COVID disinformation doesn’t necessarily begin with Russian-backed media, said Nathalie Vogel, a senior fellow at Kremlin Watch, a programme run by the European Values Center for Security Policy, and a reserve officer of the German Air Force trained in the detection of psychological operations. Vogel, who has been monitoring influence campaigns in Germany since 2007, told openDemocracy that the Kremlin seeks to lean on and exacerbate divisions that already exist.
“The fragmentation in our Western societies was already there, because of plenty of things – because of the role of social media, because of the way democracy and open societies work, because of demographics,” Vogel said. In her view, hostile actors detect, cultivate and aggravate these domestic lines of fragmentation.
The European Values Center for Security Policy takes a hawkish position towards Russia, and openDemocracy’s analysis of information shared on Telegram does not find that Germany’s COVID-sceptic movement is solely the product of activity linked to Russia. But media outlets backed by the Kremlin have nevertheless played a vital role in amplifying COVID-sceptic voices, live-streaming protests and providing a steady diet of content for the movement. Other outlets, like Epoch Times, play an important role, but lack Russia’s long history of targeting Germany with information warfare tactics and of amplifying anti-establishment voices in the country.
“Take a forest in the summer,” Vogel said. Everything is dry, the sun is shining, and a fire seems impossible – but a single unextinguished cigarette can be catastrophic. “Russia Today and Sputnik are the cigarette.”
Radicalisation
After the Reichstag incident in August, Tamara Kirschbaum, its instigator, was accused of being an “agent provocateur” by her fellow conspiracy theorists and was forced out of the German QAnon group. Support, however, came from Elsässer, who interviewed her on Compact’s YouTube channel, suggesting that “infiltrators” had been in the crowd on the day of the protest. By the time openDemocracy spoke to Kirschbaum, she had decided that the person who told her Trump was in Berlin must have been a German state infiltrator.
Elsässer has extended his support to the wider COVID-sceptic movement, recently devoting an entire issue of Compact to Querdenken, including interviews with some of the movement’s key figures, such as Samuel Eckert, Bodo Schiffmann and Oliver Janich.
Other Querdenken organisers are keen to disavow the connection between their movement and the extremists who gathered at the Reichstag. Markus Haintz, the lawyer involved with Querdenken, told us that the latter was “obviously a false flag operation”, claiming that the police presence around the Reichstag was deliberately thin, even though hundreds of officers were suddenly on hand to clear demonstrators away once they reached the building. “It’s pretty obvious that the media wanted to have their narrative,” he said.
Nevertheless, there is an overlap online between COVID sceptics and the conspiracy theorist scene. Among the groups and channels we tracked on Telegram, the QAnon group Qlobal Change was the third-largest channel spreading misinformation about COVID-19. As the US elections approached, our analysis showed that the Telegram groups became obsessed with Trump and his claims of election fraud. Haintz himself posted links on his Telegram channel to a conspiracy theory that antifa were behind the Jan 6 riots at Capitol Hill. Like Ballweg, Haintz follows KenFM and Rubikon – and told openDemocracy that he had been reading Compact for years.
On 9 December 2020, the regional branch of the Verfassungsschutz in Baden-Württemberg, the south-western state where Querdenken was founded, began to officially monitor the movement.
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Darren Loucaides Alessio Perrone Josef Holnburger | Radio Free (2021-03-31T13:00:44+00:00) How Germany became ground zero for the COVID infodemic. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/31/how-germany-became-ground-zero-for-the-covid-infodemic-2/
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