Between Russia and Elon Musk, German Voters Face a ‘Dual Front’ of Disinformation

Last week, Stephan Protschka, a member of Parliament for the far-right party Alternative for Germany, took to Facebook and Telegram to share a sensationalist article. The country’s Green Party, it claimed, was conspiring with the Ukrainian government to recruit migrants to stage terrorist attacks — and blame his party.

As intended, the post enraged Mr. Protschka’s followers. “People wake up,” one of them replied on Facebook. “This is criminal.”

The article was, in fact, part of a torrent of Russian disinformation that has flooded Europe’s biggest economic and diplomatic power ahead of its federal election on Feb. 23.

As the vote approaches, Russian influence campaigns have propagated wild claims about sexual, financial and criminal scandals involving German politicians, playing on social and political tensions that have divided the country, according to researchers who track disinformation and foreign influence operations.

The claims have appeared in fake news outlets and in videos that have been altered by artificial intelligence. They have been spread by an army of bot accounts on social media platforms like X, Facebook, Telegram and, in a new development, Bluesky.

The goal, according to the researchers and Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, is to undermine trust in mainstream parties and media and to bolster Germany’s far right, led by the Alternative for Germany, known as AfD.

Aiming at the same target is the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. His public support of the Alternative for Germany on X, the social media network he owns, has aligned with Russia’s strategic objective to destabilize Western democracies and support for Ukraine.

“We’re now dealing with a dual front,” said Sasha Havlicek, chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization that on Thursday released a report about the Russian disinformation campaign on X.

“Between Musk’s overt and the Kremlin’s covert operations,” she said, “it is clear from the content that there’s mutual reinforcement there.”

Targeting Germany

Germany’s election has become the latest battleground in Russia’s influence campaigns. The Kremlin hopes the outcome of the contest, called ahead of schedule after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition collapsed late last year, could erode support in Europe for Ukraine, where Russian invaders are grinding down the country’s defenses after three years of war.

Mr. Musk, for his part, appears to have done little to curtail Russian bots promoting the AfD on his platform. Instead, he has told his 217 million-strong audience on X that the party is the country’s last hope.

In January, Mr. Musk interviewed the party’s leading candidate, Alice Weidel, for 75 minutes on X, the same platform he gave Donald J. Trump during his run for office last August. Addressing the party’s conference by video link last month, he said it had the support of the Trump administration.

Russia’s propagandists have welcomed the convergence and sought to exploit it. Mr. Musk’s posts on X have been spread by bot accounts operated by a Russian influence operation known as Doppelgänger, according to CeMAS, an organization that tracks German online extremism. X did not respond to a question about the Russian activity.

A fake news maven

In Germany, Russia is employing tactics it has honed in France, Moldova, Georgia, the United States and other countries that have recently held elections, according to disinformation researchers including from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, CeMAS and Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company based in Massachusetts.

One key player is a former sheriff’s deputy from Florida, John Mark Dougan, who received political asylum and eventually citizenship in Moscow. Having previously built a network of more than 160 fake news websites that pushed Kremlin propaganda in the United States, Britain and France, he has now turned his attention to Germany.

Nine days after the snap election was announced on Nov. 12, Mr. Dougan began registering dozens of fake German news sites, according to a report by NewsGuard, a company that tracks online disinformation, and Correctiv, a nonprofit news organization in Germany.

By February the number had grown to 102 — some masquerading as national news outlets, others as local media in Berlin, Hamburg and other cities.

On Jan. 30, one of the sites uploaded a video claiming that Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck conspired with Ukraine to steal 50 paintings from a Berlin art gallery. Another claimed Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union and the front-runner to become the next chancellor, was a “person of interest” in a 20-year-old murder case.

“The network is showing its agility,” said Clément Briens, an analyst with Recorded Future, which also published a report detailing Russian disinformation in Germany on Thursday.

Mr. Dougan, reached in Moscow, declined to answer questions about his role, but criticized the current German government as a puppet of the United States. “All their leaders need to be replaced,” he said.

‘Deepfakes of regular people’

Not all fake videos feature prominent politicians. Another tactic that has been gaining momentum is altering videos that feature regular people.

In January, Natalie Finch, a mental health nurse, made a promotional video on Instagram for the college in Britain where she works, the University of Bradford. Two weeks later the video reappeared on Bluesky, except this time she was not speaking about nursing but the mental health of candidates for Germany’s Christian Democratic Union.

The new version was a fake, using an artificial intelligence tool to recreate her voice reading a different script over the same video, emblazoned with the university’s logo. “The video started with me introducing myself, introducing the university and then, very seamlessly I have to say, became a video about the German government,” she said in an interview.

The fake was one of several identified by Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub. Others included manipulated audio of the presidents of several U.S. universities, and a fabricated video of a British policeman claiming to have passed on warnings of terrorist attacks in Germany.

“These are some of the clearest examples of deepfakes being used for disinformation that I’ve seen,” said Darren L. Linvill, a director of the hub who notified Ms. Finch about the manipulated video. “And what’s compelling about them is that some of them are just deepfakes of regular people.”

What impact Russia’s campaign will have on the outcome of the election remains uncertain. The researchers say the efforts have not so far meaningfully altered voter preferences, but the huge volume of disinformation has certainly seeped into the public discourse, carefully tailored to compound existing social grievances.

“The Russians very intricately study the newspapers, print media, television in their target countries,” Brian Liston, an analyst at Recorded Future, said. “They probably know more about a country’s politics than the country knows its own politics in many instances.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said the quantity and sophistication of the disinformation has exceeded anything it has previously seen.

“The danger of disinformation campaigns is that they influence voters in their voting decision,” the Office for the Protection of the Constitution said in a statement to The Times. “There is also a risk that the election itself will be delegitimized and thereby cast into doubt by the public.”

There are signs that the campaign is intensifying. The 48 accounts traced to Russia on X over the past month have collectively received 2.5 million views, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s study found. Over the course of January, the number of engagements — likes or shares — tripled.

The Russian efforts benefit significantly when prominent politicians or influencers online, like Mr. Protschka of the Alternative for Germany, share the false claims, which researchers call “disinformation laundering.”

Mr. Musk, who is currently playing an outsize role in the Trump administration, may be the biggest influence. He has called the chancellor a “fool” and Germany’s president “an undemocratic tyrant.” Germany, he wrote in an opinion piece for a major newspaper in December, is “teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse.”

Mr. Musk has also amplified supporters of Alternative for Germany by sharing their posts on X. Some of these influencers were marginalized or even banned on the platform before Mr. Musk took over and reinstated them. Many, like Naomi Seibt, a 24-year-old vaccine and climate change skeptic, now post content in English to attract his attention.

Mr. Musk has also amplified Russian propaganda. In October 2023 he shared a meme created as part of an influence campaign run by Social Design Agency, an internet company in Moscow that has been sanctioned by the United States. Internal company documents from the Social Design Agency seen by CeMAS show that the Russians consider it a victory when their material is shared by public figures.

“This is the first German election where both the Kremlin and a powerful figure from the new U.S. administration are trying to influence the process and supporting the same far-right party,” said Julia Smirnova, an analyst at CeMAS.

“When figures like Musk share Russian propaganda narratives,” Ms. Smirnova said, “they ultimately normalize them, boost their reach and cause more damage than a network of inauthentic accounts.”