On Sunday, September 24, Germans took to the polls to vote in Germany’s federal election. As expected, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party came in first, however the CDU captured only 33 percent of the vote, the party’s worst showing in decades. Meanwhile, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) received over 12.5 percent of the vote, a record showing for a fringe party in Germany.

While the election has wide implications on both sides of the Atlantic, the campaign maintained a distinctly local focus. In a country that prioritizes political stability, each party doubled down on efforts to boost the turnout of existing supporters. One party in particular, the far-right AfD, utilized emotive and sometimes fake messaging on social media to gain an edge.

Throughout the summer, the @DFRLab tracked the Kremlin’s foremost amplifiers in Germany and investigated the international far-right’s online foothold in German politics. In the last week before the election, the AfD’s online efforts ramped up with increased anti-immigration messaging, some of it amplified by automated, Russian-language bots. Although the impact of these activities on the final results remains unclear, @DFRLab’s analysis reveals a demonstrable trend of Russian-language networks amplifying fake messaging.

Vkontakte

An investigation into Russian social media platform Vkontakte (VK) revealed the tactics AfD used in their targeted messaging efforts.

VK, a Russian social media alternative to Facebook, boasts a significant German audience. With 6.9% of VK’s total visitors coming from Germany, it is the 8th most popular website in Germany based on traffic, outranking Twitter, Spiegel, Bild, Whatsapp, and Netflix due to the highly-engaged nature of its user base.

An analysis by @DFRLab in the days leading up to the election showed that 90 percent of the most popular posts concerning the German election on VK supported the AfD. Furthermore, the clear majority of pro-AfD content shared on the platform linked to untrustworthy fringe media outlets rather than established publications.

The analysis shows a significant VK user preference for biased and highly emotive reporting, especially anti-refugee and anti-Merkel stories. For example, one popular article from Anonymousnews.ru shared by the outlet’s VK page attacked Merkel as a war criminal.

The other German political parties have no such presence on VK. The AfD pursues a strategy of micro-segmenting political demographics in its effort to build support for it among the Russian diaspora in Germany, and it often communicates in Russian to do so. Since VK posts from outside Russia appear largely unconstrained by hate speech laws, it has enabled a fringe, highly engaged minority to dominate the space shared by a diverse group of Germans, giving unusual prominence to false reporting and biased news that align with the ideology of one political party.

Fake News and Photoshops

In one example of their emotive, and ultimately fake, messaging in the lead up to the election, AfD affiliates amplified a graphic image on Facebook recalling the mass sexual assaults in Germany on New Year’s Eve in 2016. The image, urging citizens to get out and vote, was shared by a regional chapter of the party.

Screenshot of Facebook post by AfD Hochsauerland Region. (Source: Facebook / Archived.is)

@DFRLab, in collaboration with Germany’s BILD newspaper, proved that the image was a fake. The heavily edited photo came from an extremist white supremacist source with the apparent intent to manipulate voter perception.

A Google reverse image search of the photo reveals that the image’s background came from footage of CBS News journalist Lara Logan, who was sexually assaulted on Tahrir Square in Cairo on February 11, 2011. Users photoshopped the image, replacing Logan’s head with that of glamour model Danica Thrall.