Bulgaria’s political chaos has created a media vacuum in which Kremlin-led narratives metastasize – and the solution is not a new EU media law but better enforcement of existing rules, Balkan Insight writes (full story here).

Research shows that Bulgarian citizens are more vulnerable to disinformation than their European counterparts. Public opinion surveys point to a country deeply distrustful of authorities and susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. Bulgaria also has the highest rate of news avoidance and the lowest rate of media literacy in Europe, with only a third of the population possessing basic digital skills.

Driving these social trends is an institutional story that Brussels would do well to heed as the long-awaited European Media Freedom Act, EMFA, goes into effect. Bulgaria’s trajectory shows that disinformation thrives where institutions are visibly weak and democratic processes performative. Such captured media environments demand more than an ever-expanding body of legislation. What Europe needs now is a genuine commitment to enforcing the standards it has already set.

Bulgaria is emerging from a prolonged political crisis, marked by seven national elections in just three years and revolving-door governments. This instability has undermined media freedom and the country’s fight against disinformation. Bulgaria’s government has failed to develop a national disinformation strategy, and the work of a key multi-stakeholder body, the Bulgarian Coalition Against Disinformation, has been frozen since 2023 due to lack of political engagement.

In July, the Council for Electronic Media failed for the third time to elect a new director for Bulgarian National Television, BNT, leaving the incumbent pro-government figure of Emil Koshlukov in charge.

He has faced repeated calls to resign since taking over in 2019, accused of giving more air time to the ruling party – especially around elections – and of sacking journalists without due cause. The network recently was criticized for placing a documentary on Russian disinformation in a late-night time slot with the lowest possible viewership.

These dysfunctions are not isolated policy failures. They reflect a deeper erosion of democratic institutions that began with authorities’ failure to respond meaningfully to the 2020 anti-corruption protests, when Bulgarians demanded a judicial overhaul that has yet to materialize.

In this vacuum, disinformation has metastasized, not as a spontaneous grassroots phenomenon but as a by-product of media capture and performative governance. Politicians and prosecutors regularly deploy incendiary claims to win short-term narrative skirmishes, turning both traditional and social media into weapons in an endless credibility war, in which truth becomes collateral damage.

Networks of politically-connected media owners have long weaponized traditional media to buy favour and attack their opponents, much of their activity concealed through shell companies and opaque corporate structures. Now the same dynamics play out on Facebook, Telegram and Tiktok, thanks to many of the same funding streams.

The problem is that these platforms amplify disinformation at a rate and scale that Bulgaria’s seasoned fact-checking community simply cannot keep up with, and now fact checkers themselves are increasingly being targeted, alongside journalists.

Media capture is no longer about self-interested media owners with bad intentions – a premise that EMFA put at the centre of its Article 6 on ownership transparency. When media outlets become instruments in cyclical political warfare, media capture creates a toxic communication environment that not only undermines public trust, but truth itself.