On February 23, Germans voted in what many saw as the “most important election of their lifetime”. The result emboldened the country’s far-right, with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) almost doubling their vote, leaving the chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, to warn that Europe was now at “five minutes to midnight”.
Among the most pressing issues to emerge from the election is the extent to which foreign interference shaped it – and how to prevent this from happening in future European elections.
This interference was overt in the case of Elon Musk – the tech billionaire and senior advisor to President Trump – endorsing the AfD, including through his livestreamed interview with its leader Alice Weidel on his social media platform, X, and his virtual appearance at an AfD rally. (According to the German media, the Bundestag is investigating whether Musk’s support constituted an illegal political donation.)
A body of evidence shows there were also covert attempts to influence Germany’s information landscape – potentially violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), the landmark regulation which requires large online platforms to identify and mitigate risks to electoral processes.
Political storm
The findings were no surprise to Sorina Matei, Digital Democracy Manager at Berlin-based NGO (and Civitates’ grantee partner), Democracy Reporting International (DRI).
DRI is in the vanguard of monitoring social media in domestic elections – work which potentially puts the organisation at the centre of a political storm despite the fact that the organisation is avowedly non-partisan.
“We’re a team of researchers who try to objectively monitor online discourse and flag inauthentic behaviour,” she says. The importance of this work is growing dramatically in a world where people increasingly turn to social media and chatbots for their information. “We’re asking for transparency from platforms, and that they’re held accountable so that electoral integrity isn’t threatened.”
On February 18, DRI published its own research into online manipulation and disinformation in the German election, focussing in particular on TikTok – a key electoral battleground because of its sway over young German voters.
“We investigated the prevalence and spread of what we call ‘murky’ political accounts on TikTok, by which we mean accounts with questionable affiliations that present themselves as official government, politician or party accounts for instance,” explains Matei.
Their findings were worrying: DRI’s researchers identified 138 ‘murky’ accounts on TikTok impersonating and/or promoting major German parties of politicians. Most of these (68%) promoted the AfD in one way or another. Twenty of these AfD accounts were created just before the election.
While accounts promoting the AfD were the most numerous, active and generated the greatest engagement, DRI also found ‘murky’ accounts supporting other parties.
“We know that ‘murky’ accounts also promoted other parties such as CDU [Christian Democrat Union of Germany], the Greens, the FDP [Free Democratic Party] and the left – but those accounts had significantly fewer followers and created less impact [than the AfD ones],” says Matei. As of February 26, TikTok had removed 111 ‘murky’ accounts in response to DRI’s investigation, and a further 16 proactively.
Significant victory
DRI, however, was unable to conduct large-scale, systematic analysis of potential interference in Germany’s election on X, because the company denied them access to public data.
The DSA clearly requires companies to provide researchers with access to key engagement data – including the reach, likes, shares and visibility metrics of posts. So DRI and the Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, GFF), filed an urgent lawsuit against X at the Berlin Regional Court.
On February 7, they won an important victory, when the court ruled that X must immediately provide them with unrestricted access to publicly available data. This marked “one of the first major judicial tests” of the DSA and “a legal blow to Musk’s platform”, Politico reported.
“The digital space is not a lawless zone, and I trust that X will grant us access to its data promptly. We study online debates without fear and favour, aiming to shed light on what happens on these platforms,” said Michael Meyer-Resende, Executive Director of DRI, responding to the court’s decision.
However, X swiftly challenged the verdict, on the grounds that the company’s European headquarters is in Ireland, while also successfully filing a motion to remove the judge overseeing the case, who the company argued “had positively engaged with” social media content from the plaintiffs.
X’s response is part of a wider assault on the DSA, and the EU’s efforts to regulate its digital space. This is an attack, says Le Monde, which is being “waged in the name of freedom of expression by Donald Trump and American tech giants – foremost among them Elon Musk’s social media platform, X”.
DRI and others are diligently resisting this assault and trying to uphold the law.
