The assassin’s wife was Ukrainian, the shooter was associated with the head of the opposition Michal Šimečka… a huge number of lies of a similar type appeared on the Slovak Internet after the shooting. At the same time, Russia was behind part of it, pointed out the anonymous research group Antibot4Navalny, which monitors the spread of disinformation from this country on the X network.
According to the group, the posts were part of a campaign dubbed Doppelganger. It has been operating on social networks since at least 2022 and consists in the fact that accounts coordinated from Russia – according to Antibot4Navalna even at the behest of the Kremlin – spreads fabricated news on the Internet about how Ukraine is a rotten nation, how Ukrainian refugees burden Europe, etc. This is precisely why the Russians tried to connect the shooters from Slovakia to Ukraine – the main goal of this disinformation is to damage the attacked country.
To give you an idea of how much attention the fake news received, it was published, for example, by the popular Russian Telegram military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk, who has 1.2 million subscribers. His post about the fact that there is a “Ukrainian trace” in the assassination (which, according to current information, is not true), was read by 300,000 people.
This Russian-created disinformation was eventually picked up by accounts linked to the extreme right and chaos ensued. Even Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán shared incorrect information.
An unprecedented level of hatred
It is not just disinformation. On the Slovak Internet, according to startup elv.ai, the level of online toxicity increased by 60 percent immediately after the shooting, by which we mean hateful and aggressive comments under the profiles of media and state institutions on social networks. A few hours after the shooting, a full 21 percent of the comments under the posts were toxic. In the Czech Republic it was 13.6 percent.
“We have observed that during elections and sporting events, the level of toxicity of posts increases significantly. Attack on Prime Minister Fico but it has raised the level of hate on social media to a level we’ve never seen before.” said startup director Jakub Šuster, according to whom the numbers are alarming.
The European Commission warns
The Digital Services Act (DSA) helped to limit the spread of misinformation and toxic comments on social networks. which began to apply in Europe in February this year and whose main goal is to monitor companies that hold a lot of power on the Internet.
Companies have under the new law among other things, the obligation to protect users on the Internet more, this also means against misinformation and hateful posts. These two aspects were highlighted as one of the main benefits of the whole act. European authorities have long complained that companies like Meta or X are not doing enough against the spread of misinformation.
But the law has a catch in that it does not explicitly define misinformation and toxic content. Companies can thus interpret relatively freely what kind of contributions they should devote to. But they had to set up a contact point where users can report problematic content, and if they report it, then they have to review it and possibly delete it.
The assassination of Fico is the first really big disinformation case since the law came into force. The European Commission has already reminded the technology companies and told them that it is closely monitoring the whole situation. If firms are to play a dead bug, the DSA has “broad investigative and control powers, including the right to impose sanctions and remedial measures,” she warned in a statement. Fines can be up to 6 percent of the company’s annual worldwide turnover.
Roberto Viola of TechCrunch’s General Directorate of Communications Networks revealed that The European Commission has even sent a letter to major technology companies urging them to beware of the spread of disinformation about the Fico assassination. For example, the X network is in a complicated situation, the commission is already investigating it due to the previous insufficient fight against lies, and the owner of the company Elon Musk he only contributes to this with his behavior – after the shooting of Fico, he responded to one disinformation post, making him visible to millions of his followers.
So far, it seems that both the amount of misinformation and the amount of toxicity on the European Internet have not decreased since the DSA came into effect. But the fines that the commission is determined to hand out can change everything.