I’ve covered a lot of speech crime indictments here at the plague chronicle. Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened. Occasionally you’d find the odd article about a dumb tourist who was cited for throwing a Nazi salute in public or something, but that was it. The whole area just didn’t matter.
The German state acquired a kind of political Long Covid from the pandemic. Its agents learned from their virus repressions that they could get away with a lot more than they ever thought, and they also learned to view ordinary people as their adversaries. A third thing happened too, in that lockdowns moved a lot of discourse to the internet, and the German elite discovered for the first time that they and their policies suffer a popularity deficit there. To explain this, our baffled and offended if powerful social media naïfs borrowed the malevolent concept of ‘disinformation’ from the Anglosphere. They began whining and crying and beating their breasts and clutching their pearls about disinformation. None of them did this so hard and so insistently as the Greens, because the Greens represent the views of the German political elite, and as an elite they feel entitled to scold, control discourse and tell other people what to do.
That’s my potted history of how we got to this world, with pensioners being sent to jail for typing the wrong three-word phrase on the internet and YouTubers being fined thousands of Euros because some computer programme hallucinated into their banal complaints about poor internet reception a contextually incoherent Nazism. If you’re unlucky enough, you can get nailed for literally anything, and we only hear about a tiny minority of these cases. For a lot of people, the summary judgments they receive from the court are embarrassing, baffling and not worth the trouble. Those who can will just quietly eat the fine and try to get on with their lives.
In past pieces, I’ve drawn comparisons to the old East German DDR, and I’ve also tried to characterise political repression as something that all states get up to when their ruling classes become threatened. I stand by all of that, but I’ve neglected to explain why our present situation is unique.
Europe and particularly Germany have entered a totally new era when it comes to government interference with personal expression. We’ve never seen anything like this before, it is going to get a lot worse, and nobody anywhere has the slightest interest in dialling this back. The prosecutions are escalating and they will only become more pervasive and ridiculous.
What is happening resembles classic ‘totalitarian’ political tactics only superficially. The DDR employed literal bureaucrats and secret policemen whose job it was to censor speech according to defined standards and to punish or intimidate those who said inconvenient things. An analogy would be the farmer who decides there are too many rabbits eating his cabbages, and so he goes out and shoots them.
Modern Germany just can’t go out and shoot rabbits, and the reason has nothing to do with liberal democratic freedoms. We can’t even build bridges. Over a century ago, the Kingdom of Saxony required only two or three years to build the first Carola Bridge over the Elbe in Dresden. The SS destroyed that monument in 1945 to slow the Soviet advance, but the DDR needed only four years to build a replacement – the one that finally collapsed in September of last year. Today, in the best Germany of all time, we will require at least 10 years and almost certainly more to build our third Carola Bridge. That is a very rough scale of how much ability the state has lost in the space of just a few generations.
The sclerotic, hyper-managerialised state that cannot build an uncomplicated 500-metre bridge across a river also finds censorship really, really hard. And so it has signed over this project to a whole world of NGOs, many of which now devote incredible resources to policing the internet all day. We once had a farmer shooting rabbits, and that was bad enough if you happened to be a rabbit. Now we have an obese, bed-ridden, day-drinking farmer who can no longer fit through his front door. To solve his rabbit problem he has deputised a lot of autonomous agents, like the myxoma virus, to get rid of the hated rabbits instead. This means he’s no longer in control of the process at all. The censorship happens all on its own, and for reasons of its own too. It’s just something that a growing number of state-adjacent organisations do now, because there are institutional interests (jobs, funding) behind it.
How this happened is insidious. To take but one example: during Covid, German politicians didn’t like the fact that people were calling them names on the internet. They therefore voted to enhance penalties for insults directed against those ‘in political life’. Then, some of them ran off and founded an internet censorship NGO-cum-startup called So Done, the entire business model of which involves using AI tools to find people insulting politicians and referring these politician-insulters for prosecution. When these malefactors are ordered to pay compensation to their ‘victims’, the insulted politicians split the money with So Done, and everybody is happy.
That case is especially egregious, but it is much the same story with the ‘trusted flaggers’ deputised by the Digital Services Act and the swarm of other speech-suppressing NGOs who have descended upon German discourse like a bunch of fleas. We are looking here at a whole niche profession premised upon censoring and punishing people for saying naughty things. The not-so-subtle problem is that anyone employed under these auspices, being a professional, can never stop finding people saying naughty things, regardless of what people are actually saying. In this the new censors are much different than their DDR-era predecessors. They work not to influence discourse, not to protect the delicate feelings of wealthy invulnerable politicians, not to enforce a new online civility, not to defend the legitimacy of state institutions and not even because it is fun to see AfD voters shamed in court and deprived of their savings. No, they do it because it is their job, and that is the most terrifying thing of all.
Consider REspect!, just one of these garbage organisations. We’ve met it before – it’s the hate speech NGO run by a weird Egyptian man named Ahmed Haykel Gaafar. As of last year anyway, 10 people worked at REspect!, their salaries paid in part by the government. From their quarterly reports, we learn that in 2024 REspect! processed an average of 89 speech reports a day, 31 of which they referred to prosecutors. (As always, we’re asked to believe that people just come to REspect! with all the hate speech they’ve found online, and that REspect! then uses its prerogative as a trusted flagger to get naughty speakers banned and censored. The problem with this story, is that it requires us to believe that thousands of Germans are actually going to the dumb REspect! website and using its retarded speech report form, which I find highly unlikely. Maybe the odd offended Greenling actually does all of that, but what is actually happening here, almost certainly, is that REspect! is itself trawling the internet every day for hate speech. This would be why it needs to have a staff of at least 10 people, which you would not need if the offended and terrorised masses were doing all the reporting for you via web form.) These guys are by far most active on X and Facebook, and their all-time favourite speech offence is violations of section 86a of the German criminal code, the statute that forbids the use of NSDAP-associated slogans and symbols. This one law accounted for 64% of its entire haul last year. The reason for this is obvious: Nazi slogans are easily searchable and therefore offer the greatest payoff for the least effort. For everything else, somebody might actually have to read something, and that’s no good if you need to maintain your quota of 90 daily speech naughties.
The final step is the most frustrating: media naturally report on a subset of the prosecutions that REspect! helps generate, which causes the forbidden and highly dangerous Nazi phrases to recur all across the internet, where our word-searchers find them and initiate new prosecutions. It is like sowing the seeds of one’s future harvest.
I am not exaggerating or making this up. Consider the fate of that most deplorable of National Socialist slogans (from which I distance myself utterly), ‘Alles für Deutschland‘ (‘Everything for Germany’). Nobody except Nazi memorabilia enthusiasts knew this was a Sturmabteilung phrase until somebody caught the AfD politician Björn Höcke saying it in 2021. Since then, we have had a poor pensioner from Traunstein facing jail time for repeating ‘Alles für D–‘ in two separate tweets, in ironic commentary related to Höcke’s case. We have this guy from my old district in Bavaria who got his house searched and a €7,000 fine for merely repeating an ‘Alles für D–‘ hashtag on X, also in relation to Höcke’s prosecution. We have this pensioner from Münster hit with a €4,000 fine merely for citing the evil magical phrase, with quotation marks and everything, also in the course of discussing Höcke’s prosecution. And then finally we have the prominent social media personality Stefan Homburg convicted and fined €10,400, also for merely citing the forbidden phrase in the course of a broader discussion about the absurdity of it all. And again, these are the only the cases we know about. That can’t be emphasised enough.
Plainly, none of this is reducing the amount of ambient Nazi phraseology on the internet. If anything, the tactics before us have only served to increase the circulation of these darkly magical incantations. These morons have raised ‘Alles für D–‘ from near total obscurity to a household proverb in the space of just a few years, and they’ll keep going.
Except for the AfD, all the major German parties just love this stuff, or at least they have no idea what is going on and no conception that it might be a good idea to stop this. Our new CDU-led Government has just promoted the extremely noxious NGO HateAid to trusted flagger status alongside REspect!, and as artificial intelligence offers these people ever-improving tools, the prosecutions will just get crazier and wider-reaching.
We have established an autonomous, self-reinforcing censorship regime that serves no real purpose other than its own propagation, and for the foreseeable future we just have to live with that. It sucks.
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