With the European Union (EU) elections underway, Germany is the EU member state most hit by Russian disinformation campaigns, a European Commission spokesperson told WIRED.
The warning comes just days before Germany votes in EU elections on Sunday and during an election period marred by a series of violent attacks against German politicians.
“Most of the cases in our database relate to Germany, which means it is the country most targeted by disinformation in the EU,” said Peter Stano, the European Commission’s spokesman for foreign and security policy.
A public disinformation database run by the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Office lists numerous cases of Russian disinformation targeting Germany. One example is from April when a fake news article purportedly published by the German magazine Der Spiegel went viral on the social platform X. Clicking on an article critical of the German government led to the website Spiegel.ltd, rather than the magazine’s official domain, Spiegel.de. The link no longer works, but at least two of the accounts that shared the fake article remain online. X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
“What we are fighting and defending ourselves against is foreign interference and information manipulation coming from Russia,” Stano said of the threats facing this weekend’s EU elections. Stano said these disinformation campaigns could be linked to Russia because they link or reference Kremlin-controlled Russian state media.
Germany “is the EU’s largest member state by population and the public perceives it as leading EU policy-making,” Stano said. Russia is trying to exacerbate existing divisions in Germany, such as the East-West economic gap and “Putin versus Germany,” he added. Putin supporterA term used to describe a section of the German political class who expresses sympathy for the Russian president.
Fact checkers from the independent media group Corrective also identified videos on TikTok containing false claims that Germany was preparing to enter the war in Ukraine, as well as videos on Telegram and Facebook containing false claims that protesters and police had clashed in Mannheim after a police officer was stabbed to death last week.
Tensions are already running high in Germany ahead of the election. Earlier this week, a politician from the far-right AFD party was stabbed to death in Mannheim. Last month, a candidate from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left SPD party was hospitalised after being attacked while putting up posters. A Green party candidate has also been subjected to verbal and physical abuse.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed Thursday to fight political violence, whether from the far left or the far right. “Security is the cornerstone of our freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” he said in a speech in Berlin. The German foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the impact of disinformation on the election campaign.
The European Commission has a team of about 40 people tracking online disinformation, with a budget of about 20 million euros to track Russian activity on platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Telegram and Instagram, and report its findings to EU member states.
Compared to Russia’s, their budget is negligible, Stano said. “We estimate that they spend 1 billion euros on disinformation,” he added, explaining that the Commission arrived at this estimate based on publicly available data on allocations in the Russian state budget to state media and communications activities.
The EU is also closely watching how social media companies respond to Russian attempts to manipulate discussion on their platforms. In April, EU regulators launched a formal investigation into Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to see whether the company was complying with obligations to prevent the spread of disinformation campaigns. “We suspect that Meta’s moderation is insufficient,” EU Commission chief Margrethe Vestager said at the time.
