Description: TikTok videos purportedly depicted large crowds as chanting pro-AfD slogans by reportedly replacing the original audio with manipulated sound. The footage, originally from January 2024 anti-extremism protests, was repurposed in January 2025 to reportedly mislead viewers. Purported AI-generated or altered audio was added to create the illusion of far-right support. Fact-checkers confirmed the deception, and the accounts responsible later deleted the content, claiming no intent to spread misinformation.
Editor Notes: Please also refer to Incidents 909, 929, 1060, and 1061 for similar incidents. While this incident has not been explicitly attributed to Operation Overload (also known as Matryoshka or Storm-1679), its thematic content and manipulation tactics appear adjacent. No direct forensic or institutional linkage has been established as of this writing.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown voice cloning technology developer developed an AI system deployed by TikTok user Alice Weidel Fan , TikTok user AfD John and AfD supporters, which harmed Protesters against right-wing extremism in Germany , German election integrity and General public of Germany.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown voice cloning technology and TikTok
Incident Stats
Incident ID
931
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2025-01-21
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Several Tiktok videos some with millions of views show large demonstrations where chants of "East, East, East Germany" can be heard. The profiles that spread them are called "Alice Weidel Fan" or "AfD John". In the comments, many users expr…
Ahead of Germany's federal elections, fake news and AI-generated propaganda is multiplying online.
As German federal elections draw closer, TikTok videos allegedly showing hundreds of thousands of people marching for the far-right Alternati…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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