Something is stirring across Europe, and it is not easy to name. In recent weeks, streets from Paris to Rome, Madrid to Athens have filled with demonstrators, some peaceful, some violent, all expressing a deep weariness that has been building for years. The complaints are real and tangible: rents are too high, salaries too low, public schools are crumbling, hospitals are stretched, and the cost of putting food on the table has become a daily anxiety. On top of these long-standing grievances sits the war in Ukraine, with its endless headlines about rearmament, energy prices, and the seemingly permanent transfer of wealth to the defence industry, all of which ordinary citizens feel in their bills and at the checkout counter. It would be a mistake to dismiss these protests as mere chaos, but it would be equally naive to see them as purely spontaneous expressions of popular anger. They are being watched, amplified, twisted, and in some cases deliberately infected by an invisible layer of online manipulation. Disinformation networks are weaving the protests into a much larger and more sinister narrative: the story of a Europe in irreversible decline, too weak to protect its borders, too divided to act, too guilty of its own multicultural failures to survive. In this story, every burning car is proof of civilisational collapse, every broken window is evidence that the old order is dying, and every migrant is a threat to the European way of life. None of that is true, but it is being told with increasing confidence across social media, and many are listening.
Given that these protests have erupted almost simultaneously in several countries, it is tempting to imagine a hidden hand pulling the strings. Government officials have whispered about possible interference by the Kremlin, by Iran, by Tunisia, and some international media outlets have reported those suspicions with varying degrees of certainty. But the evidence is far more complicated. The European Digital Media Observatory, whose analysts have been tracking the waves of unrest through its Weekly Pulse and October Situational Report, warns that while foreign actors are certainly active, the claim that a single mastermind organised and coordinated the protests remains unsubstantiated. The demonstrations themselves are home-grown. In France, protesters were angry about underfunded schools and deepening educational inequality; in Italy, the riots of 17 and 18 October took place amid a broader movement against the rising cost of living; in Spain, Belgium, Portugal and Greece, the protests had distinct national flavours but shared a common sense of social injustice. These are not puppet shows. However, the exploitation of these protests by foreign actors is documented. The Financial Times reported that European authorities were examining possible Russian disinformation campaigns around the French unrest, noting that pro-Russian and far-right accounts had reposted images and videos of the violence to portray France as a country on the edge of collapse. Networks with names like Storm1516 and Matryoshka, both associated with Russian operations, were among those amplifying the chaos. Yet the same report was careful to point out that no concrete evidence of Russian involvement in actually organising the demonstrations had emerged. Meanwhile, another theory, promoted by Donald Trump and some Republicans, blamed the riots on uncontrolled immigration and Islam. President Macron dismissed that interpretation as foolish. Investigative outlets like Facta confirmed that available evidence does not prove that Russian or other foreign actors directed the violent actions in Paris, Milan, Turin or Bologna. Suspicion is not proof, and political statements are not investigative findings.
This is not to say that the danger is imaginary. The evidence points in a more subtle direction: foreign propaganda is largely reactive, not proactive. It does not create the events; it pounces on them, amplifies them, and repackages them for maximum damage. One striking example is a video of protesters throwing incendiary devices, viewed millions of times and presented as filmed in France. It was actually footage from protests in Tbilisi, Georgia, a year earlier. Not a fabrication, exactly, but a displacement of reality, authentic violence placed in the wrong country and the wrong time. This is how modern influence operations work. A foreign actor can take a crisis that it did not cause, smear it across the internet with decontextualised images, and let the algorithms do the rest. The same pattern appears in the more targeted attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Pro-Russian disinformation has circulated AI-generated videos supposedly showing Ukrainian citizens being forcefully dragged onto buses to be sent to the front lines. These clips are presented as first-hand testimonies of a brutal, coercive state, and they are designed to undermine confidence in Ukraine’s military mobilisation and in the Western alliance that supports it. Even more telling is the role of President Trump, who, before announcing a so-called diesel deal with Putin, blamed Ukraine and its attacks on Russian refineries for rising fuel prices. European investigators pointed out that this explanation conveniently ignored far more consequential factors, including the war against Iran waged by the United States and Israel, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Here we see a strange convergence: both the Kremlin and the White House, for their own reasons, finding it useful to blame Zelensky and Ukraine for the economic pain felt by ordinary Western citizens. The goal is to transform support for Ukraine into a sunk cost, a doomed investment, a burden imposed on the public by out-of-touch elites.
A second strand of disinformation seeks to transform social protests into ethnic war. The same October report from EDMO describes how the French riots were folded into a broader narrative of European collapse in which the blame falls primarily on African, Muslim and Black immigrants. The technique is familiar: flood the online space with images of looting, arson, and violence, saturate the feeds of anxious citizens, and then suggest that these images are proof of multiculturalism’s failure. Decontextualised or old footage is often recycled and presented as evidence of new anti-immigration demonstrations, creating the false impression that a vast popular consensus exists against immigrants. Individual criminals are turned into symbols of entire communities, and social problems are stealthily converted into ethnic or religious conflicts. This narrative is eagerly amplified by far-right influencers, European ultranationalists, American MAGA activists, and, not infrequently, by Trump himself. When the American streamer Zack Hoyt, better known as Asmongold, commented on the Italian unrest, he described the country as on the verge of civil war and blamed the crisis on groups outside of society. His YouTube video drew nearly 1.7 million views before Facta’s investigation exposed its distortions. None of this proves the existence of a coordinated command central. The Kremlin has an interest in weakening European social cohesion; nationalist movements have an interest in exploiting fear of migrants for domestic power; and both can benefit from depicting Europe as a continent besieged by internal enemies. They do not need to share a phone line to share a goal. The rhetoric of remigration, which proposes the forced expulsion of immigrants as the cure for Europe’s supposed identity crisis, has emerged as one of the most radical expressions of this transformation. It takes a complex collection of legitimate social grievances and reduces them to one simple, dangerous answer: get rid of the outsiders.
Digital platforms have been the great accelerant in all of this. It would be almost impossible to imagine the current wave of protests, and the online fog around them, without TikTok, Instagram, and X. Young demonstrators use these platforms to document clashes in real time, but also to coordinate, to imitate, and to perform. Italian students in Rome and Milan adopted the slogan “Let’s do as in France” and used it to organise street actions mirroring the tactics they had watched on their feeds. This is not evidence of a foreign mastermind, but rather of a contagion effect built into the architecture of social media. Highly visual, fast-paced, and largely unmoderated content travels across borders almost instantaneously, and algorithmic recommendation systems push the most chaotic footage toward similar demographics across the continent. The result is a kind of shared aesthetic of unrest, where a protest in Paris becomes a template for one in Rome, and a clash in Athens inspires a copycat confrontation in Madrid. This environment is ripe for exploitation. Prominent Russian figures, from Alexei Pushkov to Maria Zakharova, have framed the events as a civil war or as proof that the European Union is failing, and their messaging has been amplified by state media and by influence networks like Storm1516 across X, Telegram, and TikTok. Investigators have found evidence of fabricated and recycled footage being used to make localised protests look like a synchronised, continent-wide insurrection. At the same time, caution is essential. Not every graph or trend is real. In its analysis of Ukrainian attacks on Yandex data centres, EDMO looked at claims that Russian troll activity had dropped by 56%. The graph showing that decline was itself generated using artificial intelligence, and other analyses found no significant change in bot activity. That case is a warning: online visibility can be manipulated, but it is too fragile a foundation on which to build a theory of grand conspiracy.
In the end, the evidence leads to three conclusions, each of which should temper our instincts. First, there is insufficient proof that the protests in France, Italy, or elsewhere were orchestrated by a single Russian, Islamist, or other external actor. The unrest is real, rooted in local conditions and genuine suffering. Second, foreign influence operations are a real and escalating risk. Pro-Russian networks, in particular, are exploiting social tensions with increasing sophistication, and they do not need to light the fire to profit from the smoke. Other foreign actors may rally around the same grievances for their own purposes, creating the appearance of a united front where none exists. Third, domestic far-right movements are capitalising on these interferences to advance xenophobic narratives and to recast economic and social problems as identity conflicts. This convergence may not be centrally coordinated, but it is dangerous. Ahead of important elections in Europe and the United States, the risk is that diverse, complicated problems will be flattened into a single catastrophic story: Europe is collapsing, its institutions have lost control, and its conflicts are impossible to resolve. That narrative erodes trust in democracy itself, even among those who do not fully believe it. The democratic response must therefore avoid two symmetric errors. The first is to downplay foreign interference, to dismiss every warning as paranoia. The second is to blame every expression of dissent on an external enemy, excusing our own failures and silencing legitimate anger. What is needed instead is rigorous fact-checking, greater transparency about how influence networks operate, real accountability from technology platforms, and, above all, a serious effort to address the underlying causes of the protests: the cost of living, job insecurity, the quality of education, and the profound uncertainty about the future. If European leaders do not take those grievances seriously, they will keep protest alive, and every foreign and domestic manipulator will be ready to take advantage.