129 Andrew Rettman, Fight Club Russian Spies Seek EU Recruits
EUobserver, May 23,
2017. Damien McGuinness, Russia Steps into Berlin Rape Storm Claiming German Cover-Up,’’
BBC, Jan. 27, 2016;
Ben Knight, Teenage Girl Admits Making Up Migrant Rape Claim That Outraged Germany
The Guardian, Jan. 31, 2016. Damien McGuinness, Russia Steps into Berlin Rape Storm Claiming German Cover-Up,’’
BBC, Jan. 27, 2016. Statement of Melissa Hooper, Director of
Human Rights and Civil Society, Human Rights First,
The Scourge of Russian Disinformation, Hearing before the US. Commission on Security and Cooperating in Europe, Sept. 14, 2017, at 3.
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‘‘#ElectionWatch: Russian Botnet Boosts German Far-Right Posts Digital Forensic Research Lab, Sept. 21, 2017; Anne Applebaum et al.,
‘Make Germany Great Again Kremlin, Alt- Right, and International Influences in the 2017 German Elections, Institute for Strategic Dialogue and LSE Institute for Global Affairs, at 13.
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Henk Van Ess & Jane Lytvynenko, This Russian Hacker Says His Twitter Bots Are Spreading Messages to Help Germany’s Far Right Party In The Election
BuzzFeed News, Sept.
24, 2017. by Russian special security services were potentially being used to recruit new agents for the Russian state.
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Indeed, as Merkel’s Germany has led the defense of transatlantic values that underlie open, democratic societies, playing on fears of migrants has become a durable theme of Russian disinformation and political influence in an effort to undermine the German governments standing with its own population. A well-known example of this is the Lisa case of January 2016, a fabricated story initiated on a Russian state-run television broadcaster and circulated widely on social media of a 13 year-old Russian-German girl who was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by ‘‘Southern-looking,’’
presumably Muslim, migrants.
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Police interviewed the alleged victim and quickly determined the story to be false, but even Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov joined the fray in publicly highlighting the case and suggesting an official cover-up.
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The case sparked protests by thousands of Russian-German citizens who decried Germany s acceptance of migrants.
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Ironically, the Lisa case was essentially a victim of its own success, as it piqued awareness in German society of Russian-sponsored disinformation and helped contribute to a healthy skepticism of fake news as Germany entered a hotly contested election season. The use of bots and trolls in the 2016 German election appears to have been less extensive than in the recent elections in France and the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, social media analyses by US. and Euro- pean-based researchers suggested that prior to the German election, pro-Kremlin and primarily Russian-language bot accounts on Twitter combined commercial and pornographic posts and retweets with pro-AfD content,
concerns about electoral fraud, and attacks on Russian anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny— though it was unclear who was managing or directing these sporadic posts.
737
A purported Russian hacker told
BuzzFeed News that he and thirty other hackers were amplifying nonofficial, pro-
AfD content prior to the poll the party itself had stated it would not use Twitter bots as part of its campaign.
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Meanwhile, Russian state-sponsored media outlets RT and Sputnik crafted and pushed out stories carefully framed to undermine Merkel and her party. RT ran positive articles on the AfD and amplified German nationalists who railed on the country’s perceived failures in European integration and counter-terrorism, while Sputnik putout stories that played up Russian and German interests allegedly being
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130 Donald N. Jensen, ‘‘Moscow’s New Strategy in Berlin Center
for European Policy Analysis, Oct. 4, 2017. Andrea Shalal, Germany Challenges Russia Over Alleged Cyberattacks,’’
Reuters, May 4,
2017.
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