Why is 'Nazis' regularly trending on Twitter in Belgium?
Analysis showing how Russian official narratives get amplified on Twitter in Belgium whenever 'Nazis' trends, revealing coordinated pushing of pro-Kremlin framing.
Executive summary
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Check First's CrossOver team monitored Twitter's trending topics for Belgian users between December 2021 and February 2023, concentrating its detailed analysis on March through November 2022, combining data pulled from Twitter's official API with an independent user-simulation monitoring system, and identifying the roughly 100 most active accounts driving the trend.
The investigation found that the keyword "nazis" trended on 15 separate occasions during the March–November 2022 window, with usage ranging from World War II commemoration to posts casting the Ukrainian government and army as Nazis — language that mirrors official Russian "denazification" justifications for the invasion. Notably, the term appeared as trending on the monitoring tools on certain dates (such as May 9 and November 22–23, 2022) but could not be found in the corresponding trends list retrieved directly via Twitter's official API, pointing to inconsistencies in trend visibility or reporting.
The most active French-speaking accounts using the keyword were found to overlap with French far-right politics and to share anti-vaccine, conspiracy-theory, and pro-Kremlin content, leading the researchers to conclude that Russian state narratives were being systematically amplified through this cluster of accounts.
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