public policy decisions, and concrete measures to address imminent crises and challenges.
Anti-EU Disinformation: what we monitored
In our report, Anti-European Disinformation in Romania, we analyzed who is polluting public perception with false narratives about the EU and which themes have gained traction. Furthermore, we measured audience reach, impact, actors, channels, and dissemination, continuing and complementing efforts, projects, and analyses from colleagues in civil society, academia, and the media.
We conducted this research within the project “Who and How: Combating Disinformation that Drives Citizens Away from the European Project,” supported by the European Education and Culture Executive Agency and carried out by a consortium including Freedom House Romania, the Romanian Center for European Policies (CRPE), G4Media, Amapola – Progetti per la sicurezza delle persone e della comunità Associazione (Italy), and the Center for the Study of Democracy (Bulgaria).
Why EU-related disinformation gains traction: aggravating factors in Romania
The spread of disinformation about the European Union is particularly dangerous in Romania due to low societal resilience to disinformation and limited media literacy. Worse, there is a growing trend of public sympathy toward populist rhetoric. At the same time, trust in the EU and its policies is declining in Romania, a trend confirmed by recent surveys. The situation is even more concerning for specific population groups: small urban and rural communities, youth, the elderly, and citizens living in the diaspora—all of whom are specifically targeted by disinformation campaigns.
Among the general public, awareness and the ability to detect online disinformation are low. A sociological study at EU level (Eurobarometer 507 – Democracy in the EU) shows that most respondents in EU member states believe they have been exposed to or have personally witnessed online disinformation. This proportion is highest in Estonia (86%) and the Czech Republic (77%), but lower in Poland and Bulgaria (both at 49%). Romania has one of the lowest rates (47%), with only 33% in Italy.
A country-level analysis of perceived exposure to fake news, published just before the pandemic (March 2020), found that at least 50% of citizens in 16 surveyed countries said they had encountered news or information they believed to be misleading. Only 38% of Bulgarians and 33% of Romanians reported the same. Just 15% of Bulgarian respondents, 17% of Italians, and 19% of Romanians said they encountered this type of information daily, compared to an EU median of 30%.
Anti-EU narratives and their impact: who is spreading disinformation?
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What were the most frequently circulated anti-European narratives in the past year (April 2022–2023) across online media, TV, and social media?
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What is the impact of disinformation on European issues among readers and online audiences (audience size, interactions, influencers)?
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How have these narratives and disinformation been debunked through public and political communication, the press, and other actors?
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How does fact-checking compare in impact to disinformation and fake news?
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Case studies: anti-European narratives targeting EU measures on climate change (food, agriculture, consumer protection, emissions reduction), digital policies and tools (digital identity, digital wallet), and strategies for sustainable urban mobility (“15-minute cities”).
Methodology
We conducted a detailed analysis of a first set of narratives related to highly relevant EU policies and measures, most of which were EU responses to current crises and challenges. We used social listening tools/the Zelist monitoring platform, and public audience data from sources like Statista.com, BRAT, and Google’s Crowdtangle. For a series of frequently circulated narratives from the past year, prominent on the European public agenda and accompanied by EU-wide measures and strategies, we performed in-depth analyses showing how each narrative spreads, who creates and shares the content, which channels are used, the audiences reached, online impact (social media and online media), reader sentiment, and top influencers involved.
A first batch of commonly circulated current narratives over the past year was analyzed using the Zelist monitoring platform—a high-performance tool for online content monitoring, especially social media.
Zelist Monitor is a Romanian social media monitoring and measurement system that analyzes over 86,000 blogs, 41,000 Facebook pages, 298,000 Twitter accounts, 2,800 online publications, and 119 major forums weekly. It also tracks over 790,000 Romanian YouTube accounts, 190,000 Romanian Instagram accounts, and 1,100 LinkedIn groups. Platform users can identify in real-time the main discussions around specific brands/themes.
Conclusions: what EU-themed disinformation looks like in Romania
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Anti-Western and anti-European narratives are on the rise, spreading widely through an increasing number of channels and gaining validation even within Romania’s political mainstream.
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The audiences of conspiracy theorists and populist discourse promoters are significant; on some topics, their communication channels dominate audience impact rankings (e.g., digital identity and currency). Online influencers in this space are often nationalist, anti-European, populist, sovereigntist, and/or conspiracy theory promoters, with hundreds of posts and hundreds of thousands of views.
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These are narratives where the anti-European discourse is so dominant that objective, explanatory, and factual reporting barely registers in terms of relevance or impact—for example, in the cases of digital identity and digital currency.
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Channels: Social media—particularly Facebook—is the preferred medium for publishing and spreading these narratives. Next comes the press (online media).
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The impact of the press is greater than that of Facebook. Instagram and Twitter are not relevant in this discussion. TikTok, however, is growing exponentially. For example, just 0.1% of posts on TikTok accounted for 11% of the audience impact for one narrative.
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High-quality fact-checking currently has limited reach despite being timely and accurate.
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Quick reactions from mainstream press to fake news about the EU reach a relevant number of readers but are still too few, especially if not shared on social media.
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Sentiment analysis of how readers (on social and mainstream media) respond to anti-European narratives shows that more than 50% have a neutral reaction. However, on average, at least 25% of readers agree with or react positively to these narratives. While this needs deeper analysis, the current data suggests that the public is divided between believing or disbelieving EU-related falsehoods.