The scheme that the articles follow is as simple as the system with which they are created and disseminated is complex: there have been a large number of articles on the Internet for weeks that describe the consequences of the energy crisis and inflation for the have and will have populations in different European countries.
Only "competent government policy" can defuse the situation, it is said - and finally: "The lifting of the anti-Russian sanctions will play a key role in this." What is special: The articles look as if they came from "Welt", "Spiegel" or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, they can be found on websites that are exactly the same as those of the media mentioned, navigation and links on them lead to the offers of the copied pages,
only the URL reveals the fake – if you look closely.
Apart from their propagandistic message and a language that sometimes seems awkward.
Fridtjof Küchemann
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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However, dressing up in a media guise that enjoys respect and trust in society is only the first step.
As research by T-Online with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) shows, countless accounts set up solely for this purpose are used, primarily on Facebook, but also on Twitter, to spread the articles and these posts with likes, shares and artificially give relevance to comments.
Or they refer to the fake articles in the comments of posts with great attention.
Corporations like Facebook have no interest in the public knowing to what extent their services are being used as a weapon against democracies.
Independent research is hardly possible, although Facebook, for example, is a public space.
A public that can no longer observe itself loses its resilience.”
In a first wave, the accounts seem to have been created very schematically, as T-Online writes.
They deceive machine-generated profile portraits and women's names, as the employer of the alleged users, Netflix was given in a standardized way.
Many of these accounts have now disappeared again, instead there are now also some that are assigned to men in the same function.
The researchers also found dozens of pages on Facebook that have the fractured initial of the logo of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a profile picture under names such as “Freie Opinion”, possibly had other fake accounts as subscribers or “friends”, but their posts – recognizable by the faint note "sponsored" - as advertising placements in the users' timelines.
A single ad like this was played up to six hundred thousand times, reports T-Online, and it costs several hundred euros to reach a million people with a campaign like this.
In this case, it is astonishing how many resources were apparently invested here in order to imitate entire news portals and equip them with content, confirms Felix Kartte from Reset.
After the EU banned the distribution of Russian state media in the spring, the Kremlin can continue to achieve a large reach on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter with little effort.
Confronted with such misuse of their offers, the platform operators often presented themselves as neutral communication tools, comparable to a telephone line.
"But that's not true, the platforms are not neutral," says Kartte, on the contrary: "The core of their business model is to curate and select content for us.
Its algorithms make millions of editorial decisions almost every day.” His demand: “The platforms should finally show their colors and put a stop to Russia’s anti-democratic propaganda.” Russia’s war is also an information war.
Public support for Ukraine, especially here in Germany, should be undermined by lies and propaganda.
Ultimately, it is about bringing democracy into disrepute as the supposedly inferior system.