In a quiet apartment in Berlin, an elderly woman scrolls through her phone before breakfast and sees a video of a well-known German politician saying something shocking—something cruel, something that seems to confirm her worst fears. Her hands shake a little as she forwards it to her daughter, who immediately posts it in a family chat. Within hours, the clip has been viewed tens of thousands of times. But the video is not real. It is a fake, created not by a careless prankster but, as German intelligence services have identified, as part of a broader Russian disinformation campaign aimed at the country’s political life. This is the new atmosphere surrounding Germany’s federal elections in September: not merely a clash of policies and personalities, but a fog of manipulated images, manufactured scandals, and exhausted suspicion. Candidates from different parties have been targeted, and the effect is not limited to the digital world. It reaches into kitchens, classrooms, churches, and neighborhood gatherings, where ordinary people are forced to ask a question that has become almost impossible to answer: What can we still believe?
The technology behind these fake videos, often called deepfakes, makes the attack especially dangerous because it exploits the most basic human instinct: trusting our own eyes. Deepfake software uses artificial intelligence to study thousands of photographs and recordings of a person, then learns how to place their face on another body, shape their mouth around new words, and even mimic the tone and rhythm of their voice. A viewer watches a human face and naturally assumes that what they see actually happened. The brain does not want to verify every frame; it wants to feel, react, and share. That is the secret of the campaign’s power. German politicians from multiple parties have found themselves facing fabricated moments that are difficult to debunk quickly. A candidate might wake up to a video of himself endorsing a corrupt deal or insulting an ethnic minority, and by the time fact-checkers explain what happened, the damage has already spread through social media like wildfire. For the politicians and their families, the experience is deeply personal and often terrifying. They cannot defend themselves against something that never happened. They can only insist, with exhausted voices, that they would never say such things—while knowing that many people will suspect they are lying. The manipulation is not just an attack on individuals; it is an attack on the very possibility of authentic political speech.
German intelligence services have publicly attributed these fake videos to a Russian disinformation operation, a conclusion that places the videos within a much larger pattern of hybrid warfare. This is not a random act of malicious fun. It is a deliberate strategy to weaken trust in democratic institutions and to exploit the vulnerabilities of open societies. The aim is not necessarily to get a particular candidate elected, but to create a general sense that politics is dirty, that every claim is a lie, and that voting makes no difference. That cynicism is the ultimate goal, because a demoralized and deeply divided electorate is easier to confuse and ignore. The timing—before key elections—is not accidental. Periods of heightened public attention are opportunities to inject chaos. People are already anxious about migration, the economy, climate change, and social security; a fake video that shows a politician saying something outrageous can tie all those anxieties into a knot of rage. A pensioner in a small town may watch a fabricated clip and conclude that all leaders are corrupt. A young first-time voter may laugh at a manipulated meme without realizing it contains a propaganda message. The human cost is subtle but immense: every single person who becomes distrustful loses a little of the social glue that makes democracy possible. Trust, once broken, is hard to repair, and the people who spread these videos know that even after the truth emerges, the suspicion will linger.
For politicians, the reshaping of politics has become an everyday reality that goes beyond policy debates. Campaign teams now spend significant time on security measures, digital forensics, and rapid-response communication. They monitor social media obsessively, looking for the first sign of a fabricated video before it goes viral. They prepare preemptive statements, legal threats, and technical explanations, but all of that is a delicate and often inadequate defense. The more profound effect is on the emotional world of the candidates themselves. A local politician stepping into a town hall knows that someone in the audience may be recording his face with the intention of making him say something he never said. A chancellor or party leader must choose every phrase carefully, not only because of press scrutiny, but because a few seconds of her voice could be stolen and twisted into a completely different statement. This creates a strange new kind of pressure, a constant awareness that reality can be edited. Some politicians become more guarded, less spontaneous, more afraid of human warmth in public moments. Others try to make themselves less useful to manipulation by showing unusual faces or holding signs with the date and place, but these attempts can look robotic. Behind all of this there is a deep personal vulnerability. A person who enters politics usually wants to serve and make a difference. Now they must also accept that their face, their voice, and their identity can be stolen and weaponized. The experience is isolating, and it changes how candidates approach voters—not with open arms, but with clever strategies and a lingering sense of being watched.
For voters, the political landscape has become a minefield of uncertainty. The consequence is not just the spread of a single false story; it is a kind of mental exhaustion that settles over the public. People no longer know how to process the stream of videos they encounter. A father sees a clip of a minister making a heartless comment and feels anger rising; then a friend tells him the video is fake; he wonders whether the friend is naive or whether he himself was fooled. A student researches candidates for the first time and finds confusingly contradictory videos that seem to show everyone doing something shameful. The natural response is often to stop trying, to retreat into comfortable social circles where people share only the content that confirms their existing beliefs. This retreat is exactly what disinformation campaigns want. Political life becomes a series of sealed bubbles, each with its own version of the truth. In families and workplaces, arguments become more heated because there is no shared foundation of facts. A person who repeats a fake video may not be malicious; she may simply be overwhelmed and trying to make sense of a chaotic world. The human tragedy is that the constant circulation of fakes makes real injustice less visible. When everything can be faked, genuine evidence of corruption or failure is easier to dismiss as yet another manipulation. The distinction between truth and falsehood is blurred, and that blurring is itself a political choice by those who create the fakes.
Yet there is also a human counterweight to this tide of deception. Democracies have survived because of the stubborn, often messy resilience of ordinary people. The fight against fake videos does not end with better algorithms or stricter platform rules, although those are important. It ultimately depends on the willingness of citizens to pause before sharing, to talk to one another with empathy, and to rebuild trust in reliable sources. Journalists and fact-checkers are crucial, but they are not enough; the deeper need is for a return to human connections that are harder to fake. A neighbor’s lived experience, a local organizer’s hard work, a candidate’s laughter during a long campaign day—these are things that cannot be easily replaced by a manipulated clip. The September elections in Germany are therefore not only a test of political direction, but also a test of the public’s ability to hold onto its own mind without surrendering to suspicion. The targeting of politicians from different parties is meant to make everyone feel that the system is rotten, but it can also serve as a warning that no one is immune. In the end, the answer to fake videos is not simply more verification; it is more courage. It is the courage to say: I am not sure what is true, but I will not hate my neighbor because of a video. It is the courage to admit that reasonable people disagree, and that democracy still works when people are willing to listen. The fakes may keep coming, but so too does the human ability to care, to question, and to choose hope over despair.