Iceland’s EU referendum: what filled the information space before the vote
This week: what pushed Iceland away from the EU, Washington’s money for right-wing media in Europe, the fight over who is to blame for the Ceuta crisis, and the Leipzig drone. Welcome to issue 15 of Narrative Ops.
Iceland voted No to EU talks after a campaign dominated by fishing
Icelanders voted on 29 August to stay out of EU accession talks: the official results published by national broadcaster RUV put the No side at 52.8% to 47.2%, on a turnout of about 82.5%, Al Jazeera reported. The result is non-binding, but the government has committed to respecting it, and Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir said the lesson is that people are “happy with the EEA agreement” that already gives Iceland single-market access, per CNN.
Iceland exported about €1.4 billion of fish to the EU last year – “fisheries are the oil of Iceland”, economist Thorólfur Matthíasson told Follow the Money – and the industry argued throughout that Brussels’ Common Fisheries Policy would open Icelandic waters to foreign fleets. A Follow the Money investigation traced the industry’s grip on the information space: 25 companies control roughly three quarters of fishing licences, and a group of the biggest, including Samherji, has owned the publisher of Morgunblaðið, Iceland’s only daily print newspaper, since 2009. Its website reaches 89% of Icelanders aged 12 to 80 every week, its owners injected a further €4 million the day after the referendum was announced in May, and during the campaign the paper was accused of running front-page misinformation claiming Iceland would not secure the fishing carve-outs its own politicians had promised to seek.
CEPS, a Brussels-based think tank, argues the No campaign leaned on two claims it calls false: that reopening talks would automatically open Icelandic waters to EU fleets, and that membership could expose Icelanders to conscription into an EU army. Academics cited by the Guardian saw the army claim spreading rapidly online among less politically engaged voters. No foreign interference has been established, and the campaign financing was domestic and lawful: Iceland sets no limits and no disclosure duty on referendum-campaign donations, a gap the National Audit Office says it has no way to monitor, per Follow the Money.
Washington is preparing $4 million for right-wing media in Europe – and $3 million to document European “democratic backsliding”
The US State Department notified Congress on 21 August that it intends to spend $4 million to bolster right-wing media in Europe, part of a package of at least $25 million for civil society groups working on conservative causes in the region, Reuters reported on 31 August, citing four people familiar with the funding.
A further $3 million is earmarked for a programme to “document and analyze democratic backsliding in Europe” as it relates to mass and illegal migration, the independent media landscape and the legislative agendas of supranational bodies, meaning the EU institutions. Another $1 million is to build a consortium of journalists in Europe covering national sovereignty, natural rights and religious freedom.
The funding is expected to be finalised by the end of September. Reuters could not determine which organisations or journalists are likely to receive the grants, and notes that several European countries hold elections over the next two years.
Spain named two states over Ceuta – Brussels says there’s no proof
More than 72,000 people tried to cross from Morocco into Ceuta on 30 and 31 July after a rumour spread online that the border was open. On 31 August Pedro Sánchez named who he blames: Russia, Israel and an international far right that uses migration “to attack Europe and divide it”. Rumours and disinformation spread from social networks linked to all three after 30 and 31 July, he told Cadena SER, citing research by the European External Action Service without giving details. He denied outright any participation by Moroccan authorities, contradicting Ceuta’s mayor-president, who had told El País the crossings looked, if not orchestrated, then at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco. Israel and Russia both denied the accusations within a day.
Brussels put it more cautiously than Madrid. On 1 September an EEAS spokesperson told EFE the service saw Russian attempts to exploit the crisis online, but has no conclusive evidence that foreign-state disinformation triggered the crossings, and El Español, citing the EEAS report, wrote that the Israel-linked accounts were not tied to the Israeli government and had far less reach than the Russian ones.
The open question is what caused the crossings and what merely exploited them after they began. Repsense analysis of the run-up to the crossings documented coordinated effort – the same recruitment texts landing in the same Facebook groups, in the same order, seconds apart, day after day. The Cyfluence Research Center, which tracks influence operations, followed the aftermath in eleven languages and grouped it into five recurring stories, among them that Europe was facing an invasion and that the US, Israel and Morocco engineered the crossings to take control of the Strait of Gibraltar.
Germany blames Russia for the Leipzig drone – the pro-Kremlin counter-story appeared three weeks earlier
An explosives-laden drone was found near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle airport on the evening of 4 August and defused. On 1 September the German government formally attributed the attempt to Russia: Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said police investigations, offence patterns and intelligence findings together establish Russian responsibility, and that intelligence points to people who acted on “behalf of Russian state entities”, Al Jazeera reported. Leipzig/Halle is one of Europe’s largest air-freight hubs and a regular waypoint for Antonov flights carrying Ukraine-bound cargo; investigators believe the drone was meant to disable aircraft on the ground and delay shipments to Ukraine, and a US intelligence source told ABC News in August that the explosives and construction were typical of Russia’s GRU, an assessment reached with German agencies; the device failed because its triggering mechanism was disconnected.
Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Russia’s consulate general in Bonn will close by 18 September, along with the Russian cultural centre in Berlin, and announced tighter border controls for Russian nationals and more pressure on the shadow fleet, per Euronews. Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas pledged EU backing.
Pro-Kremlin channels had filled the information space long before Berlin spoke. EUvsDisinfo, the EU diplomatic service’s disinformation database, logged the claim that the drone was a staged provocation by Ukraine and Western elites on 6 August – two days after the device was found and more than three weeks before the attribution. Moscow had used the same story before. After a Russian drone entered Romanian airspace in September 2025, pro-Kremlin outlets called it a Ukrainian provocation staged to turn Europe against Russia, and the same story ran after the drone incursion into Poland that month. Moscow denies any involvement and says Berlin has produced no evidence.
The far right’s campaign machine in Latin America ran on software licensed from Trump’s campaign manager
Fernando Cerimedo, jailed in Bolivia since 18 August, built the online machinery – fake accounts, targeted ads, partisan news sites – behind right-wing campaigns from Argentina to Bolivia. In 2025 he became the sole Latin American licensee of Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver, the voter-targeting platforms owned by Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s 2020 campaign and is Cerimedo’s business partner. Parscale travelled to Bolivia to set up the tools during the 2025 election.
Sweden gets an election-season shield for its newsrooms
Valkollen 2026 (“The Election Check”) will give Swedish journalists alerts on AI-generated content, independent fact-checking and dedicated support for smaller newsrooms ahead of the September general election. It is run by the Fojo Media Institute at Linnaeus University, a partner in EDMO’s Nordic hub NORDIS, on a donation of four million Swedish kronor. Newsrooms are themselves a target in election season: fabricated election posters, AI-written stories and fake local “news” sites work by borrowing the credibility of real media.
Fake AI images of the Nepal floods are spreading faster than real footage
Open.online debunked a run of viral claims about the 26 August Bhote Koshi flood between 27 and 31 August: AI-generated “before and after” photos of a town that does not match the disaster area, a montage stitched from flood footage shot in Japan in 2021, Argentina in 2023 and Pakistan in 2025, and an AI video of a jet bombing a dam that had circulated since May. Two motives run through it: accounts farming engagement from a disaster, and the dam video’s claim that the flood was sabotage rather than a climate event. Nepal’s government has asked Meta and TikTok to act on four categories of false content.
A fake US think tank was built to feed AI chatbots pro-Israel answers
The Hanover Institute for Public Policy has no legal entity, address or named staff, yet published 124 reports – over 560,000 words – between 6 and 14 August, most headlined as questions users type into chatbots, The Guardian found. New York firm Piro Inc registered the material under the US foreign-agent act as content for the Israeli government. The material is aimed at AI chatbots rather than human readers: models answering questions about Israel and Gaza can pick up such reports as neutral research and repeat their framing.
Last week we reported the manufactured Poland–Czechia border row built from a forged ministry note.
Update: the Czech foreign ministry publicly rejected the fabricated territorial claims on 27 August, calling Poland one of its closest partners and pointing to a flood-protection project meant to settle the real 368-hectare “territorial debt”. Tusk answered in Czech with a picture of Reksio and Krtek; Babiš replied in kind. Bohumil Kartous of Czech Elves says the campaign exploited “a fragment of truth” and bears the marks of a Russian hybrid operation run through regional proxies, TVP World reports.
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