The Online Ecosystem of the German Far-Right

By Jakob Guhl, Julia Ebner and Jan Rau

On the 8th October 2019, a 28-year old man with self-made guns and body armour attacked a synagogue and a kebab shop in Halle, killing two people. He live-streamed the attack and published a ‘manifesto’ online. His intention was to kill Jews, whom he blamed for feminism and mass migration. He introduced himself as “Anon” (anonymous), a reference to ‘imageboard’ websites such as 4chan and 8chan. Shortly after, users on 4chan cynically joked about whether the attack had lived up to similar attacks in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and El Paso in the US and Christchurch in New Zealand. In each of these attacks, the perpetrators were found to be have been immersed in far-right online sub-cultures. The presence of extremist and terrorist groups on mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has been the focus of much attention in recent years, but the attacks cited above have raised concerns about the far-right subcultures that have emerged on alternative platforms like 4chan and Telegram, chat forums like Gab, and gaming applications like Discord. With mainstream social media companies forced to make greater efforts to remove extremists and hate speech from their platforms in Germany with the NetzDG law, these alternative social platforms have become increasingly important to an international far-right community that includes anti-Muslim movements like PEGIDA, ‘Identitarian’ ethnonationalist groups like Generation Identity, and militant Neo-Nazis like the Atomwaffen Division. In addition to being places where far-right terrorists are glorified, they have also become sites for activists to strategise and spread disinformation campaigns, coordinate harassment against female politicians and create meme campaigns to influence elections and political discourse.6 ISD research in the German national, Bavarian and European Parliamentary elections showed how these groups were coordinating in particular to support the right-wing populist party Alternative for Deutchland (AfD).7 Complementing these alternative social media platforms is an ecosystem of online alternative media outlets that masquerade as ‘news’ sources. Presenting themselves as alternatives to mainstream media, many of these outlets amplify far-right, anti-migrant and anti-progressive talking points through sensationalist ‘click-bait’ stories. Taken together, this toxic far-right ecosystem is potentially contributing to a rise in far-right motivated terrorism, which has increased 320% in the past five years, whilst also giving safe spaces and providing contents for those who want to undermine democracy. Policymakers are increasingly asking what can be done, but at present too little is known about these communities. To address these issues, ISD’s Digital Analysis Unit undertook one of the most comprehensive mappings of this alternative ecosystem in Germany to date. While these platforms draw in a global audience, which we are consistently mapping and analysing to understand the international connectivity of the far-right, this report focuses specifically on the German-speaking communities within this ecosystem. The German government has been at the forefront of devising legislation to force the mainstream social media companies to remove illegal hate speech from their platforms. With the NetzDG bill, passed in 2017, social media companies face large fines if they do not remove illegal content within 24 hours. While many have criticised the NetzDG bill as infringing on free speech or being ineffective by focusing on content removal, there is also the risk that it is driving extremist groups into more closed, alternative platforms which are currently not subject to the legislation. These alternative platforms present significant challenges for regulation. They may lack the resources to effectively monitor or remove extremist communities, or they may be ideologically committed to libertarian values and free speech and thus unwilling to moderate these communities.  Drawing together ISD’s digital ethnographic work across dozens of closed forums and chat groups with the latest in machine learning and natural language processing, in this report we provide an initial glimpse into the size and nature of the far-right communities on these platforms. We present data gathered from user-generated surveys on these platforms, revealing the motivations for joining and the ideological views of those drawn to these groups. Using Method 52, a proprietary software tool for the analysis and classification of unstructured text, we trained an algorithm to identify antisemitic narratives.8 We also analyse the role of alternative ‘news’ outlets in disseminating far-right concepts, drawing on ISD’s partnership with the MIT Media Lab to create the ‘Hate Observatory’, based on its Media Cloud software, the world’s largest online database of online media, containing 1,4 billion stories from 60,000 sources, to compare the frequency and types of coverage of far-right themes in mainstream and alternative media. Based on our research findings, we make a series of recommendations for tech companies, government, civil society and researchers about how to prevent these alternative platforms from being used to further radicalise or undermine democracy. Key Findings – We identified 379 far-right and right-wing populist channels across ten alternative platforms investigated for this report. Alternative platforms with notable far-right presence included: the messaging application Telegram (129 channels), the Russian social network website VK (115 groups), video-sharing website Bitchute (79), and social networking sites Gab (38 channels), Reddit (8 groups), Minds (5 communities) and Voat (5 communities). Analysis of the community standards of these platforms shows that they can be divided into two groups. Firstly, those designed for non-political purposes, such as gaming, which have been hijacked by far-right communities. Secondly, those that are based on libertarian ideals and defend the presence of far-right communities on the basis of freedom of speech. While membership numbers in these groups were not always identifiable, our analysis suggests that there are between 15,000 and 50,000 Germanspeaking individuals with far-right beliefs using these platforms, with varying levels of activity. The channel with the most followers had more than 40,000 followers. Although we identified a few platforms that were created by right-wing populist influencers, such as video-sharing sites FreiHoch3 and Prometheus, the number of users was too small to merit inclusion in the analysis. – A spectrum of far-right groups are active on alternative platforms: while there are a greater number of anti-Muslim and neo-Nazi affiliated channels, ‘Identitarian’ groups appear to have the largest reach. Of the 379 groups and channels that we identified, 104 were focused on opposition to Islam and Muslims, immigration and refugees and 92 channels expressed overt support for National Socialism. We identified 35 channels and groups associated with Identitarian and ethnonationalist groups. 117 communities and groups did not fall neatly into any specific category but instead contained a mix of content from the categories described above. It is important to note that a larger number of channels does not necessarily equate to a larger number of people reached. For example, the largest Identitarian channel has more than 35,000 followers, which is significantly greater than the largest anti-Muslim channel (18,000) or the largest neo-Nazi channel (around 10,000). (continued)  

London, Washington DC; Beirut; Toronto:  IDS - Institute for Strategic Dialogue: 2020. 76p.