Putin’s bot army is targeting German and French elections, Sweden warns

Por Tim Ross — China – POLITICO

STOCKHOLM — Russia poses a threat to upcoming elections in Europe’s biggest democracies and social media platforms must “step up” the fight against Moscow’s networks of bots, Sweden’s disinformation defense chief has warned. 

In an interview with POLITICO, Magnus Hjort, director general of the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, said elections were an “opportunity” for Vladimir Putin’s information war machine to try to polarize and divide European societies.

The Kremlin’s key objective is to make voters doubt whether their politicians should keep sending money and weapons to Kyiv by peddling fake stories about Ukrainian corruption and other abuses, he added.

Hjort and his team do not believe Moscow is targeting Sunday’s general election in Sweden — in part because the country is largely united behind the policy of supporting Ukraine.

Instead, he said, Russia is aiming at more powerful countries with elections on the horizon — including German state votes and the French presidential campaign — where far-right parties seen as more sympathetic to Moscow are poised to make gains. 

“Our assessment is that Russia is prioritizing other elections, other countries, larger countries in Europe,” said Hjort. “We have elections in Germany coming up on the regional and local level,” he added. “We have presidential elections in France next year.” 

Hjort’s intervention follows warnings of Russian attempts to sway voters this month in Germany, as well as a furor ahead of Sunday’s Swedish election over a far-right official’s links to Moscow. 

There have been growing fears in Germany over the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare, including a drone attack on Leipzig airport, as well as fake social media posts and videos falsely accusing election candidates of corruption and sex offenses. More elections are taking place in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sept. 20, with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) expected to do well. 

In France, Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally party faced criticism in the past over Russian sympathies, is leading opinion polls in the race ahead of next year’s presidential election.

Russia-backed actors have targeted Sweden with disinformation and influence campaigns in recent years, including in the run-up to the country’s accession to NATO. Hjort said he wanted social media platforms to do more to dismantle networks of automated accounts that spread foreign disinformation and run influence campaigns. 

Asked if he was happy with the efforts the likes of Meta, TikTok and X are making to tackle the problem, Hjort said: “With the platforms? No, I think the platforms should do more in order to keep their platforms clean of these bot networks. So there’s room for improvement.” 

Social media giants have their “agenda,” which is “to make money,” he said. “We have a different agenda. We want to get rid of bot networks targeting our democracies. Of course, they do not want them on their platforms. That’s not the issue, but it’s a hassle to remove them.”

Hjort added: “We need to step up our game. We need to find better ways of safeguarding our democracies. We need to work together with European country counterparts, and we need to find a way of much more effectively having a good dialogue with the platforms.” 

Fighting Putin’s lie machine 

Hjort said his agency saw a “constant flow” of foreign information manipulation and interference, from countries including Russia, China and Iran. 

In recent days, his team found evidence of a Russian-aligned attempted disinformation campaign using the so-called Matryoshka, or Russian doll method. This aims to distract fact-checkers, journalists and others by sending emails to them saying “look what the Russians are doing,” he said. “The idea is for them to pick this up, go to the actual video clip or whatever it is and then publish it with a debunking saying, ‘This is false,’ and, you know, wasting their time in looking at this.” 

Hjort believes the best way of dealing with these campaigns is simply to deny them the oxygen of engagement.

“Many of these things you need to ignore,” rather than falling into the Russian “trap,” he said. “They want to get you engaged, they want you to get angry, they want to get you excited. They want you to react, they want you to share information that polarizes … So it’s best to leave it unnoticed.”

Holiday network 

Hjort said one state actor — which authorities have not publicly named — was responsible for a bot network of 1,200 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, targeting Sweden and other countries in an attempt to divide societies.

It was nicknamed the “holiday network” because the accounts began by ostensibly discussing innocuous topics such as vacations and sport.

In total, the network published 50,000 posts and comments in 2025 and 2026, expressing intentionally divisive views — fiercely in favor of or against key political questions, the agency noted. “This is the way you can work if you want to polarize a society,” Hjort said. 

The agency chief said his team is ready to handle anything that arises in the final days of Sweden’s election, and works closely with security services, the election authorities and the civil defense agency in a structure set up to protect democracy.

For now, he’s not concerned about Russia swaying the campaign. “Our assessment is that right now we don’t see any coordinated campaign targeting Sweden,” he said. 

The biggest risk to Sunday’s election might just be that people worry too much about Russian influence. “Maybe the fear of foreign interference could be one of the biggest problems,” said Hjort. “There could be an exaggeration of the threat, and that could lead to someone saying that the election wasn’t fair, the election was targeted. That could harm the forming of a stable government after the election.”

Fonte: China – POLITICO