Before the 9/11 attacks, German police and intelligence services failed to cooperate. Our constitutional fathers, learning from the Nazi dictatorship, prevented security agencies from gaining too much power.
This weakness has proved untenable in the era of deadly international terrorism. Like in the USA, Germany has built out a “Joint Terror Defense Center.” Called GTAZ, it brings together federal and state authorities to thwart many terrorist attacks.
Today, Germany needs a similar quantum leap to fight Russian disinformation. The Kremlin wages hybrid warfare comprehensively and constantly, deploying complex and evolving tactics. A new German disinformation strategy must wield a broad toolbox that understands the threat, raises awareness, rolls out countermeasures, and increases international cooperation.
Information manipulation must be treated as a national security priority. The German government today only employs a handful of experts, split between different departments. Why do we have hundreds of thousands of soldiers, tens of thousands of cyber security warriors, but only a handful of information war specialists?
The platforms used to spread disinformation should be studied. At present, most fact-checkers investigate X. The reason is banal: texts are easy to examine. It is much more difficult to analyze videos, even though videos play a central role in today’s information wars. TikTok is little studied. Disinformation and propaganda are increasingly spread in group chats on messaging services such as Telegram.
Artificial intelligence represents the next frontier of information manipulation. The German government needs to build up professional expertise and tech companies need to be held accountable. The Munich AI accord, an agreement to combat election disinformation by 25 major tech companies on the fringes of the Munich Security Conference 2024, represents a start. Scientists and politicians must have access to data from the major social networks. Large companies must be obliged to cooperate.
We must also be prepared for a future where Russia will go beyond espionage and covert actions in the information space and carry out sabotage against physical targets. This could mean explosions, arson, and attacks on infrastructure. Germany must strengthen its protection of critical infrastructure.
Russian military intelligence has launched cyberattacks on the Bundestag and German political parties. Politicians and the public need to understand that a hacker attack on critical IT infrastructure can be just as dangerous as a physical attack on a train station or power plant.
Public education on information manipulation needs to be improved. Finland represents a good model. It begins media training in elementary school, teaching students about social networks and checking. In contrast, Germany is slashing budget cuts for civic education.
German restraint means that the Russian information war carries no costs — political or otherwise — for Moscow. This must change.
Politicians must stand up. An impressive example is Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski. In the UN Security Council, he filleted Russian lies about Ukraine point by point.
Sanctions must be extended. Germany should ban the Russian video agency Ruptly and the Russian House in Berlin. Payments from Russia to state-run media must be severed.
Lies need to be corrected – fast. If a false narrative spreads tens or hundreds of thousands of times, the battle is lost. Like other countries targeted by Russia´s information war, Germany should develop instruments designed to take down illegal content and malign mechanisms.
Sometimes “pre-bunking” is required — correcting before an event. Anglo-Saxon secret services went public to unveil Russia’s invasion plans in Ukraine. Germany should follow this model. It should leverage AI-driven fact-checker programs, blocking false information before it is published.
Germany, France, and Poland launched an early warning and response system in 2024. It’s a good start. With the Digital Services Act and the AI Act, the European Union has far-reaching regulations requiring social media to take responsibility for the content it hosts. They should be enforced. The European Commission has ordered Meta to take down the Russian disinformation network Doppelgänger and to design the systems in such a way that Doppelgänger cannot register new accounts.
Russia’s information war represents a formidable challenge to Western democracies: we need to fight malign manipulation while protecting freedom of speech. Russia’s goal is to undermine our fundamental democratic values, to destroy us from within. We must not fall into the trap.
Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven is a German diplomat. He was deputy director of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service between 2007 and 2010. He served as NATO’s first Assistant Secretary-General for Intelligence and Security and Germany’s ambassador to Poland. He is the author of ‘Putins Angriff auf Deutschland: Desinformation, Propaganda, Cyberattacken [Putin’s attack on Germany: disinformation, propaganda, cyberattacks’], published September 2024.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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