German election monitors are tracking “murky accounts” on TikTok that flood the app with support for the resurgent far right, The National has been told.
Analysts suspect that accounts supportive of Alternative for Germany (AfD) are run by mysterious viral collectives users who share tips on evading TikTok's rules for political content. It is thought the aim is to get maximum exposure in German voters' news feeds and air hardline views that the AfD might not officially put its name to from its badged channels.
The accounts are being probed by a group called Democracy Reporting International during a campaign for Germany's February 23 election. They do not suggest TikTok is to blame. Security services are bracing for attempts at foreign interference only months after a presidential vote in Romania was annulled over Russian influence.
Opinion polls suggest the Elon Musk-backed AfD will become the second-largest party in the German Bundestag and its use of TikTok is widely seen as outpacing that of traditional parties. As well as its official presence, there are accounts with names such as AfD.TikTok and afd_dr.aliceweidel – referring to the party's lead candidate – whose affiliation is unclear.
“These accounts tend to have large amounts of followers, have similar bios, and be absolutely misleading – they are not tied to the political party, but they present themselves as if they are the political party,” said Ognjan Denkovski of Democracy Reporting International. He said monitors were also looking for similar content linked to other German parties.
The accounts are run by “co-ordination networks” that work largely on Telegram, some of them with “reward mechanisms and tips on how to circumvent TikTok moderation policies that might take down the account,” he told The National. Investigations during European Parliament elections in 2024 found murky accounts linked to the AfD and France's far-right National Rally party. Researchers have informed TikTok of their findings.
“You can see that this is a co-ordinated effort between a number of individuals communicating with each other – ‘achieve this and claim x reward, whether monetary or otherwise’, or ‘my account got taken down within two seconds, how do I get out of this’, or ‘my account achieved so many followers, here are the tips on how to do this and make sure that your account stays up’,” Mr Denkovski said.
“We also see that these accounts are frequently actually followed by official party accounts from the AfD. That to us suggests some level of co-ordination or at least awareness within the party that this is happening. We do not have any concrete evidence to say the AfD is telling these people to do this on Telegram, but it would be naive to assume that there is absolutely no link.”
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sounded the alarm on hybrid threats when he dissolved the Bundestag on December 27, warning against the kind of “attempts at external influence” seen in Romania’s election and in posts on X. “It is eligible German citizens alone who will decide this election,” he said.
The German government “assumes that some foreign governments may consider carrying out interference measures related to the 2025 Bundestag elections”, the Interior Ministry wrote in a briefing last month. It warned that “Russia, above all” could try to gain illegitimate influence over the decision of German voters.
Security services “are not currently aware of any specific cyber attacks” targeting the elections, but a wide range of attacks have been observed in other elections, such as “hack-and-leak” campaigns against political parties, the ministry warned. It said disinformation and acts of espionage or sabotage “may be expected” during the campaign, although it is confident that the pen-and-paper balloting process itself is secure.
The AfD's manifesto says the fight against disinformation has led to “legitimate opinions” being censored, and calls for a law fining social media companies for illegal content to be wound down. It also calls for Germany to unfreeze relations with Russia and resume natural gas imports via the Nord Stream pipelines.
One official account for AfD members of parliament has more than 530,000 followers on TikTok, while an equivalent for Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD) has about 153,000. During one debate last month, an SPD member accused an AfD speaker of making a “nonsensical” speech about Afghan migrants that was “only suitable for a 30-second video on TikTok”.
Many of the murky additional accounts “will be pushing literally the party message as it is formally pushed by overt party channels”, Mr Denkovski said. “But it’s also a way for the party to communicate messages that it might not feel comfortable communicating through truly official channels.
“I think the overarching goal really is to achieve as much presence as possible, just to make the content very salient in the overall information environment. It's not so much a question of what content it is, it’s more a question of how prevalent the content is, how much it shows in people’s news feeds.”
