Last Saturday, a young salesman at a West German gas station was killed. A forty-nine-year-old local was shot at him, then arrested, because not having a mask he had been refused the service. While in custody, the man expressed anti-vaccination views and opposed to anti-Covid restrictions. The phone was followed by far-right personalities and various Querdenken channels (“lateral thinking”).
The event was condemned by the three favorite candidates in next Sunday’s elections, over which the shadow of online disinformation hangs. In the usual toxic mix of contents – fake about Covid-19 and pandemic, extremist and violent rhetoric and more or less twisted conspiracy theories – there are posts with a vaguely Trumpian flavor that explain how the vote has already been rigged by the masters of the world.
It was already known that Germany was not immune to this type of disinformation. In March 2021 a global anti-lockdown protest started by the German ultra anti-system, those who today call themselves Querdenker (“lateral thinker”) and are very similar to the QAnon cultists.
The novelty lies in the medium. In the last year, the most common social platforms have become more efficient in limiting disinformation (especially that relating to Covid) and eliminating its sources, especially following the Capitol Hill events. This resulted in a mass migration of conspiracy channels to Telegram, the messaging app devoted to privacy and almost devoid of moderation. Telegram is the “cradle” from which Querdenken content comes.
Germany has one of the toughest content moderation laws in the world, NetzDG, which requires public platforms to monitor, delete and proactively send illegal content to law enforcement. Telegram does not do this because it presents itself as a private messaging app, not unlike WhatsApp – even if it is difficult to define group chats of 200,000 members as “private”.
Today, the Telegram Querdenken channels (in German language) reach 1.5 million people spread across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, according to analysts at Logically. But it’s not unusual for content to filter elsewhere. Politico Europe reports that a false report – according to which the candidate of the Greens Annalena Baerbockwanted to ban pets – and circulated so much that it ended up in the mainstream media.
An Avaaz study estimates that the figures most damaged by disinformation are Baerbock herself (the subject of 25% of Querdenken content) along with outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel (13%) and her CDU candidate, Armin Laschet (10%). . The phenomenon is parallel to the American QAnon movement, connected both to the anti-vaccination circles and to those of the ultra-right nationalist, where the acolytes see in the progressive wing and in the political establishment the presence of the dark elite to fight.
These conjunctures lend themselves well to being exploited for political ends. Like a large portion of US Republicans led by former President Donald Trump , several members of Germany’s far-right AfD party have also adopted no-vax stances and conspiracy theories. When the AfD lost points to the regional in Saxony-Anhalt, the party’s response (before and after the vote) was Trumpian: the elections were rigged. From whom
it is away, the explanation starts that from the fraud reaches the alleged Deep State.
Among the most viral contents, a fake audio emerged, recorded by an AfD exponent, which explained how Baerbock had been chosen by Merkel as early as April. Josef Holnburger, co-director of the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, told the Financial Times that this audio has been shared over 750,000 times on Telegram alone.
“People still don’t take the Internet seriously. Digital hatred can have consequences in the real world, ”the other director of CMAS, Pia Lamberty , told Politico. It is fuses like these that led to the anti-lockdown protest of 30 August 2020 (organized by the “Querdenken 711” group) where a varied procession of protesters, including pandemic skeptics and hypernationalists, gave birth to an attempted assault on the Reichstag and 300 arrests.
Scholars have long warned of the existence of a porous boundary between conspiracy circles and the far right. The German authorities, for their part, believe that the anti-system sphere represents a fertile recruiting ground for neo-Nazis. The threat – which goes far beyond the upcoming elections – is systemic; as in the United States there is a risk of the complete alienation of an ever larger part of the population, a potential and massive erosion of trust in democratic institutions in the heart of Europe.
