The investigation comes after police in the city of Dortmund were forced to debunk a story published on Breitbart over the weekend. The Breitbart article claimed that a “1,000-man mob” chanting “Allahu Akbar” set fire to a church on New Years Eve, but police said that no incident occurred. A local newspaper said that Breitbart distorted its original report. Breitbart, which has stood by the article, plans to launch websites in both Germany and France ahead of elections this year.
German officials tell Reuters that the government has considered setting up a bureau under the press office that would be dedicated to tracking and combatting fake news. “We are dealing with a phenomenon of a dimension that we have not seen before,” Steffen Seibert, a German government spokesperson, tells Reuters. The Czech Republic created a similar “anti-fake news” unit last month, though plans for the German bureau remain unclear due to concerns over the government regulating news.
Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency also tells Reuters that a December cyberattack on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) last month exhibited the same “infrastructure” as a 2015 attack on the German parliament. That attack was attributed to APT28, a Russian hacking group that is believed to have infiltrated the Democratic National Committee (DNC) last year, US officials have said.
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