An agency linked to the Russian government is conducting a disinformation campaign aimed at scaring German voters and boosting the far-right AfD party, several media outlets reported on Monday, September 16, citing internal documents from a Moscow-based company.
This firm, known as the Social Design Agency (SDA), has been spreading false information 24 hours a day on social networks for at least two years, in close collaboration with the Kremlin, according to sources. the german daily South German newspaper and the German public television and radio channels WDR and NDR. With the help of other international partners, these media outlets evaluated internal presentations, tables, lists, graphs and written documents provided by an anonymous source.
Targeting Chancellor Scholz’s coalition
In the sights of this agency, which spreads pro-Russian comments, memes and caricatures on Facebook, X, Telegram and Instagram: the centre-left coalition of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
According to a leaked document from the agency, dating from late 2022, one of the stated goals was to see the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), obtain a score of 20% of the votes in a poll published by an institute considered reliable, whose results are published throughout Europe. Among the other goals of this disinformation campaign: to spread the idea that Germany’s support for Ukraine is causing the “worst economic and social crisis in the country’s recent history”, the German daily also claims. South German newspaper.
Russia acts “pragmatically and thematically flexible in order to exploit the potential for division as best as possible […] “of German society,” said the president of the domestic intelligence service (BfV), Thomas Haldenwang, quoted by the South German newspaperAccording to Thomas Haldenwang, his services are working hard “to identify the actors who want to destroy German democracy and prevent them from destabilizing it.”