Greenland’s online spaces are at risk – and the stakes have never been higher
Just two months ago, a report concluded that Greenlandic Facebook feeds were free of foreign disinformation. Now, after the country has been the center of the world’s attention, one of the authors of the report is not confident that this conclusion would hold true today.
On December 19th, 2024, Polar Journal AG published an article with this foreboding title: As AI makes Arctic languages accessible, fears of disinformation rise.
In the article, Signe Ravn-Højgaard, Director of the Digital Infrastructure Think Tank, explained that a report she had co-authored had found no evidence of foreign interference in Greenlandic public discourse taking place online. Instead, she explained, their study should work as a ‘baseline for future studies’.
Little did she (or anyone else) know that the future where such a baseline would prove relevant would arrive within just a couple of months. But since then, a lot has happened in Greenlandic political life.
In January, the country was thrown onto the center stage of world politics as Donald Trump Jr. visited the country and his father expressed interest in gaining control of it. A few weeks later, an independence-focused election was called. And most recently, a controversial documentary has thrown the cohesion of the Danish Realm into one of its biggest crises in recent memory.
All topics about which diverging opinions are many and truthful information is at a premium. It is no wonder, therefore, that Signe Ravn-Højgaard has seen big changes in Greenland’s public conversation as Polar Journal AG got back in touch with her.
“Since we last talked, Greenland has gotten a lot of international attention, and this also brought a lot of misinformation and maybe also disinformation. We saw, for instance, some American influencers make videos about Greenland being full of ‘rubies the size of baseballs’,” Signe Ravn-Højgaard said.
Sensitive to false information
The host of influencers who visited Greenland in the wake of Trump Jr.’s visit were mostly making videos for American audiences.
But, Signe Ravn-Højgaard warns, their videos were also seen by people in Greenland and could therefore influence local politics ahead of an important election.
“In Greenland, there are few traditional media outlets to correct false information and at the same time Greenlandic society is really tight knit so once certain narratives start to spread on Facebook, it doesn’t take long before it has reached almost everyone,” she said.
Facebook, in particular, is important in this context as it is, by far, the most widely used social media network in Greenland with upwards of 80 percent of the population using it. This, in turn, makes it the number one place for narratives to form and spread: a digital town square in a country that never really had a physical one.
Scams or interference?
And in the past two months, many narratives have, indeed, formed and spread on Greenland’s Facebook pages. Since the sudden appearance of foreign influencer content on Greenland in January, the Danish documentary film ‘Greenland’s White Gold’, has set the agenda in February with a controversial calculation that could, by some definitions, be labeled “misinformation”.
But aside from these more ambiguous examples, Signe Ravn-Højgaard has also noticed more obvious examples of misinformation at best, disinformation at worst.
In mid-January, during the height of the Trump interest, the Greenland government had to release a statement that an X-profile claiming to belong to prime minister Muté B. Egede was fake. The fake profile had commented on a post by Elon Musk with some choice words.
Later that week, Signe Ravn-Højgaard noticed an ad on Facebook in Greenlandic and Danish that was intended to look like it was from Greenland’s public broadcaster KNR. This ad, again, had Elon Musk as a main character, this time claiming that he was offering to pay subsidies to Greenland.
In a post on LinkedIn, Signe Ravn-Højgaard flagged the ad as a possible attempt at foreign misinformation, warning people to ‘buckle up’. But her post was noticed by a policy employee from Facebook who informed her that the fake ad was posted by a known fraudster and that it was ‘merely’ a scam, not an attempt at foreign interference.
“Facebook told me that it was a known technique to use news articles about famous people in scams, and that the profile behind the ad had previously employed the same method using Marine Le Pen in France,” Signe Ravn-Højgaard said.
“But I maintained my point. Because, no matter the intent of the ad, it could still have an effect on the public debate in Greenland, as the message played well into the debate,” she said.
A fake beating of the prime minister
And last week, a perhaps even more egregious example of misinformation occurred. Someone had created two Facebook ads, using the logo of the science communication secretariat Arctic Hub.
The ads’ headlines claimed that prime minister Muté B. Egede and politician Kuno Fencker had been beaten up for statements they made on live television. Both ads were backed up by fake photos showing the two politicians with black eyes.
If you clicked on the ad with an IP address outside Greenland, you would land on Arctic Hub’s real website, which was quickly updated to include a warning about the scam. But, if you clicked the ad from inside Greenland, you would end up on a fake page, appearing to belong to the news website Arctic Today.
Here, you would find an interview claiming that the reason for the beatings of the two politicians was statements they made about their gains from a specific exchange site for crypto currency. The site included instructions on how to make money from the exchange site, indicating a scam.
“It was quite clear that this was a scam, as it looks like a template we have seen before in other countries. But it is still interesting that these things are starting to appear now. Why do this in Greenland?” Signe Ravn-Højgaard asked, before trying to answer her own question:
“Either it has been occurring for a long time, and we are just noticing now because people have started to focus on suspicious content online. Or maybe it’s because Greenland has gotten more international attention, meaning that it has also reached the radar of scammers,” she said.
A lot is at stake
In all of the cases above, it is difficult to say for sure what the intention of the false information was and, thus, if it should be classified as misinformation, disinformation or something else entirely. At present, therefore, Signe Ravn-Højgaard is not able to make any definite claims about the extent to which foreign actors are trying to influence Greenlandic opinions.
Before going beyond anecdotes, the baseline provided by the December study will have to be followed up; something that is not yet planned nor funded, according to Signe Ravn-Højgaard.
If, in the future, a new study will be conducted, it would not surprise her if evidence of disinformation was found. Because in a country of just 57,000 people there is a lot to be gained from influencing just a few people.
“Right now, and in the immediate future, a lot is at stake in Greenland. This makes it incredibly important that the things that people see on Facebook are trustworthy,” she said.
“But what we are seeing right now is that things are moving really fast and in a small society like Greenland’s, this means that opinions are quick to form and to converge,” she said.
Ole Ellekrog, Polar Journal AG
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