The German Foreign Ministry revealed a Russian disinformation campaign about Company X. Between December 20 and January 20, experts used special software to scan the platform.

There they found 50,000 fake accounts accused of promoting anti-German sentiment in more than a million tweets, he wrote. Der Spiegel. This included trying to influence German thinking about the war in Ukraine.

The accounts are responsible for a “barrage of lies” about Germany, the weekly wrote, which also seemed to refer to posts from trusted news media, such as Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Der Spiegel itself. Anyone who clicked on that also ended up with a fake account.

The indication that Russia was behind this is that the fake accounts contained many linguistic errors and were not active on Russian holidays.

A message on a fake account of Foreign Minister Baerbock also points to Russian interference. That message stated, “The war in Ukraine will end within three months.” The post was liked 389 times, and 45 people shared it more widely.

The fake account looked deceptively real. Only a letter of the Russian alphabet revealed that this was not the real account of Baerbock.

According to Der Spiegel, the Baerbock Ministry is deeply concerned about the outcome of the investigation. Elections are scheduled to be held in three German states this year, and in the European Union, citizens will go to the polls for the European Parliament in June.

The fear is that Russia will influence the voting behavior of all these voters with the help of fake accounts. Germany has shared the results of the investigation with the European Union.

Ministry researchers concluded that a large-scale campaign has been emanating from Russia for some time, which came to light as early as 2022. France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Ukraine were also targeted.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced that year that it had launched “the largest and most complex campaign since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.” This network consists of 29 accounts on Instagram and 1,633 accounts on Facebook.