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BRUSSELS (AP) – Europe’s leading martial arts group for right-wing extremists. German authorities banned autograph tournaments twice. But Kampf der Nibelungen, or Battle of the Nibelungs, is still thriving on Facebook, where the organizers maintain multiple pages, and on Instagram and YouTube, which they use to spread their ideology, attract new members, and make money through ticket sales and branded merchandise. .
The Battle of the Nibelungs – a reference to a classic heroic epic much loved by the Nazis – is one of dozens of far-right groups that continue to use mainstream social media for profit, despite repeated commitments by Facebook and other platforms to clean themselves up. extremism.
According to research shared with The Associated Press by the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group, there are at least 54 Facebook profiles belonging to 39 organizations that the German government and civil society groups have flagged as extremist. to combat extremism. The groups have around 268,000 subscribers and friends on Facebook alone.
CEP also found 39 related Instagram profiles, 16 Twitter profiles and 34 YouTube channels with over 9.5 million views. Nearly 60% of the profiles were clearly aimed at making money by displaying prominent links to online stores or photos promoting products.
Click the big blue “view store” button on the Erik & Sons Facebook page and you can buy a t-shirt that reads “My favorite color is white” for 20 Euros ($23). Deutsches Warenhaus is offering “Refugees not welcome” tags for just 2.50 euros ($3) and skull-faced Aryan Brotherhood tube scarves for 5.88 euros ($7). OPOS Records’ Facebook stream promotes new music and products, including “True Aggression”, “Pride & Dignity” and “One Family” T-Shirts. The brand, which means “One People One Struggle”, also connects to its online store on Twitter and Instagram.
Who are the people and organizations included in the data set of CEP? Germany‘s far-right music and combat sports scenes. “They create the infrastructure where people meet, make money, enjoy music and recruit,” said Alexander Ritzmann, principal investigator of the project. “The ones who will commit violent crimes are probably not the men I highlighted. They’re very clever. They construct narratives and promote the activities of this environment in which violence later emerges.”
CEP said it focuses on groups that want to overthrow liberal democratic institutions and norms such as freedom of the press, protection of minorities and universal human dignity, and believe that the white race is under siege and should be protected with violence if necessary. The CEP said none were banned, but nearly all were described as extremists in German intelligence reports.
Groups on Facebook seem harmless. They avoid blatant violations of platform rules, such as using hate speech or posting swastikas, which are often illegal. Germany.
By carefully keeping up with the fit line, these important architects GermanyThe far-right are using the power of mainstream social media to promote festivals, fashion brands, music companies and mixed martial arts tournaments that can generate millions of sales and connect like-minded thinkers from around the world.
But simply cutting such groups can have unintended, damaging consequences.
“We don’t want to go down a path where we tell sites that they should put people out by what they do on the site, not by who they are,” said David Greene, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. .
Giving platforms ample latitude to sanction undesirable entities can give oppressive governments leverage to curb their criticism. “This could have really serious human rights concerns,” he said. “The history of content moderation has shown us that it almost always goes to the detriment of marginalized and powerless people.”
German authorities banned the Battle of the Nibelungs event in 2019 on the grounds that it was not actually about sports, but instead trained fighters with martial skills for political struggle.
In 2020, as the coronavirus raged, organizers planned to broadcast the event online – using Instagram, among other places, to promote the webcast. But a few weeks before the planned event, over a hundred black-clad police interrupted a meeting at a motorcycle club in Magdeburg, where the fights were filmed for broadcast, and filmed the boxing ring, according to local media. reports.
According to the German government’s intelligence reports, the Battle of the Nibelungs is the “central point of contact” for far-right extremists. The organization was open about its political goals – namely, fighting against the “decaying” liberal democratic order – and attracted adherents from the United States as well as Europe.
Robert Rundo, members and founder of the California white supremacist street fighting club called the Rise Above Movement, participated in the Nibelungs tournament. In 2018, at least four Rise Above members were arrested on riot charges for taking their martial training to the streets at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Graduates of the Battle of the Nibelungs went to jail, including for manslaughter, assault, and attacks on immigrants.
National Socialism Today, which describes itself as “a nationalist magazine for nationalists”, lauded the War of the Nibelungs and other groups for nurturing the will to fight and motivating “activists to improve their war readiness”.
But the group’s social media feeds do not refer to professionalized, anti-government violence. Instead, it is positioning itself as a health-conscious lifestyle brand that sells branded tea cups and shoulder bags.
“Exploring nature. Home pleasure!” A Facebook post gushes above a photo of a muscular man on top of a mountain wearing Resistend branded sportswear, one of the sponsors of the Nibelung tournament. All the men in the photos are pictured white and enjoying healthy activities such as long runs and alpine hikes.
Elsewhere on Facebook, Thorsten Heise, convicted of incitement to hatred by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Germany’s state of Thuringia, and named “one of the most prominent German neo-Nazis”, also has multiple pages.
Frank Kraemer, described by the German government as a “far-right musician”, uses his Facebook page to direct people to his blog and Sonnenkreuz online store, which sells white nationalist and coronavirus conspiracy books, as well as sports nutrition products. “vaccine rebels” t-shirts for girls.
Battle of the Nibelungs declined to comment. Resistend, Heise, and Kraemer did not respond to requests for comment.
Facebook told the AP that it employs 350 people whose primary mission is to combat terrorism and organized hate, and that it is investigating the pages and accounts flagged in this story.
“We ban organizations and individuals who declare a violent mission or engage in violence,” a company spokesperson said, adding that Facebook has banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations, including groups and individuals in the United States. Germany. The spokesperson said the company removed more than 6 million pieces of content linked to organized hate worldwide between April and June and is trying to move even faster.
Google said it was not interested in making hateful content visible on YouTube and was investigating the accounts identified in this report. The company said it worked with dozens of experts to update its policies on supremacist content in 2019, resulting in a five-fold increase in the number of channels and videos removed.
Twitter said it was committed to ensuring that public speaking on its platform was “safe and healthy” and did not tolerate violent extremist groups. “It is against our rules to threaten or encourage violent extremism,” a spokesperson told the AP, but did not comment on the specific accounts flagged in this news.
Robert Claus, who has written a book on the far-right martial arts scene, said that the sports brands in the CEP’s dataset are “all rooted in the militant far-right neo-Nazi scene in the United States.” Germany and Europe.” For example, one of the founders of the War of the Nibelungs is part of the violent Hammerskin network, and another early supporter, Russian neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin, also known as Denis Nikitin, has been banned from entering the European Union for ten years. year, he said.
Banning such groups from Facebook and other major platforms can potentially limit their reach to new audiences, but it can also drive them underground and make their activities more difficult to monitor, he said.
“It’s dangerous because they can recruit people,” he said. “Banning these accounts will cut off their communication with their audience, but key figures and their ideologies won’t be gone.”
Thorsten Hindrichs, an expert GermanyThe far-right music scene, who teaches at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, said his seemingly harmless appearance was a danger. GermanyThe heavyweights of right-wing music they use mostly to promote their brands on Facebook and Twitter can help normalize the image of extremists.
far right concerts Germany He estimated revenue of about 2 million euros ($2.3 million) per year before the coronavirus pandemic, excluding sales of CDs and branded products. He said that removing extremist music groups from Facebook would not affect sales too much, as there are other platforms they can turn to to reach their followers, such as Telegram and Gab. “Extremists are not stupid. They will always find ways to promote their stuff,” he said.
None of these groups’ activities on mainstream platforms are explicitly illegal, but may violate Facebook guidelines that prohibit “dangerous individuals and organizations” that advocate or engage in violence online or offline. Facebook said it did not allow the glorification or support of Nazism, white supremacy, white nationalism or white separatism and bans individuals and groups that adhere to such “ideologies of hate.”
Last week, Facebook removed nearly 150 accounts and pages linked to the German anti-quarantine Querdenken movement, as part of a new “social harm” policy that spreads misinformation or promotes violence but targets groups that don’t fit into the platform’s existing bad categories. actors.
However, how these evolving rules will be implemented remains unclear and controversial.
“If you do something wrong with the platform, it is easier for a platform to justify an account suspension than to kick someone out for their ideology. That would have been more difficult in terms of human rights,” said Daniel Holznagel, a Berlin judge who works for the German federal government on hate speech issues and also contributed to the CEP’s report. “The disapproval of an idea, an ideology, an idea by our legal regimes is a foundation of our Western society and human rights.”
Meanwhile, there is news from the people at the Battle of the Nibelung. “Starting today, you can dress your little ones with us too,” says a post on their Facebook feed in June. The new children’s clothing line includes a shell pink tee for girls priced at €13.90 ($16). A boy wearing the black male version is already wearing boxing gloves.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between the Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE, which examines challenges to the ideas and institutions of traditional US and European democracy.
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