Written by
W. F. Thomas | Jan 12, 2022 3:30:00 PM
With additional reporting by Ernie Piper
Disclose.tv, a disinformation outlet based in Germany, is bringing fake news to a timeline near you. Although it now presents itself on social media as a reliable news source, Disclose.tv originated as a forum fixated on conspiracy narratives and UFOs. Its continued uncritical coverage of these topics reveals its links to fringe pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.
Currently, Disclose.tv operates its main website, as well as accounts on Twitter (801K followers), Telegram (394K followers), YouTube (12K followers), Facebook (3 million followers), Gettr (583K followers), and Gab (180K followers). On these platforms, Disclose.tv functions as a news aggregator, largely sharing information from other news sources, often without attribution or without links to other news sites. Its most popular posts tend to be videos or photos taken from other accounts. Its Twitter account currently has
eight Tweets with over 20,000 likes, half of which lack attribution to any news source.
A tweet from Disclose.tv that does not include where its “breaking” news came from.
Disclose.tv consistently pushes anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown narratives. Many of their social media posts focus on negative aspects of government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and negative effects from the vaccine, usually presented in a misleading manner. Its own reporting misrepresents developments related to COVID-19, such as an article from October 2021 titled “German court declares Corona curfew unconstitutional,” which referred specifically to a curfew in the German state of Bavaria in March 2020 that the State Court retroactively ruled unconstitutional.
Examples of the types of narratives common on Disclose.tv’s social media.
Conspiratorial origins
The earliest archived version of Disclose.tv dates back to March 22, 2007 – but Disclose.tv today is a far cry from its initial form. In its initial form, Disclose. tv focused primarily on UFOs, aliens, ghosts, cryptozoology, and other baseless conspiracy theories. The site’s early tagline — “Disclose.tv - UFOs, ghosts, paranormal, conspiracy & other top secret videos.” — highlights this focus, as does its name. The name “Disclose” references the concept within UFO enthusiast circles of “disclosure,” the time when the government will confirm the existence of aliens and release information regarding them.
Popular topics on Disclose.tv on March 22, 2007
In its original form, Disclose.tv functioned largely as a forum. User contributors wrote all the material shared on the site and forums allowed members to discuss UFOs, conspiracy theories, and paranormal phenomena.
Disclose.tv, November 18, 2015
Forum discussions took a political turn in the 2010s, with topics such as “Will Russiagate backfire on the left?” and “Proof Being A Sjw Is A Mental Disorder” showing the right-wing undercurrent of the community.
In 2019, Disclose.tv stripped away the user-generated articles. An announcement welcomed users to “the all-new Disclose.tv.” In this form, the website primarily hosted forums where users’ posts grew even more conservative. On the Disclose.tv social media accounts, some of these forum posts were presented as news articles. With the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing, Disclose.tv naturally grew into a home for anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine beliefs.