How fake news on Facebook helped fuel a border crisis in Europe

Migrants seeking to enter EU fall prey to profiteers, charlatans on social media

BRUZGI (Belarus) • After more than a week sleeping in a frigid encampment on the border between Belarus and Poland, and an abortive foray across the frontier repelled by pepper spray and police batons, Mr Mohammad Faraj gave up this month and retreated to a warm hotel in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

But soon after, he watched with surprise and excitement a video report on Facebook claiming Poland was about to open its border and urging all those who wanted to enter the European Union to gather at a petrol station near the encampment that the migrants had nicknamed “the jungle”.

Mr Faraj, a 35-year-old ethnic Kurd from Iraq, rushed back to the squalid camp he had just left, travelling 306km from Minsk to the petrol station early this month.

The Polish border, of course, remained tightly shut and Mr Faraj spent the next 10 days back in what he described as “like something out of a horror movie”.