Co-author Pia Lamberty presented some of the results of the survey on Thursday in an online section with victim advice centers from Saxony and Thuringia. It turned out that Russian propaganda seems to have had a stronger impact in East Germany than in the West. Around a third of respondents in the East agreed with the statement that NATO had provoked Russia, while the figure in the West was only 16 percent.
A similar picture emerged with the conspiracy testimony that Russian President Vladimir Putin was taking action against a global elite pulling the strings behind the scenes: 27 percent in the East agreed, but only 16 percent in the West. The survey was conducted from October 3rd to 11th by the market research institute Bilendi & respondi. A total of 2,228 people between the ages of 18 and 90 took part in the study.
The authors of the study point out that this is a current mood picture. “And against the background of the increase in approval ratings for pro-Russian conspiracy narratives within the German population as a whole, this appears to be quite worrying,” they write in their study. They call for a “profound societal debate on the question of how to counteract the increasing flood of disinformation campaigns”.