Reconquista Germanica

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Logo of the RG

Reconquista Germanica (from Spanish reconquista , “back-conquering”, and Latin Germanicus , “ Germanic ” or “German”; short: RG ) was a covertly operating, right-wing extremist network that first appeared before the 2017 general election . According to the German federal government, the network has been dissolved since the end of 2019, but the “existence of similar hierarchical and clandestine follow-up projects ” cannot “be ruled out”. Right-wing extremists coordinated targeted online attacks on political opponents, media and institutions. The group was tightly organized militarily and had a YouTube channel with 33,000 subscribers. It organized itself mainly through Discord with the declared aim of strengthening the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) Thomas Haldenwang announced in October 2019 that the group was clearly right-wing extremist and could be monitored using intelligence services .

Campaigns

Networking of 114 Twitter - account , the end of January 2018 the hashtag #reconquistagermanica used (the larger one point, the greater the number of its followers )

Reconquista Germanica joined forces in summer 2017 with the aim of influencing the federal election in favor of the AfD. To this end, the radical activists agreed on times, hashtags and goals for their campaigns in closed forums, manipulating social media algorithms and dictating political online discourse.

About Discord were Twitter - rants organized and disseminated Views for commenting on YouTube videos. One of the goals was, for example, Rayk Anders , a producer of video clips on political issues on behalf of the public service youth program. After Anders criticized the AfD's double standards on September 15, 2017, an appeal by the RG was followed by two thousand comments on the video within just two days. Also Jan Böhmermann and Til Schweiger have been mentioned in a "Handbook for Media guerrillas" of the RG as targets.

For the 2017 chancellor duel , RG called for an attempt to dominate the discussion on Twitter with the hashtag # Verräterduell . After an appeal via a YouTube video to the subscribers of the RG channel just three days before the TV duel, investigative research by BuzzFeed revealed that around 1500 members appeared on the Discord server within 24 hours. Memes and tweets had been prepared there in the days leading up to the duel . With their tweets, the activists flooded the hashtags #Kanzlerduell and #TVDuell , ensuring that inflammatory memes were displayed among the top tweets. Since Twitter makes it more difficult for newly created accounts to get into the "Trending Topics", they did not succeed in getting the # Verräterduell listed here until shortly before the end of the TV duel . 388 Twitter accounts had used this hashtag; With a total of more than 202,000 tweets about the TV duel, this was the most intensely discussed event on Twitter in Germany to date.

The network also covered the federal spokeswoman for the Left Youth Solid , Sarah Rambatz, with a shitstorm of murder and rape threats after screenshots appeared, as she had asked in a Facebook group about "anti-German film recommendations" in which "Germans die". Rambatz then withdrew from the Bundestag election campaign and declared that he would be renouncing her place on the Hamburg state list for Die Linke . Immediately after the publication of a multi-page report in the print edition of Der Spiegel , it became the target of RG itself: With up to 7000 tweets per hour, the hashtags #NichtMeinSpiegel and # LügenSpiegel landed in the trending topics.

The propaganda researcher at Oxford University Lisa-Maria Neudert determined that the AfD accounted for 30% of the social media traffic in the election campaign for the 2017 federal election, leaving the other parties well behind. In particular, the RG, together with other supporters, made the AfD “appear bigger than it is” on the Internet. According to a study funded by the Open Society Foundation , 5% of the accounts were responsible for 50% of the likes in hateful comments on Facebook . An analysis by extremism researchers at the London Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that, for example, fifteen days before election day, seven hashtags initiated by the RG, including #nichtmeinekanzlerin , #reconquista and #merkelmussweg, were among the top 20 “trending hashtags” in Germany. The #AfD hashtag was in first or second place for the entire two weeks before the election, #Traudichdeutschland was the second most successful hashtag actively pushed by RG. Lars Steinke, state chairman of the Junge Alternative Niedersachsen and employee of the AfD parliamentary group, admitted in an interview that he was involved in the Reconquista Germanica in Twitter campaigns. Yannick Noé, district chairman of the AfD Leverkusen and founder of the new right - wing magazine Arcadi , which is aimed at schoolchildren and students , was also part of the network as a "VIP of Army Group West".

Another campaign related to the broadcast of the ARD film Aufbruch ins Unknown on February 14, 2018. According to the fact finder from tagesschau.de , the discussion about the film, in which dissidents flee to Africa before the scenario of a Europe dominated by right-wing extremist dictatorships, should take place in the social networks are massively and specifically influenced. According to an analysis by the Badische Zeitung on Twitter, the 1150 tweets published under # AufbruchInsUngewisse during the broadcast ensured that this hashtag temporarily led the Twitter trends. Around two thirds of these tweets came from the right-wing camp. It was noticeable that 38% of the associated Twitter accounts were younger than a year, while of the creators of the remaining third of the tweets only 14% had created their account within the last twelve months. According to an analysis for the blog Übermedien by Stefan Niggemeier, social bots did not seem to have been used during the campaign , only around 230 accounts * were assigned to the RG due to their networking. The Badische Zeitung also came to the conclusion that if you consistently followed the RG instruction “Put between five and ten Twitter accounts” only around 35 to 70 people were involved in the troll storm. A few days before the film was broadcast, netzpolitik.org had already analyzed that only 114 accounts were posting on Twitter using the hashtag #ReconquistaGermanica .

* Note: The analysis of the Badische Zeitung comprised 1150 tweets during the broadcast of the 90-minute film, the analysis for over-media included 2408 tweets from the period three days before the broadcast until the morning after.

High-ranking members of the RG are authors of the new right magazine Arcadi . According to the RG there is a close cooperation.

organization

Organizational chart of Reconquista Germanica

Reconquista Germanica was organized on the basis of military hierarchies , there was a commander-in-chief , generals , officers , private and recruits . According to an analysis by extremism and terrorism researcher Julia Ebner , virtual successes were rewarded with promotions to higher, virtual ranks, which should later be reflected in real society. The Identitarian Movement and the Young Alternative for Germany were also listed as part of Reconquista Germanica in an organizational chart .

The leader of the movement, about whom little information is known, was called Nikolai Alexander. According to research by the Badische Zeitung , he comes from the Czech city of Ostrov (German: Schlackenwerth) and has a donation account at the Sparkasse Allgäu ; according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung , he lives in Bavaria. Before he set up the Discordia server in September 2017 , the self-declared Schopenhauer fan uploaded videos to his YouTube channel (which is now blocked in Germany) for five years. These consisted of a type of slide show that had become increasingly xenophobic over the years . On their soundtrack, he defended Russia against the West and declared “German sovereignty ” to be the ultimate goal, since he saw Germany as a “colony of the USA”. Belltower.News sees Alexander play a hinge function between the identitarian movement and the classic neo-Nazi scene. B. the AfD-affiliated Youtuber Hagen Grell and the guitarist of the neo-Nazi band Stahlgewitter Frank Krämer in their networks on Alexander and vice versa. Even Martin Sellner was led into the user lists the Reconquista Germanica. In contrast to the Identitarian Movement, Reconquista Germanica has not been observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution , according to a request from the Badische Zeitung .

According to BuzzFeed, RG's strategy was to move 4chan users to more private communication networks like Discord via YouTube . The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote of 5000 users who were registered on RG's Discord server. Alexander called on them to get as many Twitter accounts as possible and to retweet the tweets given on Discord as often as possible. This is intended to create the impression of a majority on the outside. The aim was not necessarily to convince the "stubborn" opponents with arguments, but to provoke, humiliate and also - if the counterpart proves to be resistant to such tactics - to insult. The strategy was also to impersonate refugees on social media who publicly claim that there is no longer any war in Syria, for example.

According to DLF Kultur , the RG members are said to have been mostly middle-aged men. Christian Stöcker , who is researching propaganda attacks via online media in a project funded by the BMBF , saw the mechanisms and motivation of the activists as comparable to those of computer gamers. According to his perception, “these are right in the middle of Western consumer culture”, but at the same time have “a massive need for right thought and hatred and struggle”. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , the journalist and sociologist Carolin Wiedemann saw the several hundred members of the RG as a counterpart to the “masculinity exercises” of fascist free corpse soldiers , which Klaus Theweleit described in his dissertation on images of women and masculinity fantasies from the 1920s.

Julia Ebner assumed that people in the Reconquista Germanica's so-called “Crisis Prevention Center” believed in an imminent “race war”, so there were instructions on how to build electric batons and firearms. The recapture of a Germany that is supposedly lost to foreign forces is the top priority there.

Satirical adaptation

Jan Böhmermann started a satirical adaptation of the "Reconquista Internet" as part of his program Neo Magazin Royale on April 26, 2018 . He is one of the " wankers who spoil the wankers who spoil our fun on the Internet, spoil the fun on the Internet." "Anyone who adheres to the strict rules of this secret manifesto is allowed to participate," called the TV presenter while he was holding the German constitution into the camera.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b ZEIT ONLINE : Thomas Haldenwang: Head of the Constitutional Protection warns of increasingly extremist AfD "wing". In: time online. October 18, 2019, accessed November 18, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Parliamentary News | Inside and home / answer: Existence of follow-up projects organized in a similar hierarchical and clandestine manner . In: German Bundestag, February 21, 2020, accessed on May 3, 2020.
  3. ^ A b c Julia Ebner : Hatred at the push of a button: Researcher infiltrates the right troll factory. In: Focus-Online , March 6, 2018.
  4. ↑ a b Stephan Mündges: campaign: Where the rights accumulated. In: today . September 20, 2017, archived from the original on November 25, 2017 ; accessed on February 15, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Rayk Anders : The AfD and the "courage to truth" on YouTube . 15th September 2017.
  6. ↑ a b c Patrick Gensing : Information war by all means. In: faktenfinder.tagesschau.de. February 13, 2018, accessed February 16, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Karsten Schmehl: These secret chats show who is behind the meme attack # Verräterduell on the TV duel . In: buzzFeed . 3rd September 2017.
  8. ↑ Lars Wienand: Ten times more tweets in the TV duel than in the record “Tatort” . In: derwesten.de . 4th September 2017.
  9. ↑ Mike Schlink: Death threats after disturbing Facebook post . In: Hamburger Morgenpost , September 6, 2017.
  10. ↑ Konstantin von Hammerstein, Roman Höfner, Marcel Rosenbach : How the right-wing extremists mobilize with agitation. In: Der Spiegel 37/2017, pp. 22-25.
  11. ↑ The tone is getting rougher - Twitter campaign against “Spiegel” . In: MDR . 10th September 2017.
  12. ↑ Digital Forensic Research Lab: #BotSpot: Memes Target Der Spiegel, Merkel . In: medium.com . September 14, 2017.
  13. ^ Kai Kupferschmidt: Social media 'bots' tried to influence the US election. Germany may be next . In: Science . 13th September 2017.
  14. ↑ Thorsten Jabs: "AfD made up 30 percent of social media traffic" . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . 23 September 2017.
  15. ^ Anne Applebaum , Peter Pomerantsev , Melanie Smith, Chloe Colliver: "Make Germany great again". Kremlin, Alt-Right and International Influences in the 2017 German Elections. In: Institute for Strategic Dialogue , London, December 2017.
  16. ↑ Jacob Davey, Julia Ebner : "The Fringe Insurgency". Connectivity, Convergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right. In: Institute for Strategic Dialogue , London, October 2017.
  17. ↑ Constitutional Protection Report of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for 2019 , p. 118
  18. ↑ Marita Wehlus: AfD officials apparently support Identitarian Movement in NRW correctiv.org, August 16, 2018
  19. ↑ AfD functionary involved in troll attacks . In: tagesschau.de . 1st March 2018.
  20. ^ A b c d e f Daniel Laufer: How German rights want to manipulate the public on the Internet . In: Badische Zeitung . February 16, 2018.
  21. ↑ Laura Lucas: How right-wing trolls hijacked the discussion about an ARD film . In: Übermedien . 15th February 2018.
  22. ↑ Markus Reuter, Anna Biselli: Disguised as a gamer: Insights into a right-wing radical troll army . In: netzpolitik.org . 5th February 2018.
  23. ↑ https://motherboard.vice.com/de/article/xwmzq7/bundesregierung-kein-rechtsextremismus-bei-reconquista-germanica-trolle
  24. ↑ Stefan Lauer: Information war for the elementary school: "Reconquista Germanica" and "D Generation" . In: Belltower.News . 19th January 2018.
  25. ↑ a b Lena Kampf: How right-wing Internet trolls tried to influence the federal election . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . 20th February 2018.
  26. ↑ Kira Ayyadi: How "Reconquista Germanica" organizes its "Troll Army" on Discord . In: Belltower.News . 15th February 2018.
  27. ↑ a b Karsten Schmehl, Ryan Broderick: A German YouTuber Tried To Make His Far-Right Hashtag Go Viral And It Was A Huge Flop . In: buzzFeed . 4th September 2017.
  28. ^ Reconquista Germanica: How a right-wing extremist troll network works . In: The Standard . February 13, 2018.
  29. ↑ Max Oppel: Troll attack on an ARD film. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , February 15, 2018.
  30. ↑ Carolin Wiedemann: The white Sharia . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . 4th January 2018.
  31. ↑ “What does it mean to you to be a patriot?” This is how right-wing trolls recruit on the Internet. In: focus.de. Retrieved April 26, 2018 .
  32. ↑ Hate on the Internet | NEO MAGAZIN ROYALE with Jan Böhmermann - ZDFneo. In: youtube.de , accessed on April 26, 2018.