Original Material
Talking points from Moscow: How RT and the GRU set the agenda on German-language Telegram
The Kremlin controls half of the sociopolitical content
After the start of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, the German segment of Telegram was flooded with channels spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda. Some that had previously been negligible in size grew to hundreds of thousands of subscribers within a short period, and the disinformation they circulated was picked up by even larger German-language Telegram channels. The Insider and Novaya Gazeta Europe studied the structure and content of the German-language Telegram ecosystem and found that these channels are part of a single, well-organized disinformation network controlled from the Kremlin and linked to Russian intelligence agencies.
According to the Telemetr.io statistics aggregator, Germany has roughly 9,500 Telegram channels. The service does not explain exactly how it determines a channel’s country affiliation, but it is known to factor in language, content – for example, the frequency of mentions of particular locations and public figures – and network environment (which accounts repost the messages). The total size of their audience is difficult to estimate; it is only known that the combined reach of these channels, whose audiences overlap, is approximately 60 million, and that the largest channels average around 100,000 views per post. This suggests that Telegram’s German audience numbers in the lower millions — not comparable to traditional media or YouTube, but still electorally significant.
In total, we identified roughly 330 channels spreading pro-Kremlin disinformation. Of these, 230 focus on news and politics, and another 100 cover topics ranging from history to human health. Notably, however, they occasionally publish pro-Kremlin propaganda as well — including conspiracy theories about COVID-19. In terms of reach, pro-Kremlin channels occupy a fairly significant place in this particular media landscape: among the channels that Telemetr.io classified under “News & Media” and “Politics,” pro-Kremlin public pages account for 49% of the audience.
Only seven channels on the list specialize in Russian-language content targeting the diaspora, while another five publish content in both Russian and German. The remaining 320 accounts are fully German-language, with their agendas embedded in the local German context.