In a Facebook post from September 5, 2022, the German federal government warns that Russian disinformation is becoming increasingly tricky and that the entire news portal from Germany has been faithfully recreated in order to deliberately spread fake news in the interests of the Kremlin. This false information is intended to undermine trust in politics and the media in this country. With the slogan: “Together against disinformation. “How to recognize fake news portals”, the federal government gives tips on how to protect yourself from them.
We have reported on the fake news portals mentioned
These are fake websites such as Bild, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, T-Online and Spiegel. The content is consistently pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian in nature. In addition, people's emotions and concerns are played with, so the topic of the energy crisis and inflation is regularly taken up in the articles and a link is made to the Ukraine crisis.
We are actually used to fake news sites because they have been around for years: alleged picture articles about a sensational platform in “Lion's Den” or a fake Northern Bavaria article about a secret project by Jeff Bezos, which ultimately only refers to fraudulent Bitcoin platforms should attract.
What is new, however, are pages to which we have been referred frequently since mid-August 2022: genuine-looking articles that do not contain any fraudulent links, but whose content is credibly staged propaganda for Russia and against Ukraine.
Even at Mimikama, we have never seen such a large disinformation campaign as the current pro-Russian one on social media in all these years!
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Europe has once again been confronted with Russian disinformation. What is particularly striking is that Russian foreign missions or Russian state media continually use recurring narratives via social media channels.
Narratives are overall messages that are spread and constantly repeated through individual texts, images and videos through fake accounts on social networks or on supposed news portals. Individual reports always contribute to a message, a narrative. Some of these narratives have been used for many years and have been combined or changed depending on current events and attitudes.
Source: Federal Government
High potential for manipulation!
There is great potential for manipulation in false reports. These messages are sent to people who are not particularly political or even politically extreme. However, due to the structure and appearance, many users cannot distinguish these news pages from their real templates. Anyone who falls for the fact that the content appears to come from established media will be influenced in their opinion formation.
That is the big problem, because in this way many people could get the impression that they have been lied to by the relevant media. The counterfeiters, in turn, do not recognize them.
The pages also use special wording. The fake reports use words that frame things very strongly, i.e. that steer people in a certain direction. For example, people talk about “parasites” when it comes to refugees from Ukraine. Likewise, the German federal government is always demonized and a Russia-friendly image is painted.
So far only Germany has been affected by this wave, but not Austria. Often there are small errors that point to a specific origin of the propaganda. For example, one of the fake posts mentions “Chancellor Angela Merkel,” while another contains occasional Cyrillic characters. This suggests that there are people at work who know Germany well, but who make mistakes in the details.
The content itself is traditionally distributed subliminally via social media multipliers and certain channels. Often from fake profiles that have only existed for a few months or weeks and whose profile picture was created by artificial intelligence. The people who then read these posts then share them. This creates the virality of fake news websites.
With content from our articles “ This Spiegel article is a fake ” as well as “ The flood of professional propaganda with recreated news sites ” by Ralf Nowotny and statements by Andre Wolf
Source: German Federal Government
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )