AfD leak: Fake emails circulate – CDU politician quotes a forgery in state parliament
Alongside genuine data, invented quotes from the AfD leak are spreading online. A CDU lawmaker cited one in the Stuttgart state parliament, and a Green MP shared three on Instagram.
Graphic: TERRA WORLD NEWS (own graphic based on the sources listed)
Following the publication of more than 420,000 emails, according to ZDFheute, allegedly stolen from the AfD, fake content is also spreading online. According to research by t-online, screenshots of supposedly scandalous emails shared on Tuesday and Wednesday do not match the actual dataset. The forgeries imitate the look of the portal "International Cyber Digest", which published the first genuine emails late on Monday evening. Some posts called for the party to be banned.
Bastian Schneider (CDU), chair of the interior committee in Baden-Württemberg's state parliament, quoted one such fake email in the chamber on Wednesday; it attributed a remark about Adolf Hitler's birthday to an AfD politician. The North Rhine-Westphalia state lawmaker concerned, Andreas Keith, denied making it, and according to t-online the email is not in the dataset. Green Bundestag member Johannes Wagner received around 140,000 likes for an Instagram post containing three invented quotes.
The genuine data is nonetheless sensitive: according to t-online, the leak includes a list of more than 3,000 AfD members in North Rhine-Westphalia with private addresses and phone numbers. AfD managing director Hans-Holger Malcomeß wrote in an email to members that "two dozen mailboxes" had been compromised. Treasurer Hannes Gnauck called the data "a few gigabytes of unimportant stuff".