German Chancellor Olaf Scholz allegedly has one. So, too, does Green Party co-chair Franziska Brantner. A multi-million-dollar villa in California.

Scholz, according to the narrative, owns a choice estate in the Hollywood Hills – or did, at least, until it was burned down in the fires. That, at least, was the claim espoused by a recent video, complete with aerial shots of a spectacular mansion.

Many videos currently circulating on social media channels, particularly TikTok, are reinforcing a popular cliché: namely that those at the top earn millions and betray the interests of ordinary people.

The problem, though, is that the videos are complete and utter fabrications.

Russian-Produced Fakes

On Elon Musk’s channel X, a clip is circulating showing a uniformed police officer who introduces himself as Cameron. He says he is happy he works in the United Kingdom and not in Germany. According to information received by his agency, he says, a series of major terrorist attacks are being prepared in Germany during the country’s snap parliamentary elections in February. "Share this video with your friends and family," he says.

This video, too, is a fake, likely produced in Russia. The creators took clips from real videos and, as the activists from the fake-news awareness group Antibot4Navalny learned, then used artificial intelligence to distort the voices.

The internet is currently full of countless other manipulations, all with a single goal: to trigger chaos and uncertainty ahead of German elections in an effort to strengthen the political fringes.

There have likely never before been so many and such extensive external attempts to influence a German parliamentary election. Previous elections, to be sure, have also seen their fair share of fake, Russian-controlled social media accounts spreading lies and half-truths. Since then, though, technology has become far more sophisticated. Artificial intelligence tools are making it easier and easier to produce fake videos and put false words into the mouths of politicians.

Lies have found their way into the German campaign. How deep will the poison seep in?

The attacks aren’t just coming from the east, but also from the west, from the U.S., the erstwhile beacon of freedom and democracy. Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world and the owner of both X and Tesla, a man who has developed an almost manic interest in German politics of late, has become a new heavyweight distributor of disinformation. He recently livestreamed a bizarre discussion on X with Alice Weidel, the head of the radical right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and has repeatedly encouraged voters to back extremist parties. He has also used X to disseminate conspiracy theories designed to boost the fortunes of right-wing populist and right-wing extremist parties around the world. He has never been as politically active as he is now, providing his assistance to the authoritarian-minded to gain more reach and attention. In Germany as well.

According to X, around 200,000 people watched his digital tête-à-tête with Weidel, who is also running as the AfD’s candidate for chancellor. During the talk, Weidel made numerous false claims that went unchallenged – inaccurate assertions about border controls, the tax burden in Germany and the country’s phase-out of nuclear energy. But Musk doesn’t care about such trivialities. Fake news has become his business model.

A preliminary analysis by communications consultant Johannes Hillje shows that Musk’s calls to vote for the AfD combined with the livestreamed interview with Weidel significantly amplified the reach of her X posts – a "Musk boost for the AfD,” as Hillje puts it. The AfD’s national party conference in Riesa, Saxony, was also broadcast live on X by Musk.

The AfD is not primarily interested in numbers. It’s the symbolism that counts, and Musk has enhanced the party’s image. There has been a "sea change” in the U.S., says AfD member of European Parliament Marc Jongen, one which has gripped the AfD and Germany and "from which we are profiting.” The AfD campaign platform notes that the party sees the new U.S. government as a "strong partner in our commitment to freedom of expression and against internet censorship.” Several AfD politicians flew to the U.S. for the recent swearing in of President Donald Trump, including Weidel’s co-chair Tino Chrupalla – at the invitation of the Republicans, he claimed.

Targeted Misinformation

A terrible new world?

In today’s post-truth information ecosystem, Elon Musk is merely the chief troll. One level below him are the influencers, podcasters and purveyors of so-called alternative media, quoting each other and cheering each other on. Along with their constant broadsides against diversity, the left and "wokeism,” they are also fond of attacking the "established” or "old” media.

Targeted misinformation has always been a political tool, particularly during campaign season. "Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear,” wrote political philosopher Hannah Arendt half a century ago in her essay "Lying in Politics.”

What is new is the brazenness of the liars, the sheer number of lies and their new, unfiltered reach thanks to social networks. By the end of Trump’s first term in office, fact checkers had counted 30,573 inaccurate and misleading claims made by the president.

Years ago, Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon propagated his favored media strategy for the new age: "Flood the zone with shit.” With lies, exaggerations – anything that might be helpful to get a leg up in the political battle. By now, it has become clear: The strategy has worked. And it is one now being pursued on both sides of the Atlantic every day on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Telegram and X.

"Our Antenna Are Up"

New post-factual information spaces have appeared in which the point is no longer that of exchanging viewpoints or discussing political solutions, rather they have the sole goal of denigrating, discrediting and insulting political opponents. In Germany, too, there are those who hope to strengthen the extreme right-wing camp, undermine liberal democracy and portray political representatives as clowns.

Germany’s government and public agencies have long since launched efforts to ward off the flood. They have sought to build up defenses against disinformation campaigns, targeted data leaks and hacker attacks. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, established a taskforce ahead of this election season to address the problem, while the Federal Office for Information Security in Bonn has boosted its defensive operations. "Our antenna are all up,” says one high-ranking security official.

In addition, the German government established a unit several months ago with the cumbersome name "Center for the Detection of Foreign Information Manipulation.” It is based in a building in the Berlin neighborhood of Wilmersdorf that used to belong to the Royal Prussian Artillery Inspection Commission. The agency’s staff includes people from the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the Federal Press Office and they are tasked with scanning social media outlets to identify and analyze approaching disinformation campaigns as early as possible. But the unit is still under development, and it is currently made up of only 12 men and women. Because of the snap elections, the small group must prove its worth more quickly than initially thought. At best, the defenders of the truth are struggling to keep up.

As this campaign season began, the BfV issued a clear warning against unacceptable interference by "foreign powers” in the upcoming election. Russia, the agency wrote, "has likely the greatest and most obvious interest in influencing the election.” And BfV agents are prepared for the worst: disinformation, the discrediting of politicians, espionage, sabotage – anything is conceivable, the agency believes.

Escalating the Information War

Security agencies are most concerned about "hack and leak” operations, whereby emails or other sensitive documents are stolen from politicians through cyberattacks and then made public on the eve of the election. In Poland, hackers believed to be working on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s secret service agencies demonstrated how far they are willing to go: They took over control of a user account belonging to a government politician and posted photos of a party ally in underwear.

Russia has thus far refrained from leaking sensitive material on politicians in Germany, even though its troll army possesses several gigabytes of such information. In 2015, hackers under the control of Moscow successfully breached Bundestag servers; in 2021, they launched targeted attacks on the private email accounts of politicians; in 2023 they broke into the inboxes of Social Democratic leaders. Thus far, none of it has been leaked. But that isn’t likely to remain the case forever.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has further escalated its information war against the West. As DER SPIEGEL reporting has found, Putin’s strategists are primarily eager to unsettle people in the West. An internal document from the Russian foreign intelligence agency SVR notes that creating "fear” in Europe must be the new "leitmotif” of the disinformation campaign. One of the most important target countries is Germany.

One example of the Kremlin’s approach is the so-called "doppelgänger” campaign. It relies on hundreds of thousands of fake accounts, pseudo news sites and falsified web pages that almost perfectly resemble leading German news outlets like DER SPIEGEL. And they can be used by Moscow to disseminate untruths.

"German Pensions Are Burning in Ukraine," was the headline on one such page, for example. Or: "Because of Zelenskyy’s Policies, Germany Will Soon Face Hunger.” One fake account posted on X: "The anti-Russian sanctions are a boomerang for our industry. We are paying the price.” The claims aren’t always complete lies. Instead, debates are frequently fueled through the use of half-truths or polarizing positions.

FBI documents from the U.S. identify who is behind the campaign: a Russian company commissioned by the Kremlin called Social Design Agency. An internal strategy paper from the company talks about building a "factory” for "fakes.” The main focus of the company’s activities is to magnify "internal conflict” within Western countries – and to strengthen the political fringes.

According to a Russian paper obtained by the FBI, Putin’s troll army is eager to strengthen the AfD in Germany, a party with right-wing extremist tendencies. "We support the party,” the paper reads in one section, "using all tools.” It is to be portrayed, the paper notes, as the only party representing "Germany’s national interests.”

The Berlin-based nonprofit CeMAS, which has been analyzing social networks since 2021, discovered 630 original, German-language posts on X from mid-December to mid-January that it attributes to the Russian influence operation. According to CeMAS expert Julia Smirnova, each of them was shared hundreds of times. In total, the posts amassed more than 2.8 million views, she says. "The posts often focused on economic fears, the current government was criticized, particularly the Green Party and Olaf Scholz, but also the CDU,” she says, referring to the center-right Christian Democratic Union, which is currently the leading opposition party in German parliament. "The AfD, by contrast, was mentioned in a positive light on several occasions.” Interestingly, some of the posts, says Smirnova, used the Russian abbreviation for the party (ADG for Alternativa Dlja Germanii).

"Kowtowing to Trump"

"Normally, the Election Integrity team from X would have gotten in touch by now, but Musk got rid of it,” says CeMAS co-founder Miro Dittrich. In a similar step, Meta head Mark Zuckerberg recently eliminated the fact-checking programs at both Instagram and Facebook, initially in the U.S.

This "kowtowing to Trump” is "a complete catastrophe,” says Dittrich. Like Elon Musk before him, Zuckerberg is now using the political situation not just to cozy up to the Trump administration, he says, but also to ruthlessly cut costs. The moves make it far easier for all manner of disinformation campaigns.

Though the word "disinformation” itself has long since become a weaponized term. And it is a label that has frequently been used in the past. One example is the lab-leak theory about the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, an argument that was flagged by Facebook early on as disinformation and prohibited. The theory holds that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. Facebook lifted the ban only when U.S. agencies launched a new investigation into the origin of the virus – a question that still hasn’t been fully resolved today.

The authoritarian right wing uses individual examples such as this one to brand content moderation on the whole as "censorship.” The EU’s Digital Services Act (DCA) is a favorite target, legislation which applies strict guidelines to social media platform operators in the European Union. The EU has been conducting proceedings against X since 2023 and Brussels officials apparently monitored the live chat between Musk and Weidel on the lookout for possible violations. Just this month, the European Commission tightened its rules and demanded that Musk’s platform provide EU investigators with access to technical interfaces. Musk has repeatedly criticized the DSA and the increased costs and administrative work it generates. A showdown could now be in the offing: During the campaign, Vice President J.D. Vance threatened that an ongoing EU offensive against Musk’s platform could have a deleterious effect on U.S. contributions to NATO.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam published an analysis this month proving that political incumbents and parties in power are also among those spreading false information. They analyzed a dataset including around 32 million tweets posted by more than 8,000 politicians from 26 countries, including Germany. Their analysis revealed that across all international borders, one political camp was far more likely than others to spread misinformation: the populist and extreme right wing.

In Germany, that means members of the AfD. Since the party’s founding, it has been well known for twisting, turning and falsifying information, with such efforts becoming increasingly targeted in recent years, frequently with Russian help. Just over two years ago, AfD chairwoman Weidel shared Russian propaganda intended to discredit Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party.

Now, the AfD turns to artificial intelligence more frequently than any other party. Weidel is even using a video clip in her campaign which negatively portrays former German Chancellor Angela Merkel with the help of AI. The corners of Merkel’s mouth droop lower, her wrinkles are emphasized, and the overall impression is gloomy. When contacted by DER SPIEGEL, Weidel’s office said that she didn’t authorize the clip herself.

The agency which produces videos like this one for the AfD is led by Alexander "Malenki” Kleine. He was once a well-known personality in the identitarian movement, a group of right-wing extremist activists that is actually on the AfD’s list of groups to avoid. Kleine also participated in "Reconquista Germanica,” a far-reaching troll offensive undertaken by the identitarians in the 2017 campaign. That campaign saw the right-wing extremists adopt military ranks and issue "daily orders” about the message to be disseminated on social media that day. Kleine was one of the leaders of the operation – and he is now responsible for the AfD’s social media campaign.

The Benefits of Bro Culture

The AfD also relies on numerous platforms that are more than happy to further disseminate disinformation and extreme right-wing narratives. Links to their texts make their way through WhatsApp and Facebook groups – and the dividing line between serious journalism and manipulative content is not always clear to the uninitiated.

The platforms are united by their reliance on fear, rejection and distorted or simplified narratives to achieve their goals. Whereas they used to have limited reach and were not particularly influential outside of Telegram, the blackest of the black sheep among social networks, they are now far more present on other platforms as well.

Their support for the AfD isn’t always blatantly obvious. Whereas the right-wing extremist magazine Compact takes a dark, shrill tone, others are far more subtle. Apollo News, for example, looks like a normal news website at first glance. It’s coverage of the AfD is positive and it conducts interviews with people like Hans-Georg Maaßen, the former head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) who has turned into a notorious adherent of right-wing conspiracy ideologies.

This new information cosmos is often uninterested in journalistic standards like the two-source principle, according to which all information must be confirmed by a second independent source. It is also apparently vulnerable to attempts from abroad to influence them. In September, the U.S. Department of Justice launched proceedings against a right-wing American media agency which, according to the indictment, received $10 million from Russia to distribute among right-wing influencers. Elon Musk repeatedly retweeted many of these Russian-paid influencers, thus ensuring a huge reach for the Kremlin-sponsored messages.

The AfD is also a beneficiary of bro culture, within which masculinity and strength are more important than nuance and critical thinking. The "bros” – primarily young men without university degrees who live in rural areas or in smaller cities, according to an analysis performed on behalf of DER SPIEGEL by the digital experts Felix Kartte and Benjamin Läpple – tend to be particularly fond of the black-and-white narratives promulgated by Musk and the AfD.

Targeting the Greens

These media users are "increasingly susceptible to populist or authoritarian ideologies that provide simple answers to complex questions,” says Kartte, a senior fellow at the Mercator Foundation. The caricature, he says, is that of a young man in the countryside with a lower-level high school diploma who feels trapped in an identity crisis. Traditional roles are disappearing, there is a shortage of women in rural areas in Germany anyway, the economy isn’t doing well, and he is frequently isolated. Such a person, say Kartte and Läpple, spends lots of time in social networks, hardly believes the classical news outlets anymore and, on the search for orientation and support, finds succor in physical strength, status symbols and the idea of male dominance. Bro culture.

"The AfD and its influencers then tell these people that the purported big-city elites are only interested in identity politics and the interests of queer people, while banning the consumption of meat and gas-powered vehicles,” says Läpple, whose specialty is the segmentation of electorates.

In Germany, fake news producers primarily have their sights set on the Green Party, particularly senior Green politicians like Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck.

On December 6, staff members at Green Party headquarters were looking forward to the Christmas party that evening. But it turned out not to be the festive occasion they had been hoping for. A three-minute, AI-generated video began circulating on the internet that day portraying Green Party chancellor candidate Habeck as a child molester. The clip was so perfectly done that its inauthenticity was not immediately recognizable.

A team, which had been assembled some time earlier for the specific purpose of responding to such digital attacks, was immediately called in. As chance would have it, all staff members who belonged to the team were on site for the planned party.

It would be a long night. It soon became clear that it was a fake of the most nefarious sort, likely from Russia. The video was ultimately deleted from X, but it had been shared and commented on many times before then.

A different story was being spread about Annalena Baerbock. Following a trip to West Africa by the German foreign minister last year, a Nigerian news site published a fake interview with a sex worker who had been paid for the piece. He claimed that Baerbock is one of his regular clients. Analyses carried out by the Foreign Ministry showed that the fake story rapidly spread on social media platforms after the pro-Russian disinformation portal zeitgeschenen.de "reported” on the purported affair.

The Greens believe they are now prepared for such campaigns. Party staff members comb the internet for anomalies and there is a plan of action should there be an incident along with experts who can be brought in to form a team if needed. External service providers are also on call to perform deeper research into the perpetrators of online hate speech, for example.

Party headquarters has deployed a digital tool designed for early detection called Talkwalker. The tool allows companies to listen in on social networks and other online platforms to identify things like social and economic trends. It serves the party as an early warning system for possible online hate crimes. The Greens have also put together a guide on how to deal with attacks and also runs training sessions for members at the grassroots level for a variety of eventualities, including how to interact at campaign stands with voters who take fake news items about the Greens at face value.

"Keeping Your Cool"

Perhaps the greatest problem facing the party is deciding – once a fake story or online attack has been identified – whether to sound the alarm or not. When should the target of the attack react?

Politicians in particular tend to insist on a rapid response, but that isn’t always the best idea, says a Green Party staffer. "Keeping your cool is the hardest thing to do because it goes against human intuition,” she says. But sometimes, it makes the most sense, because some attacks originate in the most remote echo chambers of the far-right ecosystem, such as on Russian Telegram channels, and never actually make it to larger platforms like X. "Not intervening is sometimes the best solution,” is one of the tenets established by the Greens.