Member of Parliament Maikel Boon (PVV) from Bergen op Zoom has shared fake photos via radical right-wing Facebook pages, according to research by De Groene Amsterdammer and the Data School of Utrecht University. On the Facebook pages, the incendiary images are next to PVV slogans. De Groene concludes that the pages come from the PVV faction itself, namely from Maikel Boon.
Asylum seekers depicted as angry crowds and dozens of pictures of a blond person with texts such as: “We do not want to become a minority in our own country.” This concerns a total of 282 unique images, which were created together by AI. The pages are according to The Green most active at political moments such as the House of Representatives elections and the debate on declaring an asylum crisis.
The ‘Netherlands is ours’ page was established on July 11, 2015. Maikel Boon is still a member of Parliament in Brabant on behalf of the PVV. On the day the account is set up, Boon shares a link to the page and calls it ‘our page’. He also does this on another page ‘NO, no more AZC in the Netherlands’. It is linked to a total of six pages.
Account number PVV Brabant
Furthermore, the ‘Netherlands is ours’ page actively recruits for the PVV in Brabant. In 2020, for example, the page shares a bit with the account number of the Noord-Brabant PVV Foundation, on whose behalf Boon was a member of parliament. The study also establishes a link between screenshots shared on the right-wing pages and Boon’s own profile, which switch from so-called light mode to dark mode at the same time.
Maikel Boon, the national and Brabant PVV factions and Speaker of the House Martin Bosma did not want to respond to the research by De Groene Amsterdammer. The weekly magazine does write that a few hours after requesting a response to the research, five of the six pages examined were taken offline. The AI images have been removed from the sixth page.
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