Donald Trump has aborted his threat to take Greenland by force but online the war is just getting started.

The United States president in January shocked Europe with threats of tariffs to support his right to own Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Danish kingdom.

While the intensity of those threats has subsided for now, Danish and European officials say the small island remains vulnerable to the power wielded by the U.S. administration online.

With a population of under 60,000, the tiniest drop of misinformation can spread quickly and significantly affect public opinion — especially when the false narrative is coming not from anonymous Russian troll farms but from the most powerful politician in the Western world.

“Greenland is a target of influence campaigns of various kinds,” Denmark’s Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard told POLITICO, with one goal of such campaigns “to create division in the relationship between Denmark and Greenland.”

In the last year disinformation has increased in Greenland, said Thomas Hedin, editor-in-chief of Danish fact-checker TjekDet.

While the influx has lacked any “structured campaign,” including from Russia, Hedin cited as an example of disinformation the idea that the U.S. could buy Greenland — a message repeated by Trump but that is impossible under the Danish constitution, Hedin said.

The fact that Greenland is not part of the EU means that the bloc’s social media law — which obliges platforms to consider and mitigate threats of misinformation to civic discourse — does not apply to Greenland, Denmark’s digital ministry told POLITICO. 

While polls show that Greenlandic people still favor integration with Europe, German Greens lawmaker Sergey Lagodinsky said the EU needs to prepare for a “new type of hybrid confrontation” over the island.

“It’s no more combatting Russian trolls trying to hack the system. If pointed at the EU and Greenland, the disinformation campaigns on U.S. platforms become the system,” he said.

Ripe for exploitation

The relationship between Denmark and Greenland is particularly ripe for exploitation, said Signe Ravn-Højgaard, co-founder and CEO of Denmark-based Digital Infrastructure Think Tank, who conducted an analysis on the misinformation landscape in Greenland.  

With a population the size of a Brussels municipality, news travels fast in Greenland and there are few media outlets that can debunk information. Most people rely on Facebook, said Ravn-Højgaard. With only a few shares, a fake news story can reach the entire population.  

“It’s completely different from how it is in Denmark,” she said. If in a city of 20,000 people, 5,000 people believe something false, “it’s not a danger to the democracy of Denmark.” But in Greenland, “that would firstly, quickly spread to everyone, and secondly, it’s a large percentage of the population,” she said.  

Organized foreign interference campaigns haven’t appeared in Greenland yet, according to two researchers that POLITICO spoke to, but misinformation has been spreading.

Two members of the Greenlandic government, Fisheries Minister Peter Borg and Labour Minister Aqqaluaq Egede, pleaded with the public to “stand in unity” on social media in the face of threats from the U.S.  

EU lawmakers have also sounded the alarm. Greens lawmaker Alexandra Geese said to “expect influence operations using state-of-the-art propaganda campaigns as well as hate and harassment campaigns against political figures in Greenland and Denmark.”

Transparency

While Denmark said it has no legal obligation to enforce the bloc’s platform law, the Digital Services Act, on Greenland territory, several lawmakers say that should change.

Geese said that the EU should enforce the law, “making sure algorithms respect users’ choices rather than acting in the interest of the same tech oligarchs who are investing in Greenland’s minerals.”

That’s despite the fact that the EU has struggled to show tangible results elsewhere so far. The European Commission hasn’t concluded any of its investigations on risks to elections and civic discourse despite having probes open on four platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and X.

As well as getting platforms to make changes to their systems, the DSA could also help bring transparency to the online ecosystem. The law requires platforms to be transparent about paid ads and data — something Greenland is lacking, said Ravn-Højgaard.

Ravn-Højgaard cited paid ads that ran on Facebook ahead of the territory’s election in March 2025, which were not available on the platform’s transparency database.

Lagodinsky said the EU should set up an “ad hoc expert group explicitly focused on Greenland.”

Brussels should also increase support to fact-checking networks and civil society organizations, he said, similar to the support offered in countries like Moldova and Ukraine.