A Dutch farmers' protest that turned out to be a transnational story
The 2022 nitrogen policy gave Dutch livestock farmers a real grievance. Online, that grievance was captured and rewritten into a global conspiracy, and most of the people telling the story were not Dutch.
The problem
The Changing Markets Foundation was tracking how persuasion narratives shape debate over meat, dairy, and agricultural policy, and the Dutch farmers' protests had become a flashpoint. In 2022 the Netherlands committed 24.3 billion euros to agricultural reform and a plan to cut nitrogen emissions by half, which could mean reducing livestock by roughly a third. Farmers had a genuine grievance about their livelihoods. The question was what was happening to that grievance online, who was shaping it, and whether the conversation was really about Dutch farming at all.
What we did
Ripple Research built a dedicated dataset for the protests, separate from the wider meat-and-dairy study, using a custom English-and-Dutch search lexicon developed through a Human-and-AI approach. The result captured 156,406 posts identified as misinformation, from 85,107 accounts, drawing 490,988 engagements over a twelve-month window. Across that dataset we ran timeline analysis to find volume peaks, narrative analysis to map the themes, and misinfluencer analysis to identify the accounts driving reach.
What we found
The narratives barely evolved; they stayed anchored to a few fixed conspiracies.
Rather than shifting over the year, the misinformation kept returning to three themes: the Great Reset, Agenda 2030, and the claim that emissions policy was a cover for seizing farmers' land. A softer "climate tyranny" theme ran alongside them. Whatever the week's news, the frame stayed the same.
“The WEF elite are enforcing land-grab policies to steal private property from farmers as part of Agenda 2030.”
A real policy, the buyout of high-emission farms, rewritten as global elites stealing land. The grievance was genuine; the story around it was not.
Real events were absorbed into the conspiracy rather than tested against it.
All nine volume peaks traced back to the same core themes. A protest at The Hague, the farmer party's election gains, the Prime Minister's resignation, and the release of the "No Farmers No Food" documentary each became fresh proof of a fixed story rather than an occasion to question it. New evidence confirmed the frame instead of complicating it.
The conversation looked Dutch, but most of it was not.
Three-quarters of the posts were in English, and almost as many originated outside the Netherlands as inside it. A local dispute over nitrogen policy was picked up by a transnational far-right network, amplified alongside the Canadian Freedom Convoy and boosted by US and UK commentators, until the Dutch farmer became a symbol in a global anti-government narrative.
Nearly as many geo-located posts came from outside the Netherlands as inside it, and about three-quarters of all posts were in English.
The protest was Dutch. The conversation about it belonged to a transnational movement.
A small set of accounts carried most of the reach.
The volume was not evenly distributed. A concentrated group of misinfluencers, several already known from anti-vaccine and far-right networks, generated engagement running from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, alongside pseudonymous pages built to push the same frames. Reach was manufactured by a few, not organic to many.
The farmers' grievance was real. What travelled was not the grievance but the story wrapped around it: land theft, global elites, and a crisis said to be invented.
What it led to
The study gave the Changing Markets Foundation a data-driven map of a cross-border far-right movement seeping into mainstream agricultural policy debate, and it fed the wider "Truth, Lies and Culture Wars" analysis of meat and dairy persuasion narratives. It also stands as a clear case of the dynamic behind Ripple Research's Meet-and-Move framework: a legitimate concern captured and redirected toward a conspiratorial conclusion. An addendum to the report noted that a far-right party went on to win the subsequent Dutch parliamentary election, underlining what is at stake when a captured narrative reaches the ballot box.
Working on a similar question?
Most engagements start with a conversation about what you're trying to understand and what a useful answer would look like.