A dramatic video appears online. It shows a crowded border crossing, immigration police overwhelmed by migrants attempting to get from Morocco to Spain in the small enclave of Ceuta. Within hours, the news is picked up by news outlets, content creators, and even politicians: they report the story, exaggerate the facts, and use the events to blame others for decisions or policies that “encourage” these actions. Within days, the narratives grow and shift, sometimes changing public opinion as they go. For fact-checkers, these moments are familiar. The challenge is getting to them before the narrative takes hold.
Migration misinformation is common around elections, as narratives can feed into debates about cost-of-living and social policies. Repetition of stories, whether true or false, can lead voters to support candidates who will respond to perceived issues in a way that is aligned with their belief. Thus, migration-related narratives can be a powerful aspect of pre-election debates. Other triggers of migration-related misinformation can be more sudden, such as in reaction to a border crisis, a high-profile crime, or a new migration policy.
Migration is an especially powerful subject for disinformation because it connects to existing fears about crime, housing, public services and economic security. Those spreading misleading narratives can use these fears to build distrust in immigrants, support for anti-immigration policies or political movements. Sensational content also generates clicks and engagement.
These beliefs can take hold in audiences because they are most often based on something real: a crime, a statistic, or a real change in what people see day-to-day. These real and true events are then twisted by disinformation actors, presented without context, extrapolated from one statistic to a generalisation, or reduced to a simple and alarming conclusion.
But prebunking can help to address false narratives before widespread belief takes hold. That’s why the EFCSN has partnered with Full Fact and Maldita.es to build the Prebunking at Scale tool, and with 53 member organisations, we’re monitoring narratives circulating on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts and addressing them at scale.
Recent narratives
Migrants portrayed as linked to crime
Research by Facta (Italy) has identified a persistent pattern of portraying migrants as inherently linked to crime, often by taking individual incidents, images or videos out of context and turning them into evidence of a much broader threat. “Stories like this are often circulated on social media by pages that primarily publish racist content and seek to propagate the idea that there is a national public safety emergency caused by migrants.” They warn readers that attention must be paid to media stories focusing on links between immigration and crime.
Migration in Denmark’s election debate
TjekDet (Denmark) notes that immigration debates were centred in recent political debates in the run-up to elections. They examined the facts and figures, if they supported politicians’ statements, and determined whether they stood up to this in-depth scrutiny.
The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum
Lakmusz and Factcheck.bg examined coverage of the European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum, which came into effect in June 2026, and how the changes would impact Hungary and Bulgaria respectively. Factcheck.bg notes that “False, misleading, and manipulative claims about migration are rarely completely fabricated. More often, they use real documents, statistics, or policy decisions but present parts of them out of context or attribute to them a meaning they do not contain,” and warns readers to carefully analyse claims relating to how the Pact on Migration and Asylum would change life in Bulgaria.
From reactive debunking to proactive prebunking
Improvements to tooling and monitoring processes help to change the fact-checking workflow. Instead of waiting for a viral claim to arrive in a fact-checker’s inbox, monitoring tools such as Prebunking at Scale continuously scan social and traditional media for emerging narratives, recurring keywords and changes in the conversation.
Traditional fact-checking is essential, but it often happens after the harm has begun. Prebunking moves the intervention earlier. For migration, that might mean warning audiences that a new crime story could be used to generalise about migrants, that election statistics may be presented selectively, or that complex asylum rules can easily be turned into misleading claims about “special treatment”.
Our role is to help fact-checkers make that shift possible: from reacting to misinformation to anticipating it. Because the earlier we can see a narrative forming, the earlier fact-checkers can act; and the more effectively they can protect audiences from it.
About Prebunking at Scale
The fact-checks and prebunks in this story were created by EFCSN members as part of Prebunking at Scale. The project aims to enhance public resilience against dis- and misinformation by proactively addressing emerging false claims and narratives before they gain widespread traction. It uses an AI-powered monitoring and analysis system to alert fact-checkers to rising and viral narratives, allowing them to create and publish prebunking materials before harmful beliefs take hold.
Stay tuned for the next impact story, where we explore how monitoring and prebunking can help fact-checkers get ahead of the next misinformation wave.
