Disinformation about Bulgaria and Romania’s accession to the Schengen Area fuels Eurosceptic attitudes and distrust in the media

The accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the Schengen Area has been a subject of controversy and public debate in the last years, with full access granted as of today, December 12^th, 2024. The topic was not spared of many disinformation narratives, circulating in all types of media, in both countries.

In this context, immediately after the announcement, in December 2023, of the partial integration of both countries starting March 2024, BROD researchers conducted a comparative experiment in both countries, testing effects of disinformation narratives about Schengen integration circulating on mainstream, alternative, and social media on Eurosceptic attitudes, media trust, and engagement with such content. Both experiments were conducted using online panels provided by Dynata, at national level during the month of February 2024.

Results show that exposure to misleading narratives about Schengen increases Euroscepticism in both countries, regardless of the type of media through which disinformation is disseminated. Additionally, media trust decreases, when people are exposed to such narratives, but only in Romania, even though trust in the media is usually a stable attitude. Engagement with such topics is significantly higher if the information comes from mainstream media, probably due to higher levels of trust people place on such media outlets. The results remain robust across ideological preferences, news consumption patterns, or importance people attribute to the Schengen topic in general.

Such results raise issues related to people’s high vulnerability to disinformation, fragility of the European project faced with the constant threat to disinformation campaigns, and the high potential of all types of media (including mainstream media) to generate such effects.

Results have been presented to the EDMO scientific conference in Amsterdam and the Media Literacy Matters conference in Brussels, both held in February 2024, and are currently submitted to academic journals.