Disinformation About the Green Deal: How Czech Chain Emails Exploit Climate Narratives to Undermine EU Legitimacy

Climate change-related disinformation is omnipresent. The Czech Republic is an EU member state where chain emails are heavily used for it. However, the understanding of their motivation, mechanisms, and targets is limited. Given the current developments, it is critical to fill this gap by employing current data and conducting a national case study. The Czech Elves, an informal civic movement fighting against disinformation, maintain a public database, Eldariel, which contains and categorizes disinformation emails, including 50 Czech chain emails about the EU’s commitment to the environment and climate change sent between January and May 2025. Additionally, seven recipients of these chain emails were located and interviewed. Hence, a Czech case study is built on a reciprocal snowball triangular mechanism to address four research questions based on subject headings, assigned tags, and the content of these emails, as well as their perception by their recipients, to examine how climate change information is manipulated. Consequently, this article engages with a pioneering, holistic, and systematic ten-step analysis of these chain emails and their perception, addressing how they attract attention (RQ1), where and in what context (RQ2), what they challenge (RQ3), and why they do so (RQ4). The juxtaposition of findings regarding these four research questions reveals how climate change information, particularly regarding the European Green Deal, is leveraged within the EU to support disinformation campaigns, both related to and unrelated to environmental protection. This calls for further longitudinal studies encompassing the jurisdictions of other EU member states.