Fake videos are being circulated on X and by pro-russian sources, allegedly showing men destroying mail-in ballots cast for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party or displaying voting papers from which the AfD has supposedly been removed.<\/p>\n
All of these videos are fabricated. Their falsity has been confirmed by Germany\u2019s state and district election commissions, as well as German monitoring projects. The AfD is in fact included on the official ballot. The videos showing the alleged \u201cdestruction of ballots\u201d also contain numerous anomalies: the \u201cballot packages\u201d shown lack mandatory voter cards, the envelopes do not have sealing strips, and the ballots differ in size and folding method from the official forms. In addition, analysis of the audio tracks featuring alleged \u201cvoters\u2019 voices\u201d in the background showed that they were generated using artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u25ab\ufe0f The tactics used to create and distribute this fake fully correspond to the methods of the pro-kremlin influence network Storm-1516.<\/p>\n
The goal of this disinformation campaign is to discredit Germany\u2019s electoral system, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote, undermine trust in democratic institutions and benefit pro-russian political forces.<\/p>\n
The Center has previously reported on the intensification of russian disinformation operations ahead of the elections in Germany. In particular, the mass dissemination of fabricated materials through the kremlin-coordinated \u201cMatryoshka\u201d network was documented, with German candidates being falsely accused of scandals, crimes and manipulated polling data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fake videos are being circulated on X and by pro-russian sources, allegedly showing men destroying mail-in ballots cast for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party or displaying voting papers from which the AfD has supposedly been removed. All of these videos are fabricated. Their falsity has been confirmed by Germany\u2019s state and district election commissions,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":51441,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"default","_kad_post_title":"default","_kad_post_layout":"default","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"default","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"default","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[932],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51443,"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51440\/revisions\/51443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpd.gov.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}