The claim that a NATO aircraft prevented the launch of anti-hail rockets on May 31, 2022 near Sadovo is false. The missiles were stopped because of a passenger plane landing on a flight from Paris. Тhis information was also confirmed by the Airspace Coordination Centre and the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry.
The Constitution of Ukraine, adopted in 1996, establishes Ukrainian as the sole official language of the country. Thus, Ukrainian legislation requires the spelling of names in personal documents of each citizen to be according to the rules of the only official language in the country which is Ukrainian. There is no intentional discrimination towards Bulgarians or any other national or linguistic minority in Ukraine.
The claim that US economist Jeffrey Sachs has admitted to the artificial origin of the coronavirus in the US is false. It is also untrue that he claims it is US military bio-labs that distributed it. The economist expresses the opinion that the hypothesis of the laboratory origin of the virus should be investigated. There is currently no indisputable evidence of the origin of the virus.
The FENCE initiative, supported by the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), offers small-scale grants to boost fact-checking and debunking activities in Southeast Europe, with a special focus on Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania. The initiative’s aim is to reveal the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda narratives being spread across the region, and in particular those used by domestic actors in national political…
The claim that the U.S. Army-led HAARP program was the cause of the heavy rains that flooded several towns the Karlovo region is not true. Russian officials have not warned of the activation of HAARP, nor has the Bulgarian caretaker Prime Minister admitted to its use. The U.S. HAARP research program did exist until 2014, but it did not engage in weather control.
Factcheck.bg is the first fact-checking platform in Bulgaria, endorsed by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in the USA. Factcheck.bg was launched in June 2021 as an initiative of the Association of European Journalists to counter the growing amount of misinformation in the Bulgarian media environment. In just over…
A photo repeatedly shared on Facebook showing “the President of Estonia and her son” wearing a pink dress is fake. A similar photo, with the same people and apparently from the same event was also circulating during that time, gathering hundreds of reactions and negative comments firmly criticizing the liberal propaganda of the West. The image is far from new – it was taken on August 18, 2020. The man in the dress is Mikk Pärnitsa, an Estonian writer, translator and cultural critic. There is no evidence that Mikk Pärnitsa has any family connection to the now ex-president of Estonia.
Countering Russian disinformation and propaganda requires not only deterrence, but also a long-term strategy of media literacy training and awareness campaigns for the general public. In the short term, the creation of a state body to monitor the media environment and combat disinformation, similar to the existing ones in the Western countries, would help. Another…
As part of its ongoing research on disinformation and foreign influence, CSD is monitoring the disinformation narratives related to the situation in Kazakhstan that appeared in Bulgarian News Front’s content during the first half of January 2022. The outlet published nearly 100 articles referring to Kazakhstan out of total of 350 articles in the period…
The narrative about the Ukrainian “nuclear bomb” may not be among the most popular stories in our country related to the war in Ukraine. But the way in which it is constructed illustrates how Kremlin propaganda works: loud claims, unsupported by facts, respectively – difficult or impossible to verify and possibly refute; simultaneous dissemination of…
