00:06 Paul Brandus: A name that Americans may soon be hearing more of, Geert Wilders, whose so-called Freedom Party got the most votes in last month's election in the Netherlands. Wilders will have to form a coalition government, which Dutch political analysts say will be difficult to form, much less maintain, because of what they call his aggressive anti-immigration and particularly anti-Islam stance. Wilders has called Islam, quote, a retarded culture. He's also said that as prime minister, he would not support sending more weapons to Ukraine, an announcement that has no doubt pleased Russian president Vladimir Putin. Not surprisingly, the Russians have used what they call active measures to bolster Wilders It's the latest example of Moscow's enduring and intense long-term effort to influence opinion in the West. Of course, one form of active measures is disinformation. I'm Paul Brandus, and that's the name of this award-winning podcast series, Disinformation. Meredith Wilson, Chief Executive Officer of Emergent Risk International, a global risk advisory firm, is away. But I'll be joined by one of her top associates, Thea Gioe, a former CIA officer who specializes in the synthesizing of intelligence expertise and security analysis. The issue of migration is one that Russia has long exploited in Europe. Thanks to things like Syria's civil war of a decade ago and the Russian war on Ukraine now, plus longer-term dynamics like climate-induced migration, well, there are plenty of opportunities to stir the pot. Of course, the Russians aren't the only ones who are taking advantage of such issues. Here's Thea Gioe.

02:12 Thea Gioe: There's a lot of different groups that are stirring that pot, right? There are nationalist groups who are looking to come back into power. And nationalism was considered very, it was on the fringes for a long time in Europe, right? We had a strong run of socially democratic parties kind of across Europe working on a number of issues, and so now we're seeing a really strong resurgence of more conservative, nationalist, right-wing parties moving in, and these are rally points that they use to drive that. We're seeing in Germany some very concerning trends, and German politicians have been very open about addressing some of this, recently made some very powerful statements. So, I think we're going to see that this is going to be an issue, as we move through elections in the next year. And we've got this strong tension between more conservative and more liberal parties.

03:20 Paul Brandus: Migration by Muslims to another country, Sweden, is also interesting. Let's take a closer look at Sweden. And for that, here's an excerpt from a video by American filmmaker Ami Horowitz.

03:34 Ami Horowitz: Sweden has always had a reputation of being a harmonious and liberal society. This image has been shattered as rape has skyrocketed over the past five years.

03:44 Paul Brandus: Apparently there was, all of a sudden, a rape epidemic. What was going on in Sweden? More from Horowitz's film, which was made for Fox News.

03:54 Ami Horowitz: At the same time, Sweden has been going through a revolutionary demographic shift. that has seen the country take in more refugees from Islamic countries than any Western nation in the world.

04:07 Paul Brandus: When you watch Horowitz's 10-minute video, it was made back in 2016, by the way, there's a headline on the website, it says, quote, Sweden Now Europe Rape Capital Amidst Muslim Immigration, unquote. There's little equivocation in the film. Horowitz says Muslim immigration is the reason for the apparent rise in rapes. But is this really the reason? Does the occurrence of two things over the same approximate time frame prove that they are truly correlated? How do you know? And to dig a little bit deeper, when making assumptions about data and what it may suggest, folks need to examine the methodology and the way that data is defined, collected, and organized. Here's what Horowitz says about that.

04:56 Ami Horowitz: Look, the connection was, it's interesting. So Sweden used to keep demographic statistics on rape and murder, right? They said where the rape and murder came from, what segments of society. Now they stopped that because even at the time, there was a clear association between Islamic immigration and rape and murder. Now they took that out, so now it became more of trying to figure out if in fact the two are correlated. So there's a number of ways one could analyze it and say, okay, I see some connection. So the first is you can see when the bulk migration came in after the war in Syria. And then you can also layer over that the increase in rape and murder. And you saw there was a significant connection. Now that's not enough to say that's a correlation, but it begins the first part of the indication. This is the reason why I thought I want to start looking into it. Yeah, it's this. I want to be very clear. It doesn't mean that the majority of people moving Islamic migrants going to Sweden were involved in anything nefarious whatsoever. It was clearly a small minority. Having said that, even with a small minority, it could have a certain amount of social dislocation. And I think you saw that with the data.

06:12 Paul Brandus: There's a lot to unpack there, but perhaps this needs to be said. Sometimes data alone does not tell the full story. Further examination and broader context is often needed. With regard to Sweden, its approach to crime stats, how data is defined and gathered, is complex and has changed over the years. For example, nearly a quarter century ago, long before Horowitz traveled to Sweden to do his report, a professor of criminology at Stockholm University, Hans Vanhoeffer, wrote that there are three types of factors that determine the outcome of crime statistics, statistical factors, legal factors, and substantive factors. Professor Vanhoeffer, who died in 2014, said that the combined effect of these things, quote, make it safe to contend that the Swedish rape stats constitute an over-reporting relative to the European average. In other words, the late professor was saying that these factors, again, legal, statistical, and substantive, conveyed the impression that rape was more common in Sweden, or in his words, over-reported to the European average. Perhaps one often overlooked reason why rape stats have surged in Sweden is this. Years ago, the Swedes changed the definition of rape, broadening it considerably. Again, here's Theo Geo.

07:41 Thea Gioe: You know, the data for Sweden. It looks like rape just explodes off the charts. and painting very unflattering pictures about how these migrant communities were driving that. Now, we use this as an example in our training courses, because whenever you see huge changes in data like that, you should ask yourself some really hard questions. Human behavior alone doesn't shift overnight like that. So what usually is the case, and what was the case here, is that there were changes in how Sweden legally defined rape, that caused a lot of incidents that were previously classified as something else, not rape, to be now classified as rape. They also changed how they counted incidents of rape. Before, you know, incidents between one pair of individuals counted as one incident, where suddenly it was each and every individual incident. So if we're talking about things like spousal things, Whereas that would have been one incident of four. If you've had a long marriage where this has been a repetitive issue, you might all of a sudden have a number of incidents.

08:54 Paul Brandus: For example, if a Swedish woman says she has been forced by her husband to have sex, say three times a week, that would count for a dozen cases of rape per month. Other countries, by contrast, may use more restrictive methods of counting.

09:10 Thea Gioe: So there were a couple of different reasons why rape numbers in Sweden all of a sudden spiked at that time. It had absolutely nothing to do with this incident of migration. But you have to really understand data and how data works, and you have to ask the correct questions, and you have to go back and do some digging. And quite honestly, you know, if people were given an alternative narrative, they're happy to take that.

09:40 Paul Brandus: Let's take a quick break, more after these brief messages.

09:45 ad read: This series on disinformation is a co-production of Evergreen Podcasts and Emergent Risk International, a global risk advisory firm. Emergent Risk International, we build intelligent solutions that find opportunities in a world of risk.

10:07 Paul Brandus: Welcome back. The issue of migration to Europe is fodder for disinformation, of course, as is often the case, lack of knowledge about basic facts can play a role. More now from my conversation with Thea Geo.

10:22 Thea Gioe: You know, one of the other statistics that I saw that again, particularly for Europe that I thought was really interesting is, is that we're seeing a lot of disinformation around to what extent migration is an issue in Europe. And there have been studies out there that show that on average, migration is around 7% of the overall European population right now. not an insignificant number, but the perception is that migration is actually more around 16%. So the average European actually believes that there are twice as many people migrating to Europe as actually are, right? More than twice as many. If you've only got 7% coming in, but the perception is 16%. So there's this real drive out there being fed by the disinformation, with this fear to really provoke populations to try and lock down their borders. And who's behind it? I think there's a lot of actors, but I think, you know, you have to look at Russia, right? Russia's working really hard to create division, to feed division, to undermine confidence in Western institutions. And this is a key way to do it.

11:46 Paul Brandus: And what about migration caused by the two wars underway right now in Europe and the Middle East?

11:53 Thea Gioe: You know, I haven't seen too much yet regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict, which is not to say that it's not out there. It hasn't jumped out and grabbed me yet, but certainly there has been over the last couple of years a lot of narrative shaping around particularly the migration from Ukraine, this perception that people were, again, just moving en masse and needing a lot of services, needing a lot of support. And I think I've seen less of that recently. I think I've seen more of a shift towards really focusing on the economic policies to support Ukraine, you know, I think there's no doubt that Russia's been behind a lot of the narratives around how unfair it is that Ukrainian grain is flooding, and I'm going to put that in air quotes, you know, flooding European markets. And we're seeing Poland really push back, right? We're seeing those other countries right on Ukraine's horrors, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, really push back. I think also no surprise that those are where we see some of the more conservative governments gaining strength, right? There's just an overall push to reinforce this narrative that not just the influx of people, but the influx of goods or products are deteriorating the quality of life in these neighboring countries.

13:34 Paul Brandus: As is often the case, and we see this on both sides of the Atlantic, by the way, fear of migrants can be based on multiple factors. Dr. Alberto Horst-Niedhart is a policy analyst for the European Policy Center's European Diversity and Migration Program. He's also a lecturer at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

13:57 Niedhart: Disinformation and hostile narratives typically evoke three main fears, and these relate to the health of the resident population, to their wealth, and to their cultural and racial identity. Some of the most frequently appearing narratives that we have identified in relation to these fears are, first, that migrants allegedly constitute an invasion force. Second, that there is an elite conspiracy to encourage more migration. Third, that migrants abuse the social benefit system. And fourth, that migrants receive preferential treatment over the native population, what we call in our study reverse discrimination claims. So these narratives are not present to the same degree in all European countries, but they are the most dominant overall, and they have a considerable impact on the perception of migration by the local population.

14:53 Paul Brandus: Just to give one example around this, Europe's biggest economy, Germany's, is struggling right now. The International Monetary Fund says it is the world's only major economy that will shrink in 2023. The IMF predicts a decline of one half of one percent. Why is Germany's economy struggling? high energy prices, rising interest rates, and a slowing economy in China, which for years has been Germany's number one export market, are the principal reasons. But Germany's domestic intelligence agency said in September that Russian disinformation has gotten, quote, more confrontational and more aggressive, unquote, since Moscow invaded Ukraine and has played up the theme of migration as a factor in Germany's economic troubles. Can fact-checking help? Dr. Neidhart, his comments are taken from a recent presentation, says fact-checking, a tactic which many media organizations employ, is ineffective because it can just antagonize those who were attracted to the false narrative in the first place. Thus, there seems to be an inherent advantage where malicious actors who manufacture and distribute disinformation, overcoming this is an ongoing struggle and perhaps the struggle of our time. Thanks to Ami Horowitz and Thea Geo. Sound from Dr. Alberto Horst-Niedhart via the European Policy Dialogue Forum on Refugees and Migrants. Our sound designer and editor, Noah Foutz. Audio engineer, Nathan Corson. Executive producers, Michael Dealoia and Gerardo Orlando. And on behalf of Meredith Wilson, I'm Paul Brandus. Thanks so much for listening.