Russia’s disinformation operations resurface ahead of German election

A non-profit has detected the well-known ‘Doppelgänger’ campaign spreading content aimed at swaying German voters.

Transcript

00:00How Russia's Doppelganger campaign is resurfacing ahead of the German election

00:09Weeks before Germans head to the polls, there are signs Russia is intensifying its efforts to sow divisions among voters online.

00:17German researchers have identified a well-known disinformation campaign called Doppelganger resurfacing in recent weeks.

00:25This is how Doppelganger works. This article looks exactly like it's been published by prominent German media Der Spiegel.

00:33But a closer look at the domain name shows that the page has been cloned to impersonate the site. The content is in fact false.

00:41Here's another page imitating the German TV channel Welt, but which is also under a spoofed domain name.

00:47The articles are then usually shared and amplified by bot-like accounts online.

00:53German non-profit CEMAS has identified 630 posts suspected to be part of Doppelganger on social platform X since mid-December,

01:03which have been viewed an estimated 2.8 million times.

01:07Many of these posts discredit German political parties, including the Greens, Chancellor Olaf Scholz's SPD and the Conservatives' CDU.

01:17The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AFD, was mentioned only positively in Doppelganger posts, according to the research,

01:25such as in this post which reads,

01:36Doppelganger was first detected in the EU in 2022, cloning media websites such as The Guardian,

01:42France's Le Parfaitien, as well as RBC Ukraine.

01:46The EU, the US and the UK have all sanctioned firms and individuals behind the campaign,

01:52but there are real fears that those sanctions are being circumvented.