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“Europe TELLS Sánchez OFF for attacking the Justice: ‘He pressured the judges’”. “GIORGIA MELONI has just DEMOLISHED ZAPATERO in the EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT!”.”🚨TERRIBLE SCOLDING! URSULA VON DER LEYEN EXPLOITS and HUMILIATES BOLAÑOS FOR THE AMNESTY LAW!😱” These are some of the titles of the videos of a network of channels that publish disinformation on YouTube pitting European politicians against Spanish ones, following the same technique: as a thumbnail, an image usually made with AI depicting the two politicians supposedly facing each other, with a supposed quote from the scuffle highlighted; a synthetic voice over stock photos of the politicians they mention is used in the video; and the titles of the post usually have an initial emoji, capital letters and exclamation marks talking about “humiliations”, “crushing” and “trashing” of Spanish politicians by another European politician.
49 active channels with more than 400,000 subscribers (as of March 12, 2025)
In an analysis by Maldita.es, we have found 49 YouTube channels active as of March 12, 2025, along with five that no longer operate, which have spread hoaxes that purport confrontations between European politicians against Spanish politicians, such as that Giorgia Meloni has criticized José Luis Rodríguez in the European Parliament, that Ursula von der Leyen has “humiliated” Teresa Ribera in the European Parliament and that António Costa has “crushed” Pedro Sánchez in the European Parliament. These three disinformation alone add up to more than one million views. The 49 channels that have published these videos have a total of more than 400,000 subscribers and 32.2 million accumulated views in their 6,342 videos, according to this study.
In another analysis we did in February, we already detected 35 channels with more than 36 million views that publish political disinformation with this and other approaches.
Although some of the most viral videos refer to events that never happened in the European Parliament and focus on politicians from PSOE, Sumar and Podemos, there are also others that disinform against politicians from other parties. This is the case of a content from February 6, 2025 that states that Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo has been “dismissed from the PP by [its leader] Feijóo and joins Vox”. As of March 12, Álvarez de Toledo is still deputy spokesperson of the Popular Parliamentary Group in the Congress of Deputies and spokesperson of the Constitutional Commission.
Other contents also state that Madrid regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso has switched parties to move to Vox after accusing Alberto Núñez Feijóo, president of the Spanish Popular Party, of stealing one million euros. Something that as of March 12, 2025 has not happened either.
Recently created channels that may change their name and type of content.
These Spanish political disinformation channels have in common that they were created in 2025 or late 2024, although some have earlier creation dates, according to the information they have posted on their YouTube profiles. For example, one currently called Your Real Politics was created in 2013 but its first video currently published dates back to January 30, 2025.
A channel created in July 2024 changed its name from Get up to date to Spain Up-to-Date. According to its not updated information when this article was published, Ponte al Día was a channel for “latest international news and gossip from the world of celebrities. From the most scandalous romances and unexpected breakups to the juiciest exclusives and red carpet events”.
His first videos, uploaded in July 2024, ranged from how Spanish tennis player Rafa Nadal “sells out to occultism of the Paris Olympics” and how Puerto Rican singer Anuel AA fell “in a tremendous depression” over the public kiss of artists Karol G and Feid. On the other hand, in March 2025, it has published political content such as that Pedro Sánchez has warned the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, of the decision to send “troops against Putin” and that the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, has been charged.
Another channel has changed its name from February to March without changing the type of content: from Spain Perspective to Fist of the Right, “the channel where we tell you THE TRUTH without censorship. Here you will not find manipulations or politically correct speeches. In this channel we unmask what the progressive media do not want you to know and we tell you what is really happening in Spain”.
There are indications that synthetic voices created digitally and with generative AI have been used for the narrations of these videos
As we already analyzed with the disinformative content of Von der Leyen and Ribera, not only is generative AI used to make the thumbnails of these videos, but also to voice them with narrations that have indications of having been digitally generated. The voiceovers “are synthetic, due to the speech style and intonation pattern,” according to an analysis of a sample of videos we sent to Nieves Ábalos, a computer engineer and co-founder of Monoceros Labs, a speech technology innovation studio.
Although there is no infallible method to ensure with absolute certainty whether a voice has been synthetically generated, this type of observation can be used to identify whether an audio has been created with digital techniques, such as generative AI. In general, natural voices have a number of characteristics such as pitch, timbre or rhythm, which have particularities depending on the person and the context in which the voice is used. In the case of artificial voices, these characteristics are invariant, indicating monotony and lack of emotion.
Despite YouTube's claim to remove disinformation and videos that employ AI and have not been labeled as synthetic, all of these videos are still posted
Although the fact that our analysis concludes that there is evidence of the use of synthetic voices in the narrations of all the detected videos and in many of them there are also images created with AI, in the case of the contents about Meloni and Zapatero, only 25 of the 51 videos analyzed have the ‘Altered or synthetic content' label from YouTube. The figure drops to 3 out of the 9 that are still active in the case of Pedro Sánchez and António Costa. This mark, which appears in the upper left corner of the videos and in the description, allows channels to alert the audience “when content that appears realistic has been significantly modified or generated synthetically,” according to the platform's website.
It's not just users who can tag content. “In some cases, where the use of AI in content is not recognized, YouTube may take steps to reduce the risk of harm to users, such as proactively applying a label that creators will not have the option to remove,” the platform says. In their policy, they warn that unlabeled content may be removed or channels may be suspended from participating in the YouTube Partner Program.
However, of the 16 channels analyzed in February 2025 that shared disinformation about Von der Leyen and Ribera, 12 channels are still available one month later, including those that do not include tags in their videos. This also points to non-compliance with YouTube's disinformation policy, as they claim to remove disinformation content involving a “high risk of serious harm”. They further note that channels may be terminated if they engage in “violating any policy,” but we detected 49 channels available at the time of publication of this article (3:50 p.m. on March 12, 2025).
