German election: From AI influencers to Russian disinformation, the far-right is getting a leg-up online

Sky News

21-02-2025

Voters in Germany are being exposed to copious pro-AfD narratives online from AI-generated content and Russian disinformation campaigns.
Experts monitoring social media say Russian-based groups are involved, including "Doppelganger" and "Storm-1516", which US officials found to be active in America's election last year.
Some of these campaigns are using artificial intelligence to spread their messaging ahead of Sunday's vote, which will see Germany elect a new Bundestag.
Methods are said to include creating fake TV news stories or deep-fake videos of apparent "witnesses" or "whistle blowers" fabricating stories about prominent politicians.
For example, in November 2024, shortly before the snap election was called, a video was published that claimed one parliamentary member who is an outspoken supporter of Ukraine was a Russian spy.
Dr Marcus Faber, a member of the Free Democratic Party and head of the government's defence committee, was targeted in a video which used AI to suggest a former adviser was making the claim. We asked Dr Faber for his reaction to the video but he was unable to comment at this time.
In another video an 18-year-old woman accused a German minister of child abuse - the accusation was false, and the video was made using AI.
A recent report from the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, or CeMAS, a non-profit thinktank specialising in the analysis of disinformation and right-wing extremism, and Alliance 4 Europe which aims to combat digital disinformation, has linked both stories to the Russian disinformation campaign Storm-1516.
The researchers have also been tracking the Doppelganger campaign, run by a Russian PR company Social Design Agency, widely reported to have links to the Kremlin.
They have found the group's main tactic is to create fake news articles, which often resemble well-known publications. A network of social media accounts then share and spread those articles across different platforms.
Posts will often appear to be from a worried citizen, like the one below that reads: "I am concerned that aid to Ukraine will impact our ability to invest in our own infrastructure and social security systems."
The post links to a fake news article criticising Germany's funding for the war in Ukraine, on a fake website resembling the German newspaper Der Spiegel.
"Different Russian campaigns are trying, on the one hand, to discredit established parties," says Julia Smirnova, a senior researcher for CeMAS. "They're also trying to boost the far-right AfD."
"It's not about just one fake video or one fake article. There's a systematic effort to constantly create this flood of false stories, flood of propaganda stories, and continue spreading them," she says.
From mid-December 2024 to mid-January 2025, CeMAS found a total of 630 German-language posts with typical Doppelgänger patterns on X alone.
For Ferdinand Gehringer, a cybersecurity policy adviser, Russian interference online isn't a surprise.
"There are clear objectives for Russia to interfere and to also manipulate our public opinion," he says.
From the party's plan to stop sending arms to Ukraine to their calls to ramp up imports of Russian gas, he says "Russia sees within the AfD's program and ideas the best options for future cooperation".
CeMAS has found at least one case where a fake story that originated from a Russian campaign was spread by an AfD politician.
Stephan Protschka, a parliamentary member, posted on his social media channels that the Green Party was working with Ukraine to recruit people to commit crimes and blame them on the AfD, a narrative researchers say originated from a Russian disinformation campaign.
Sky News asked Mr Protschka for comment, but he did not respond.
We also reached out to Social Design Agency to respond to the allegations against the Doppelganger group. They did not respond. We were unable to contact anyone behind the Storm-1516 campaign for comment.
Inside Germany
Beyond the extremes of Russian-led disinformation campaigns, far-right groups within Germany are also ramping up their online presence. Take Larissa Wagner, an AI-generated social media influencer.
"Hey guys, I'm just on my way to the polling station. I'm daring this time. I'm voting for AfD," she said in a video posted to her X account on 22 September 2024, the day of the Brandenburg state election.
Her accounts on Twitter and Instagram were both created in the last year and her regular videos espouse far-right narratives, like telling Syrian immigrants to "pack your bags and go back home".
She even says she interned with the right-wing magazine Compact, which was banned by the German government last year.
It's unclear who created Larissa. When Sky News messaged to ask her on Instagram she replied: "I think it's completely irrelevant who controls me. Influencers like me are the future...
"Like anyone else, I want to share my perspective on things. Every influencer does that. But because I'm young, attractive, and right-wing, it's framed as 'influencing the political discourse'."
Ferdinand Gehringer notes that her posts have become more radical over time. "The potential for influence is significant-especially since the presence of a young, attractive woman increases audience engagement," he adds.
The far-right's use of generative AI on social media goes beyond characters like Larissa. A report this week from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue assessed the scale of its use, identifying 883 posts since April 2023 that included images, memes and music videos made using generative AI.
The posts came from far-right supporters as well as the AfD itself - party accounts published more than 50 posts that contained generative AI content in October alone.
The AfD is using AI more than other parties, says Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who co-authored the report. "They're clearly the one actor that is exploiting this technology the most," he says.
The messaging in the far-right content they sampled falls into two categories: attacking narratives, like AI-generated images of migrants portrayed as violent criminals, and narratives that glorify traditional German values.
When these two narratives are combined, "the far-right community feels more united in the so-called cultural fight against these groups that they're attacking," says Mr Maristany de las Casas.
Take Remigration Song, a promotional song and music video commissioned by the now-disbanded youth wing of the AfD. It was produced using AI and advocates the mass deportation of immigrants - known as remigration.
It's this home-grown content that some experts say could affect public opinions.
A recent survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a thinktank which promotes social reform, showed that 80% of Germans consider disinformation on the internet to be a major problem for society and 88% agreed that disinformation is spread to influence political opinions.
"Just the foreign information itself is probably not going to shift attitudes" says senior researcher Cathleen Berger. "I think the impact only comes when it is being picked up by domestic actors".
Additional reporting from Olive Enokido-Lineham, OSINT producer; Mary Poynter, Data and Forensics producer.
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