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In just 24 hours, 28 profiles on social networks and Telegram channels that have over 2 million followers got 800.000 impressions to promote the “Peace and neutrality, not our war” demonstration around the Spanish Congress, that took place on Sunday 9th of March in Madrid. An analysis by Fundación Maldita.es found that at least 82% of these accounts have previously participated in the dissemination of pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian disinformation.
For this analysis we have verified how many of those accounts had participated in the dissemination of 10 unequivocally pro-Russian hoaxes, such as lies about the massacre of Bucha or the false accusations that the Ukrainian president and his wife had bought a casino in Cyprus with Western aid money. 82% of these accounts (23 out of 28) had spread at least one of those hoaxes and, among that group, 91% (21 out of 23) had spread at least two of the hoaxes.
Although disinformation about the war in Ukraine is the one that has received the most support from this network (60% who promoted the demonstration also spread false information, for example, about the Bucha massacre), the group has also participated in the dissemination of disinformation about Spain: half of the accounts had promoted hoaxes about the DANA natural disaster in Valencia, such as conspiracy theories about an alleged concealment of victims in the Bonaire car park (35%) or those about the King's alleged police escort in Valencia (25%), which were amplified by Russian networks.
A demonstration against “the warmonger drift” about Ukraine
Last Monday, March 3, Rubén Gisbert published in his Telegram channel and in X a call to demonstrate this Sunday in front of the Spanish Congress under the slogan “It is not our war” and to protest “against the warmongering drift of the European political class in relation to the war in Ukraine” and demand neutrality because “we cannot remain idle while Spain is involved in a conflict far removed from our national interests.”
Gisbert himself has spread pro-Russian hoaxes in the past like Bucha's or the video of Ukrainian children going to the front, But its publication of the demonstration’s poster on Tuesday meant that another 27 profiles that accumulated more than 2 million followers quickly joined the dissemination, generating more than 840,000 impressions. Among them are accounts like VerdadesOfenden, which has spread 90% of the pro-russian or anti-Ukrainian hoaxes that we took as examples, or the Albatros Telegram channel, which has promoted 70% of them.
Beyond these accounts there is, Spanish News Pravda, which is a network of websites dedicated to disinformation and propaganda according to the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), and that also promoted the demonstration in two different articles.
82% of the accounts had already published pro-Russian misinformation in the past
23 of the 28 accounts that promoted the demonstration for “Spain's neutrality in the war in Ukraine” have amplified pro-Russian hoaxes or misinformation. Among other examples, the conspiracy theory of an alleged trafficking network of Ukrainian minors, an alleged ovation in the European Parliament to the launch of American missiles against Russia, or a video that states without evidence that USAID has paid for celebrities to visit Ukraine to increase the popularity of the Ukrainian president.
Among the 23 accounts that had spread any of the 10 pro-Russian misinformation stories in the sample, 91% had promoted more than one and 39% had amplified at least half of them, as can be seen in the graph.
30% of the accounts that shared pro-Russian disinformation had also shared a video, also amplified by media controlled or related to the Kremlin, of a visit by Pedro Sánchez and Spanish King Felipe VI to the areas of Valencia affected by the DANA floods. This one showed a huge row of police cars and said they were part of the police escort and criticized the fact that these resources were not used for rescue operations instead. However, they were cars from the Madrid Municipal Police who were going to Valencia to do just that.
The Bucha massacre: the most widespread disinformation on the channels
On April 2, 2022, Ukraine announced the liberation of the entire Kyiv region and different media that got into the city of Bucha showed images of devastated streets with bodies on the ground. Disinformation content quickly appeared denying that the killings had been committed by Russian troops.
Of our sample of 10 pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian viral misinformation incidents, this is the one that was amplified by more accounts. 17 of the 28 profiles and channels reviewed by Maldita.es that had served as key promoters of the Madrid demonstration, also published posts indicating that the images of Bucha were actually montages or that the massacres had occurred after the departure of the Russian troops from the city.
The dead in the Bonaire car park in Valencia
Beyond the disinformation aligned with the Kremlin's narratives, 1 out of 4 accounts that participated in promoting the demonstration and amplifying some of the pro-Russian disinformation also shared content that reflected the most viral conspiracy theory about the DANA floods in Spain.
After the floods in Valencia at the end of 2024, the car park of the Bonaire shopping center in Aldaia was one of the key themes of the wave of misinformation about the catastrophe. At Maldita.es, we debunked more than 20 hoaxes that claimed without evidence that there were hundreds of deaths in that parking lot, even after the Police finished the inspection of the place without finding any fatalities.
“They are removing dead people nonstop with the order to say that there is nothing”, “The BONAIRE Cemetery” or “The Bonaire parking lot, a death trap” are some of the messages that these accounts posted after the natural disaster.
Methodology
To carry out this analysis, a reverse search was first carried out on the image of the poster of the demonstration promoted by Rubén Gisbert on Tuesday, March 4, which made it possible to identify all the accounts that spread the poster in the first 24 hours on various digital platforms, and then a series of manual searches were carried out on Telegram. Of these profiles and channels, only those with more than 2,000 followers were selected for further investigation. Then, from the misinformation database debunked by Maldita.es, 10 specific examples from the last three years that were unequivocally pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian were selected. Next, a keyword search was carried out within the profiles that promoted the demonstration to verify whether or not they participated in the dissemination of the selected incidents. To understand if there was also a component of national disinformation, we also checked whether the same profiles had spread two very relevant hoaxes during the DANA in Valencia (Bonaire and the royal police escort), the latter was amplified by Russian networks.
