The Next Fakenews War

On the front lines with the fact-checkers and soldiers in the information war

- Simon Shuster

Less than two weeks earlier, the U.S. election had ended in victory for Donald Trump, and the postmortems were full of buzzwords that Merkel urgently needed to understand: filter bubbles, bots, fake news, disinformation, much of it related to the claims that Russia had somehow hijacked the election.

What was past, Merkel said, may be prologue. With German elections scheduled for Sept. 24, the Chancellor knows that her bid for a fourth term in office may be subject to the same dirty tricks employed in the U.S. race. As Europe’s most powerful leader and a determined critic of the Kremlin, Merkel has raised alarms over Russia’s “disinformation” campaigns in Germany. Emails were stolen from her political allies in 2015 by the same hackers who later targeted the U.S. race, according to German and American investigators. During her nearly 12 years in power, Merkel has also watched the Kremlin’s media apparatus air broadsides against her policies in a variety of languages.

Her concern is not just the Russian media outlets that spread disinformation, Hegelich says. It is also the automated algorithms, known as bots, that help false reports go viral before politicians or fact-checkers can debunk them. In June, one study found that 59% of Germans reported seeing fake news online; 61% said it poses a threat to democracy.