By Kontur and AFP | 2024-01-26

FRANKFURT -- Germany has uncovered a major "pro-Russian disinformation campaign" using thousands of fake accounts on X to incite anger at Berlin's support for Ukraine, news weekly Der Spiegel reported Friday (January 26).

Analysts commissioned by the German Federal Foreign Office used specialized software to monitor posts on the online platform X, formerly known as Twitter, between December 20 and January 20, the newspaper reported.

They reportedly stumbled across more than 50,000 fake user accounts that together pumped out more than a million German-language tweets.

A common theme was the accusation that Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government was neglecting the country's own population in favor of helping Ukraine in its war against Russia, according to Der Spiegel, which said it has seen excerpts of the analysis.

Doppelganger

The accounts also often linked to fake news stories on websites designed to resemble those of genuine media outlets, it said, leading analysts to connect it to the Russia-linked "Doppelganger" campaign already known to authorities.

Doppelganger was first disrupted by Meta's security team in 2022.

The core of the operation was to mimic websites of mainstream news outlets in Europe and post bogus stories about Russia's war on Ukraine, then try to spread them online, Meta head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said following a threat analysis report released last August.

Companies involved in the campaign were recently sanctioned by the European Union (EU).

Germany, France and Ukraine remain the most targeted countries overall, but the operation has added the United States and Israel to its list of targets, said Meta.

This was done by spoofing the domains of major news outlets, including the Washington Post and Fox News.

Gleicher described Doppelganger, which is intended to weaken support of Ukraine, as the largest and most aggressively persistent influence operation from Russia that Meta has seen since 2017.

'Democracy at risk'

The latest discoveries come at a time of increasing worries about the effect that sophisticated disinformation campaigns could have on elections.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned this week that 2024 will be a "critical year" for fighting disinformation from actors such as Russia, as two billion people around the world face elections.

"Fifty percent of the adult population of the world will be called to vote, in the European Parliament, in the US, in India, in many places around the world," Borrell said Tuesday.

"Elections will become the prime target for malign foreign actors."

An annual report released Tuesday by the EU's diplomatic service analyzed 750 cases of foreign manipulation between December 2022 and last November.

Russia and, to a lesser extent, China are identified as the major culprits, with Ukraine being the main target as Moscow seeks to justify its invasion.

"The platforms most often involved were Telegram and X (formerly Twitter)," the report said.

"One of the most significant threats of our time is not about a bomb that can kill you; it's about a poison that can colonize your mind and how to address it," Borrell said.

"Malicious content spreads like a cancer and puts the health of our democracy at risk," he said.

"But we have the tools to effectively fight against this disease. We have the capacity; we need more."

The World Economic Forum has ranked disinformation as its number-one threat over the next two years.