Investigations

Malta appears to be groaning under the weight of its tourism. The smallest and most densely populated EU member state, measuring just 316km2 and home to over half a million residents, it saw around 4 million tourists in 2025, and is likely to hit the 4.5 million mark this year.

This report examines the main disinformation narratives that circulated in Greece and Cyprus during the first months of the 2026 US/Israel war on Iran. Drawing on fact-checks published by leading Greek and Cypriot fact-checking organisations, it analyses how false and misleading claims spread across social media, news websites and other online platforms.

Just before and after the prime minister called Malta’s snap general election, a number of dubious domains were registered, all leading to websites that were decidedly biased towards the governing Labour Party.

May 25, 2026 By Theofile Bloudanis The “Sandy” case, or “Sandygate”, in Cyprus quickly moved from the realm of a political and judicial scandal to that of a controversy over the reliability of the digital evidence linked to the investigation that “exposed” the scandal. The accusations made public by journalist Makarios Drousiotis, a candidate in

May 25, 2026 By Thanos Sitistas Behind seemingly harmless videos of young Chinese women speaking fluent Greek, sharing everyday moments, cultural stories and cheerful messages about China, a more complex influence operation appears to be taking shape. A network of Greek-language social media accounts, some officially labelled by Meta as China state-controlled media, has built

As Greece approaches the August 2026 EU deadline for replacing old identity cards with the new biometric ID-1 format, public debate has been accompanied by a wave of misleading claims and conspiracy-driven narratives concerning the new identity system, disseminated by both individual citizens and political actors.

Polarisation is being exploited repeatedly in political rhetoric and forms the bedrock of much of the disinformation circulating in Malta and other places, not least in the United States.

Through this report, by focusing on Facebook, MedDMO demonstrates that deepfake-powered scams have emerged on social media platforms in Greece. Since late 2022, fact-checkers have identified several cases of fraudulent advertisements using AI-generated content, representing a notable evolution from traditional online fraud tactics.

Multiple false narratives about COVID-19 vaccines and their alleged harmful effects have spread across Cyprus, including fabricated stories about celebrity deaths caused by vaccines, distorted research findings about cancer survival rates and false claims about vaccines’ effect on behaviour. This report examines how some of these claims originated and made their way across the country.

This report examines a disinformation campaign promoting various unproven alternative medicine therapies and substances as miraculous cures for serious medical conditions. These narratives exploit people’s desire for simple, natural solutions to complex health problems while deliberately omitting critical safety information and scientific evidence.