00:01I'm Melanie Smith, I'm a senior director at ISD.
00:05So let's talk about German regional elections.
00:08We've just had breakthrough success of AFD in Sachsen-Anhalt.
00:15There will be new elections coming up.
00:17What are you witnessing in terms of disinformation, campaigns to influence the vote?
00:25We have seen campaigns from Russian aligned actors, particularly in the Sachsen-Anhalt elections recently.
00:33Those campaigns were very similar to the ones that we see across national elections too.
00:38So we noted them in 2024, 2025.
00:40They are becoming more local and more tailored to particular rhetoric.
00:45But the campaigns themselves in terms of the content,
00:48what that looks like is mostly videos impersonating public figures, election candidates at times, journalists.
00:54And they're intended to look authentic, but they are using AI-generated voiceovers to do so.
01:01So those individuals are ending up looking like they're saying things that they're actually not.
01:07What do you expect for next year's election?
01:11A lot of European countries are going to have national elections, Italy among them.
01:17Does the European institutions and networks, both governmental and non-governmental,
01:25have the instruments and tools to counter this kind of operations, or are we particularly susceptible to those?
01:36We're very susceptible just from an appetite perspective.
01:39I do think there are a whole host of actors that will be monitoring those elections,
01:44looking at how they can drive wedges around particular issues, both foreign and domestic.
01:49I would say in terms of our preparedness, the infrastructure and the mechanisms exist.
01:54They're just not very well coordinated.
01:56So we're kind of in this phase now where we have lots of those mechanisms.
02:00We understand what needs to be done, but actually putting it into practice is still quite difficult.
02:04I think the interoperability of data is really important, but slightly nerdy point.
02:10It's very difficult for researchers like us to understand what government does and doesn't know
02:14about what's happening in an election context because there's very little intelligence sharing happening.
02:19We often proactively flag things to the authorities.
02:23It's very unclear to us how they're responding, if they're responding, if those targets are actually being met.
02:28So there needs to be more coordination ahead of next year.
02:31One final question.
02:34We know what has been going on with Doppelganger, with those kind of operations.
02:40Is there a way to break up these networks or are they now too distributed and too, you know, difficult
02:50to track down?
02:51And so can the solution be, you know, at the source of the problem?
02:56Or are we just going to have to basically respond to every action without being able to counter the source?
03:04We are definitely still in the mode of playing whack-a-mole with those operations.
03:08We managed to take down some accounts. We hope that that's effective.
03:11Ultimately, the success of those campaigns lies in them being picked up by domestic audiences and by domestic voices.
03:18So what we really need to do is make sure that that can't happen.
03:21So people understand that the narratives themselves are false or misleading.
03:25The information itself is being manipulated or those accounts simply don't exist online.
03:29So I do think it's important that we continue to remove the activity where we see it.
03:33But there needs to be a more holistic response around people understanding what information manipulation is, how to spot AI.
03:41Some of those digital literacy principles are really still missing from, you know,
03:45the way in which we communicate to the public around these issues and particularly when it comes to elections.
03:49In those weeks before you really want to be telling your domestic audiences, you are likely to become a target.
03:55You will see these things in your news feeds. Here's what to look for.
03:59And that unfortunately is not happening in any large scale coordinated way yet.
04:04Thank you very much.
04:05Thanks.
04:06Okay.
04:07Thank you.
04:07Grazie.
