Disinformation helps weaponize homophobia in the Balkans

Skopje Pride 2023, held on June 24, 2023. Photo by Global Voices, (CC-BY-3.0). Populist political forces across Europe have been utilizing homophobia and the stigmatization of LGBTQ+ people as a weapon of political influence for the last two decades. Many of these campaigns have mimicked, or were even helped by, the extreme right-wing circles from the US. After 2013, Moscow emerged as a major generator of homophobic narratives that exploited existing endemic intolerance in the Balkans region. A recent analysis entitled “Kremlin speaking: homophobia as geopolitics” by Bulgarian fact-checking pl…

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