Russian Twitter bots boosted baseless voter fraud claims in Germany
A Russian-language network of Twitter bots tried to boost claims of voter fraud going into Germany's national elections on Sept. 24.
Those elections seem to have largely avoided the alleged Russian interference that had recently taken place in both the United States and France, but Russian-language bots still seized on a claim made by what appears to be a fake account, according to The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.
On Sept. 22, an account sent a tweet in German (translated below) that made it seem as though someone going by the name of "Sahrer" was going to help run the election, and would invalidate votes in favor of Alternative for Germany, a far-right party whose leaders have developed friendships in Moscow.
The above account photo, as pointed out by the Digital Forensic Research Lab, is actually a Pakistani actress with some digitally-altered red hair, and the account didn't post much until it was close to election time in Germany.
"The activity indicates a high likelihood this is a fake account pushing a message to provoke a reaction from the far right, and, potentially, to call the legitimacy of the election into question," the researchers wrote in a Medium post.
That message found success, though not without help from the Russian-language botnet.
Alternative for Germany supporters had been tweeting #Wahlbetrug (#ElectionFraud) in the week before the election, and they used that hashtag to bring attention to this incendiary tweet, too. But that hashtag got a giant boost going into the weekend. Researchers wrote that "the traffic was not organic, but boosted by a network of automated 'bot' accounts" operating "largely in Russian."
Several experts expected the Russian government might try to degrade Germany's election integrity instead of trying to unseat Chancellor Angela Merkel, a rival of Russian President Vladimir Putin who pushed for anti-Moscow sanctions after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Merkel's Christian Democratic Union was likely to win the election, but that didn't mean there was nothing for a Russian influence operation to do.
"You just have to have people doubt that their votes were counted," Adam Segal, the director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.
And Moscow may have realized that, even if they weren't able to knock Merkel from her perch, the election results were still likely to be favorable.
Merkel's Christian Democratic Union handily won a majority of parliamentary seats, with 33 percent of the vote, but that number was still far off from the 41 percent they took home in 2013. Alternative for Germany, the first far-right party in the German parliament in well over half a century, took home around 13 percent of the vote.
Considering Moscow's ties to Germany's resurgent far-right, it's hard not to see that as a victory of sorts for Moscow.
Speaking before the election, Joerg Forbrig, a senior transatlantic fellow with The German Marshall Fund, a transatlantic policy institute, said, "If the aim is to weaken Merkel, the Kremlin may decide that a risky last-minute interference is not necessary."
Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
