Hybrid.info’s Disinformation About Disinformation

Hybrid.info substitutes authority for evidence, branding journalism as “disinformation” while parroting official denials. This is not fact-checking, it is narrative defence disguised as verification.

There is a revealing irony in the very name Hybrid.info. It announces itself as a guardian against hybrid threats foreign disinformation, malign influence, corrosive propaganda, yet the practice it engages in most consistently is the mirror image of that mission. Its interventions, dressed as fact-checks, bear all the hallmarks of hybrid warfare themselves: selective sourcing, semantic acrobatics, and a studied refusal to confront evidence when it collides with the interests of their benefactors.

Their latest assault¹, labelling The Gunpowder Chronicles’ reporting on the departure of Ambassador Jorn Rohde as “dezinformatë,” is a case study in this inversion.

Let us be precise: our article² did not invent facts, it presented a record—public statements, official correspondence, evasive replies and drew an inference from them. It argued that the Ambassador’s exit, while clothed by Berlin in the polite fiction of “routine rotation,” was in substance a dismissal triggered by sustained scrutiny of his conduct. This is a conclusion, rooted in evidence, open to challenge, but not to be casually dismissed as fabrication.

Hybrid.info, however, substitutes authority for evidence. Their entire counter rests on the tautology that because the German Foreign Office says it was routine, therefore it must be routine. In doing so, they abdicate the central duty of verification. Fact-checking is not stenography. To repeat the official line is not to test it. If journalism is to mean anything, it is precisely the act of questioning the powerful when they insist that appearances are all there is.

What Hybrid.info never engages with are the particulars of the record: the Embassy’s solidarity with a frivolous criminal complaint against a citizen³; the trivialisation of Mitrovica’s bridge of division as a mere “traffic concern”; the urging of elected mayors to vacate their offices in violation of the Vienna Convention’s strictures. Each of these episodes was documented⁴; each went unanswered when we put questions directly to Berlin. These are not suppositions, they are facts⁵. To leave them unaddressed while branding our reporting “disinformation” is not analysis but avoidance.

Nor does Hybrid.info reckon with chronology. The announcement of Rohde’s departure followed, within days, our formal inquiries to the German Foreign Office. The timing was as clear as the denials were terse. To suggest that this coincidence is irrelevant, or that it can be dismissed with a retirement notice, is not fact-checking, it is narrative management.

The deeper failing is conceptual. Disinformation, properly defined, is the deliberate fabrication of falsehoods with the intent to mislead. An investigative editorial that marshals evidence and advances a conclusion, one that can be debated, critiqued, even rejected, is not disinformation. To collapse those categories is to weaponise the term, to use it not as a shield for truth but as a bludgeon against inconvenient journalism.

Hybrid.info unmasked: not a watchdog of truth but a wolf of narrative, cloaked in the language of verification while preying on independent journalism.

This is hybrid warfare by another name

Erode public trust not by disproving facts, but by muddying them, recasting dissent as deceit, and branding the critical journalist as the real threat.

That Hybrid.info is funded by Western governments is no trivial footnote. It explains their reflex. Confronted with reporting that embarrassed Berlin, they sided not with evidence but with power, as if their mandate were to defend patrons rather than to serve the public.

This is the essence of the hybrid campaign: outsource narrative policing to NGOs dressed in the neutral robes of verification, and let them do what governments cannot do openly: delegitimise dissent.

What is most damaging is not what Hybrid.info disproves, they disproved nothing, but what they ignore. They ignore the ethical stakes of a diplomat who interferes in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. They ignore the judiciary undermined by embassy applause for a frivolous case. They ignore the corrosive precedent set when freedom of expression is trampled under the guise of solidarity⁶. These silences are not accidental; they are the method.

Independent journalism does not fear debate. We welcome it. But debate requires engagement with the evidence, not its dismissal. To call investigation “supposition,” to brand inference as “fabrication,” to reduce the scrutiny of power to the repetition of power’s own denials, this is not fact-checking, it is collaboration.

The name Hybrid.info has finally revealed its truest meaning. It does not describe the threats it seeks to expose; it describes the tactics it employs. Against independent journalism, it has become a hybrid weapon: part NGO, part public-relations office, part cudgel. Its verdicts are not judgements of fact, but acts of containment.

And this, perhaps, is the most telling fact of all: had Hybrid.info chosen the path of honest verification, they could have engaged with our evidence, contested our reasoning, and opened a real conversation about diplomacy, accountability, and the role of the press. Instead, they chose to brandish the most corrosive label in the modern information sphere »disinformation« without proving fabrication, without addressing substance, without producing evidence.

In doing so, they have not discredited us. They have discredited themselves.

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1. Pretendim pa fakte se Ambasadori gjerman Rohde u shkarkua — Hybrid.info.

2. Scrutiny That Stuck: Journalism Forces Berlin’s Hand on Rohde

After relentless scrutiny by The Gunpowder Chronicles, Ambassador Jörn Rohde exits Kosovo, Berlin calls it “routine,” but the record shows dismissal for breaches of diplomacy and democracy. — The GPC Europe Watch.

3. German Embassy in Prishtina Facebook Post June 21, 2025.

4. When Diplomacy Becomes Subversion: The Rohde Record

In Kosovo, Rohde built not bridges but barricades: elevating extremists, silencing dissent, and teaching a nation to mistrust its own democracy. — The GPC Politics.

5. The Envoy Who Shrinks Democracy

Ambassador Jörn Rohde has turned diplomacy into a theatre of diminishment, disguising appeasement as stability, undermining sovereignty, and teaching Kosovars to doubt their own democracy. — The GPC Europe Watch.

6. International Silence on a Press Freedom Scandal

A celebrated press freedom advocate is accused of using international influence to silence a critic, while organisations that endorsed her evade detailed questions demanding accountability. — The GPC Media Watch.