Von Notz challenges outreach Selen on disinformation

Oct 5

Von Notz challenges the gap between the chiefs’ stark Russia warnings and their public impact, citing recent election results and asking how concrete hostile activity can be verified. Selen says Russian information manipulation seeks societal destabilization and finds receptive audiences; he calls for visible defensive capacity and resilience. Pressed on concrete public communication, he acknowledges that established media and agency channels fail to reach some audiences and that social media’s influence was underemphasized, including by his agency. He warns that AI-mediated information gathering may deepen that problem. Asked for transparent regular threat reporting, he says GAZ Hybrid already compiles daily or weekly situational reports; the problem is dissemination, not an absence of information. Von Notz concludes that platform ownership and partisan messages create a further problem for lawmakers. These are their competing assessments of communication and democratic resilience, not a quantified finding that Russian campaigns caused an election result.

At the hearing Selen says Russian actors including Storm-1516 and Matryoshka manipulated German state and local electoral discourse through targeted discrediting, election-process doubts, AI, bots and extensive dissemination networks. Challenged by Eichwede and von Notz, he says destabilization reaches receptive audiences and acknowledges that traditional agency and media communication fails to reach some social-media users. He urges wider dissemination and warns that AI-mediated information gathering could deepen the gap. He says threat reports already exist; von Notz also raises platform ownership and partisan messages. Neither speaker establishes a quantified causal effect on a particular election result.