A phenomenon in the world of disinformation: bare walls in Munich are currently used for pro-Russian propaganda. Photos of alleged graffiti appear again and again on social media that put Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a bad light. But the empty facades were not actually graffitied. An expert explains what lies behind such counterfeits.
The alleged graffiti shows the ultra-conservative US television journalist Tucker Carlson trying to convey the supposed feeling in Germany towards Ukraine. The picture with his black and white likeness shows him with his middle finger extended towards US President Joe Biden. A photo of the house wall painted in this way circulated on social media at the beginning of February. The place where the photo was supposedly taken: in front of the Ukrainian embassy in Berlin. Alone: Everything about it is a lie.
The apartment building in the photo is not in the German capital, but in Munich. And the supposed graffiti doesn’t exist and didn’t exist there at all. Reporters from the German Press Agency (dpa), who looked around on the relevant street corner in Giesing, came across an unstained wall. Dirt in the joints precluded a fresh coat of paint or recent cleaning.
For Pia Lamberty from the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (Cemas), the spread of invented graffiti is no surprise. “Fakes can be a simple way to reinforce certain positions,” says the co-director of the institute, which, among other things, deals with disinformation and conspiracy theories on the Internet. Similar fake images have gone viral in the past.
Banksy-style anti-Ukrainian street art also faked
By the end of 2023, another Munich house wall had already made a rapid career online. On an apartment building in Berg am Laim, an image of a man in orange dungarees removing a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag with a high-pressure cleaner is said to have been seen in the style of the British street artist Banksy. But here too, a visit to the site revealed that the alleged picture never existed.
A resident, a member of the owners’ association, assured the dpa at the time that there had never been such graffiti at the site. None of them had been freshly painted over either. “A key goal of disinformation is to cause discord and chaos and to ensure destabilization,” says Lamberty, explaining the intention of such posts. Certain positions and narratives are intended to be spread and often presented as larger than they actually are.
In the case of the fictional Tucker Carlson graffiti, a QR code is used to advertise his much-criticized interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to the Cemas expert, anti-Semitic fake depictions of Stars of David in ovens have also been circulating. According to research by T Online There was a connection to the so-called Doppelgänger campaign – a pro-Russian network of real-looking but fake news sites. Images of areas in the Hasenbergl district were used.
Even more fakes on Munich facades
More fake graffiti from the city is circulating on social networks. Some of the walls photographed for this purpose are only a few steps apart. For example, another residential building in Giesing was photographed just two minutes’ walk from the wall of the house for the Carlson fake. A depiction of Zelensky in a clown costume was then photoshopped onto this surface. 80 meters in another direction, an empty facade is used for fake graffiti, which supposedly shows a mountain of corpses caused by Ukraine.
The side wall of a garage in the Ramersdorf-Perlach district was used to create a fictional image of the Ukrainian president as a rat. In all cases, the alleged images could not be found on site. The recordings were therefore manipulated afterwards. The Munich police have not received any reports of graffiti or graffiti on the streets in question in recent weeks.