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Foreign interference: German think-tank says Russia is using X to boost far-right AfD in its campaign as the country holds national election on Feb. 23 (self.news)

submitted 1 day ago by thelucky8 to c/news

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Original link in German

A Russian disinformation campaign is seeking to boost the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) ahead of the country's election on Febryuary 23, an investigation by the German Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS) has found.

CeMAS tracked a total of 630 German-language posts with typical double-track patterns were documented on X from 17 December 2024 to 14 January 2025, the organization says. The contributions reached a total of over 2.8 million views by January 15, 2025. Due to the nature of this metric, this figure is to be considered as a rough guide, for example because of the artificial distribution of the contributions by the campaign itself. For the 630 contributions, only a few responses from apparently uninvolved accounts could be recorded, which were also mostly critical.

The so-called Doppelgaenger campaign, created after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine to undermine Western support for Kyiv, spreads links to falsified Western news outlets sharing false information, according to a German foreign ministry report published last June.

The German posts on X have blamed the Greens party for Germany's economic woes, lambasted Chancellor Olaf Scholz (from the Social Democratic Party for his support of Ukraine, cast the conservatives as untrustworthy but spoken in favour of the right-wing AfD, according to the report.

While 79 posts were based on images and did not contain a link, 63 articles referred to authentic articles from existing German media such as Focus, Spiegel, Welt or Handelsblatt, which focused primarily on economic problems. It is assumed that these articles were instrumentalized in the sense of the campaign goal, as they fit into the narrative, CeMAS says.

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[–] kodoku 4 points 1 day ago

i mean, yeah, twitter and facebook and the like should all be banned, but before that, i find it insane how politicians in the west collectively stuck their heads in the sand and refused to tackle large issues while pretending said issues didn't exist

in a way, it is their fault far right parties even begun gaining traction, so whatever foreign interference wants to come in has it a lot easier