Empty grocery shelves. Olaf Scholz in front of the turbine for the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Men with German flags. Police officers beating protesters. The images in the videos have nothing to do with each other, but someone edited them together to make viewers uneasy. In addition, electronic sounds that are supposed to sound scary. The texts that are displayed always have the same tenor: the Germans are suffering from the sanctions against Russia, they are angry, the “economic war” against the Kremlin must end. Without naming a source, reference is made to “a survey” according to which the majority of respondents believe that the federal government “does too little for its citizens”. The top corner of the videos shows the SZ logo Süddeutsche Zeitung.
But the videos are fake, they are pro-Russian propaganda. They are not on the real SZ website, but on fake sites. Its creators have put a lot of effort into creating a mood against the pro-Ukrainian course of the federal government in the supposed name of the SZ. The design of the website, the web address at the top of the browser, the SZ logo, the colored background of the displayed text: all of this is based on the SZ. Partly deceptively real, partly amateurish.
The SZ brand has obviously been misused for a campaign in which unknown persons have been imitating major German media for weeks. With the reasonably real-looking videos, they spread pro-Russian messages. The authors are apparently trying to reach people who trust well-known media and tend to avoid obscure channels, such as Messenger Telegram, which was developed in Russia and is used by nationalist groups.
Dozens of major news sites have been recreated for the campaign, including imitations of mirrorT-Online, picture, World and FAZ. ZDF and T-Online reported on this for the first time at the end of August. The Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution are examining the case. Deceptively real fakes were also published by international media such as the British Daily Mail created.
Spelling mistakes and awkward formulations
The procedure is always the same. The creators register domains that are similar to the originals, such as sueddeutsche.me instead of sueddeutsche.de. Unwary users should not immediately notice the difference when they take a quick look at the web address. In this case, such so-called top-level domains probably only cost a handful of euros. However, the domain owner cannot be found in the corresponding online directories, he has veiled his identity and is hiding behind the company Privacy Guardian, which specializes in such anonymization.
Visually, the video clones are almost perfect, but the content is rather cheap. Articles and subtitles of the videos are full of spelling mistakes and awkward formulations, sometimes words in Cyrillic letters appear. The unknowns rely on social media to spread the word. They share the links on Twitter and Facebook, partly in the form of paid ads, partly as posts in the comments section of Facebook pages like the Goethe-Institut. The SZ contacted Facebook about the abuse. However, the group said it could not do anything because the videos came from outside and are only linked to on Facebook.
Fake accounts are also used to share the fake sites. Hundreds were automatically created by software. They share striking similarities like computer-generated profile photos that don’t show real people and spread propaganda links galore.
The backers also record the Internet traffic on the fake pages, so a so-called redirector built-in. With the help of website redirection, the originator can see from where the page is accessed and how often. This technique is an integral part of the campaign.
The effort was probably greater than the reward
Some of the video snippets used can be found on the Internet and date from before the start of the war. This is shown by analyzes of freely available data from the Internet. With the image search of search engines and screenshots of the videos, many snippets can be assigned chronologically. This suggests that the actors are relying on cheap, freely available archive material, which they fetch from platforms such as YouTube. A snippet, for example, shows a scene in which Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer was verbally attacked by demonstrators in January. The snippets are each about five seconds long, indicating some level of software automation. The counterfeiters probably didn’t want to cut everything together by hand.
Despite all these tricks, the measurable success of disinformation is limited. You can find many fake accounts, but hardly any reactions to the videos they spread. Random checks show that the links to the fakes were rarely if ever shared by real people. The fakes also played no role on Telegram. There are a number of large groups and channels that follow the Russian propaganda line in terms of content. Despite this, the replicated pages almost never appear there. By all appearances, the cost of the campaign was greater than the reward.
In case of suspicion: Dear readers, should you become aware of manipulated or suspicious websites that appear with the logo and style of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and are possibly forged, please send us an email with the relevant link to [email protected].