“It’s no more combatting Russian trolls trying to hack the system. If pointed at the EU and Greenland, the disinformation campaigns on U.S. platforms become the system,” he said.
Ripe for exploitation
The relationship between Denmark and Greenland is particularly ripe for exploitation, said Signe Ravn-Højgaard, co-founder and CEO of Denmark-based Digital Infrastructure Think Tank, who conducted an analysis on the misinformation landscape in Greenland.
With a population the size of a Brussels municipality, news travels fast in Greenland and there are few media outlets that can debunk information. Most people rely on Facebook, said Ravn-Højgaard. With only a few shares, a fake news story can reach the entire population.
“It’s completely different from how it is in Denmark,” she said. If in a city of 20,000 people, 5,000 people believe something false, “it’s not a danger to the democracy of Denmark.” But in Greenland, “that would firstly, quickly spread to everyone, and secondly, it’s a large percentage of the population,” she said.
Organized foreign interference campaigns haven’t appeared in Greenland yet, according to two researchers that POLITICO spoke to, but misinformation has been spreading.
Two members of the Greenlandic government, Fisheries Minister Peter Borg and Labour Minister Aqqaluaq Egede, pleaded with the public to “stand in unity” on social media in the face of threats from the U.S.