Picture a morning in Berlin. You pour your coffee, open your phone, and see an article from a familiar news site claiming that election officials are counting ballots in a back room. You are angry. You share it. Hours later, you learn that the site was a clone, the article was invented, and the anger was manufactured by people thousands of miles away. This is not a futuristic warning. It is the texture of German public life in the mid-2020s. For years, observers warned that Russia was waging information warfare against the West. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that warning has become routine. Germany, not the United States, is now Ukraine’s largest financial backer, and the Kremlin treats Germany as a top target. Along with Poland, the Baltic states, and France, Germany faces an organized, increasingly professional campaign of lies, half-truths, and manipulated media. The problem is known in Berlin. The government has created committees and working groups. But what it still lacks is a clear, effective counter-strategy. The European External Action Service offers a useful definition: one false story is not enough. To count as foreign information manipulation and interference, an operation must be manipulative, deliberate, coordinated, and driven by a foreign actor. That definition matters because it separates ordinary propaganda from something more dangerous. A single lie is a problem for a fact-checker. A coordinated operation is a problem for democracy itself. The operation is aimed not at convincing voters of one policy, but at convincing them that no policy, no fact, no institution can be trusted. When citizens no longer know what is real, they can no longer govern themselves. That is the quiet emergency that Germany is only beginning to confront.
Consider some of the operations that have already been exposed. In Doppelgänger, Russian operatives cloned the websites of established news outlets and filled them with false stories, making it look as if Western mainstream media had already published the claims. German intelligence said that about thirty percent of the clicks on those fake pages came from Germany, an indication of how closely the country was being watched and how successfully its citizens were being reached. Another campaign, known as Matryoshka or Overload, did not target the public directly. It aimed at fact-checkers and journalists, flooding them with coordinated false material for verification. The purpose was to overwhelm them, to consume their time and energy with lies, so that genuine warnings would be lost in the noise. If every story has to be checked, and every check reveals another hoax, eventually even honest journalists begin to hesitate. A third operation, Storm-1516, was even more elaborate. It invented entire stories, backed them with fabricated evidence and fake websites, and then spread them through influencers and the stolen identities of real journalists. The idea was to create such a tangle of sources that even mainstream media and politicians would react to the story as if it might be true. By then, the damage was done. The operation did not need to prove anything. It needed to create enough doubt for the story to live in the public mind. The most important thing to understand about these campaigns is that their aim is not simply to make people believe a specific lie. It is to make people believe that everything is a lie. When citizens think that all news is rigged, all elections are fixed, and all politicians are corrupt, they stop trying to find the truth. They retreat to their own echo chambers, distrust their neighbors, and abandon common ground. That is the true goal. In that sense, Russian disinformation is not about winning an argument. It is about making argument itself impossible.
Inside the German government, awareness has grown but action remains cautious. In response to the rising number of attacks, the interior ministry created a project group known as PG ZEAM. It includes officials from the foreign and justice ministries, the chancellery, and the federal press office. In principle, its job is to monitor foreign information manipulation and interference directed at the country. In practice, it has no investigative or sanctioning powers. It cannot expose the perpetrators, punish them, or even demand that social media platforms remove their content. The intelligence services map these campaigns, but day-to-day monitoring falls to a working group of perhaps ten to twenty people. Their task is to watch and report, not to act. There is a serious professional debate about whether debunking fake news and deepfake videos actually helps or only spreads the material even further. It is a legitimate question. More could be done, though. France has built a dedicated national service, VIGINUM, with broader powers and a larger budget. When a campaign targeted President Macron, VIGINUM exposed and documented it within two days. Germany has no equivalent. Why? The answer is not simply money. German ministries and agencies are scrupulous about free speech. They stress that spreading disinformation is not, by itself, punishable, and they are wary of creating a government office that can decide what is true. That caution is understandable. A democracy should not have a ministry of truth. But there is a difference between controlling speech and defending the public sphere from manipulative foreign attacks. France has shown that a democratic state can investigate foreign interference and publish its findings without becoming a censor. Germany’s hesitation may be rooted in history and values, but inaction has its own cost. While officials debate the risks of responding, the attacks continue, and each attack makes the next one easier.
Nowhere has this caution been more costly than in elections, where the operations have intensified over the past two years. Before the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, authorities recorded unprecedented activity. The far-right AfD won its best-ever result and could now enter government. The disinformation campaign clearly targeted centrist parties and their politicians, leaving the future winner and its possible coalition partner largely untouched. One line of attack claimed that the CDU candidate for state premier was detaining young refugees. Another campaign, highly realistic, claimed that destroyed postal ballots had been found in a district and that those ballots would have been cast for the AfD. That operation was later linked to Storm-1516, the network with a clear Russian background. Think about what that means. Voters were told, in a convincing way, that their ballots had been destroyed to silence their support for a party they preferred. The message was not simply that the particular candidate was bad. The message was that the election itself was a sham. In an atmosphere like that, some people become more angry, some become more frightened, and many simply stop believing that democracy works. The harm is not measured only in votes. It is measured in the loss of civic trust. Experts familiar with the subject say a single member state can do little against campaigns of this kind on its own. The operations are borderless, yet the defenses are national. A unified EU response is needed. The EU’s Digital Services Act requires large online platforms to address systemic risks from disinformation and information manipulation. In theory, that is exactly the right tool. In practice, getting a specific piece of content taken down is very difficult. The tech companies often prefer to pay a fine rather than change their systems and algorithms. For them, false content is engagement, and engagement is revenue. A fine is just the cost of doing business.
Perhaps the most hopeful response to this threat comes not from a ministry but from a small Berlin startup. The company has monitored recent years of state elections and developed software that can detect deepfake video. The AI-based tool can tell when a video was artificially created or manipulated, and it can even tell when a genuine image or video is being falsely presented as if it had been shot at a different time or place. This distinction matters, because not all disinformation is fake in the obvious sense. Sometimes the material is real, but the context is a lie. Jakob Tesch, who handles government relations for the company, told Átlátszó that the software is continuously trained and optimized mainly with the help of journalists. For this year’s Berlin elections, the startup ran a special project that let ordinary citizens submit any piece of content free of charge. The AI program then told the user whether the material was genuine or likely fake. They called the project Gretchenfrage, an old German expression that means “the decisive question.” The name comes from Goethe’s Faust, where Gretchen asks Mephistopheles a question he cannot answer honestly. It is a fitting name for an election project: citizens are asking the decisive question, and the machine is helping them get a straight answer. Tesch argues that deleting false content is the wrong strategy. He believes transparency and public education are more effective than censorship. The company advises the German government, and Tesch thinks pressure should be put on the platforms to enforce a level playing field. He called it perverse that his company cannot run paid campaigns on the platforms about fighting disinformation. Those ads are treated as political advertising, and political advertising is banned. So the very platforms that profit from spreading lies also prevent defenders of democracy from reaching the same audience with the truth.
Gretchenfrage was a quiet success. Alongside the roughly 85,000 posts submitted by the public, the project showed that ordinary people are not simply passive victims of disinformation. They are willing to stop, ask, and check. The company plans to use the project again, mainly for domestic state elections, and talks are under way about making the software available for important European votes as well. None of this is a complete solution. A small startup cannot defeat a sophisticated foreign intelligence operation. A government working group cannot by itself restore trust in institutions. A single project, however cleverly designed, cannot undo years of algorithmic radicalization. But together, these efforts point to a different way of thinking about the challenge. The answer to foreign information manipulation is not to close down the internet or to create a state authority that decides what is true. It is to equip citizens with the tools and the confidence to ask the decisive question themselves. It is to build institutions that can investigate and expose foreign interference without becoming censors. It is to hold platforms accountable for the ecosystems they have created, not merely for individual pieces of content. And it is to remember that the target of disinformation is not just a voter’s opinion, but a citizen’s ability to participate in public life. When a lie is planted in an election, the real damage is not the lie itself. It is the aftertaste of suspicion, the lingering feeling that the whole system is rigged. The antidote to that feeling is not more official statements. It is the experience, repeated many times, of asking hard questions and receiving honest answers. That is what Gretchenfrage offers, and it is what every functioning democracy must offer: a moment in which truth can still be told, and trusted.