USA TODAY International Edition
Don’t blame Russia! U.S. right wing may be meddling in Germany
An alliance of mostly anonymous online trolls and extremist agitators is meddling in Germany’s election, but researchers said Russians aren’t to blame.
Instead, they said, right-wing groups in the USA are behind materials popping up on YouTube, messaging board sites such as 4chan and reddit and texting service Gab.ai.
The evidence comes less than a week before Sunday’s vote, which is likely to hand German Chancellor Angela Merkel a fourth term.
“So far, we have not been able to track down any specific Rus-
sian activity,” said Simon Hegelich, a professor of political science data at the Technical University of Munich who has advised the German government about the threat of hacking and false information.
Hegelich said proving connections among sympathizers is difficult and may never be conclusive.
An analysis of 300 million tweets over the past six months by Hegelich and researchers at the Technical University of Munich shows Germany is a hot spot for posts that use the hashtag “#AltRight.”
“A lot of the stuff we are seeing in Germany can be linked to, or is at least inspired by, the ‘alt-right’ movement in the U.S.,” Hegelich said, referring to a loosely defined far-right group that rejects mainstream conservatism. The movement includes people dedicated to “white identity.”
Many posts denigrate both leading candidates — Merkel and her conservative Christian Democratic Union party and her chief rival, Martin Schulz of the left-ofcenter Social Democratic Party — with the hashtags #Merkel and #Schulz.
Many of those posts originate in the USA, adding to the impression that right-wing social media users in both countries may be trying to sway German public opinion.
It’s possible that some of this alt-right messaging coming out of the USA may be connected to Russian interference; that, too, is difficult to determine, Hegelich said.
“There will never be an election again in which trolling, hacking and extreme far-right politics do not play a role,” Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and blogger for the U.S. neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website wrote after Donald Trump’s election victory last year.
The Daily Stormer publishes commentaries about the German election.