Spanish foreign minister Josep Borrell is continuing his international campaign to sell the Spanish government's narrative about the police repression of the 2017 Catalan independence referendum. This Monday, he brought up the vote as an example of "disinformation" in an EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting. "We've given examples of cases like the famous thousand injured during the illegal referendum in Catalonia", the minister said in Brussels, saying that "only two were admitted to hospital".
One of the topics for debate today was an action plan to fight false information in the European election. Borrell told his counterparts that "the images spread those days on the police's violent attitude" were "false" and that "there was an enormous quantity of information" those days which came from servers "situated in Russian or Venezuelan territory".
The minister said that foreign interference and fake news is "of special importance" for Spain in its "internal problem" of Catalonia. "In the Catalonia conflict, disinformation has played a very important role", he told a press conference after the meeting.
According to Borrell, all the European states agree on the need to develop measures to protect this year's European election from outside interference and false information. He warned that "it's ever easier to hack human brains".