Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young for BuzzFlash: Hate Speech on Telegram, With Germany as an Example
January 30, 2022
By Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young
The messaging service Telegram is a freeware cross-platform and a cloud-based instant messaging service that provides end-to-end encrypted video calls, VoIP, file sharing, and several other features. Telegram is available in 58 languages. In April 2020, Telegram reported 400 million monthly active users worldwide with close to eight million in Germany. Yet, a recent study on Telegram paints a rather grim picture.
Germany’s Telegram is used for daily messages calling for brutality, murder, assassinations, and killings. Recently, Germans have been starting to hear about cases of violent anti-vaxxers using Telegram. These are people using Telegram to exchange calls for killings, shooting, executions, public hangings, and the like.
For Germany’s anti-vaxxers, Telegram is quickly becoming one of the most useful tool when spreading conspiracy theories, to engage with tin-foil hat people, planning so-called hygiene rallies, organizing attacks on virtually everyone supporting Covid-19 mass vaccination, and even more so, to target those supporting mandatory vaccination.
A recent research conducted by one of Germany’s most reputable TV stations – the Tagesschau – found that Telegram users have issued calls to kill people on an almost daily basis. Among the many cases, there is a German army (Bundeswehr) soldier who wants to spread dead bodies over corn fields; there is a right-wing extremist organization in former East-German state of Saxony that plans to assassinate Saxony’s prime minister. There is more.
A fresh evaluation of secret and not-so-secret Telegram chat groups show that many right-wing groups and the exchange of hate speech has, in fact, intensified. Worse, their online and their real-world activities have significantly increased since the middle of November 2021. The study found daily calls about the assassination of politicians, the murder of medical scientists linked to the Coronavirus pandemic, hospital and medical staff, nurse, doctors, etc.
Online attacks are also directed against German government officials, the media, and journalists. In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, German opponents of anti-Covid-19 vaccination and anti-vaxxers have become increasingly radicalized. Many have entered the irrational world of echo-chambers where hate speech is reinforced in Telegram chat rooms.
In one chat room, more than 250 calls for killings can be found. However, this is only the tip of the infamous icebergs. Telegram – unlike Twitter – does not allow the mass scanning of its messages. Telegram simply cannot be searched in one go. As a consequence, only individual channels and chats in which one is a member can be accessed.
Since most right-wing and anti-vaxxer chat groups are secret, they can only be accessed or entered through an invitation linking you to a particular group or chat room. The research spanning many weeks since mid-November 2021 found just three days in early November when no calls for murder or killing were posted.
Instead, the research found that there were talks and pictures of gallows, guillotine, ropes to hang politicians, scientists, doctors, police officers, and journalists in Telegram chat rooms. Inside Telegram chat rooms, there is hardly anyone trying to keep hate speech at bay. Nobody challenges hate speech. Telegram provides an open hunting season for haters, right-wingers, Germany’s ever present Neo-Nazi, Reichbürger, anti-vaxxers, etc.
Inside the assumed security of a closed chat room, anti-vaxxers and right-wing extremists even operate under their supposedly real names when spreading hate speech. The study found that even in very large chats rooms with well over 50,000 members, hate speech was almost never questioned or rejected. Instead, in such very large chat rooms, one finds calls for people to be killed, gallows, anti-vaxxers with sniper rifles, etc.
Political scientist like Josef Holnburger at the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, considers such calls for killing and murder extremely dangerous. In an interview with the public TV broadcaster tagesschau.de, Holnburger noted,
“people with a conspiracy-ideological worldview are much more likely to use violence. We know that from the previous research. Indeed, we have known this for some time … for many years”.
Rebuffs of hate speech are rarely found – everyone agrees. This helps to maintain the illusion that Germany’s anti-vaxxers are a unified movement. Yet, anti-vaxxers in south-west Germany, for example, tend to be more motivated by esoteric beliefs, New Ageism, German romanticism, and back-to-nature hallucinations. By contrast, anti-vaxxers in former East-Germany (e.g. Saxony) are more likely to be right-wing extremists and Neo-Nazis.
One Telegram chat member posted on Saxony’s state premier Michael Kretschmer (31st December 2021), “Kretschmer and his mercenaries [meaning: police officers] need to be executed for high treason against the people!” In another chat entry, a user asked (21st December 2021), “whether Germany’s minister of justice Marco Buschmann can be shot”.
Yet, not only Kretschmer is a victim of such uninhibited Telegram calls for violence. The targets of Telegram hate speech also includes Bavaria’s state premier Markus Söder (conservative), Merkel’s successor and freshly-elected CDU-boss Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz (social-democratic party), Germany’s former minister of health Jens Spahn (Merkel’s CDU), as well as Germany’s current minister for health, medical doctor, and professor of medicine Karl Lauterbach (social-democratic SPD). Sometimes, these officials are mentioned several times.
Since German chancellor Olaf Scholz and his health minister called for mandatory vaccination, many more hate messages about assassinations, murders, and killings have been documented. An analysis of these comments shows that – since about mid-November 2021 – posts on killing and murder have greatly increased so much so that after the 16th of November, there simply was not a single day without the occurrence of online killing fantasies.
Since the start of the debate on compulsory vaccination, Google noted an increase in searches for the term. Yet, when it came to hate messages, more than a third of all hate messages about mandatory vaccination came from just two Telegram chat rooms. These are rooms in which the followers of QAnon and believers in conspiracy fantasies exchange messages. In both, the mood is particularly aggressive as conspiracy theory believers seem to exchange hate messages uninhibitedly.
On average, people post calls to kill more than a hundred times in these two groups. In one Telegram chat room in which many soldiers and reservists exchange messages, even more frequent calls for killing and murder have been made. It emerged that at the end of December 2021, Andreas O. (a German Gebirgsjäger highly-trained for close combat in alpine warfare) had issued twenty calls to kill people. This is not an isolated case.
A German soldier from the Bavarian town of Bad Reichenhall posted a video with the threatening message, “your dead bodies will be found in potato fields”. Worse, in a “soldiers & reservists” Telegram chat group, a note was found (15th November 2021) about the then minister of defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer that said, “the old bitch needs to be shot”. And, these are not idle threats. Instead, German society is increasingly brutalised as far-right crimes hit record levels. This is also directed against the media.
Hatred of the media is not just directed against politicians who are threatened. Last year, there was a message about one of Germany’s most excellent science journalist. She had been awarded Germany’s Order of Merit. The Telegram message read, one day, we hang you. In an attached post to the hate message, journalists and TV moderators who had called for mandatory vaccination were also threatened.
On one Monday evening in early 2022, a right-wing mob gathered in Berlin. Enticed by Telegram messages, hundreds of people gathered in front of Germany’s national TV broadcaster the ZDF shouting, ”lying press”. A newspaper journalist for the Berlin local daily, the Tagesspiegel reported that a chain of police officers had to protect the office of the public broadcaster. This is Germany in 2021 – not 1921!
Before the rally, messages like “the traitors of the people will be hanged at the gallows” were found on Telegram. This is how one Telegram user saw it on the 5th November 2021, “maybe we should really go to ARD and ZDF [Germany’s two prime public TV stations] to burn down their propaganda machine”.
Long before the Nazis burned books in 1933, one of Germany’s greatest poets – Heinrich Heine – said, “where books are burned, in the end people will be burned”. In her masterpiece Fascism – A Warning, the former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright reminds us, “it is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than to kill the ideas that gave them birth”.
Another Telegram user asks on 11th December 2021, “why aren’t the media already burning ... I mean the buildings ... where that filth is being broadcast from?” An article by one of Germany’s foremost liberal daily, the Süddeutsche received this comment by a right-wing Telegram user, “level that propaganda machine to the ground … traitors of the people on the gallows”.
Conspiracy believers see the media as part of a small elite conspiring to achieve their evil goals. It is not surprising that in front of the public media, right-wing rallies take place to threaten them. Yet, since the Coronavirus pandemic, medical doctors have been moving into the focus of such attacks. The media took a backseat when it came to the most recent attacks. “I hope they all hang them", writes Telegram user called Gisela about a local medical office that vaccinates people. Another Telegram user writes about another medical doctor, “we should put a bullet in his head”.
The aforementioned research examined 230 Telegram channels and chats which were published on Telegram from far-right extremists and anti-vaxxers. Search terms were: gallows, shoot, hang, lantern, lamppost, guillotine, shoot down, execution, torching, burning, kill, assassination, court, executed, tribunal, bullet, rope, etc.
Online threats were also posted against the state premier of the former East-Germany state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania Manuela Schwesig (SPD). The state police of Mecklenburg-Pomerania has been investigating a hate speech letter filled with death threats against the state premier. The letter was distributed via Telegram.
Turbo-charged by the Coronavirus pandemic, German right-wing extremists have increasingly taken to the messenger service Telegram to distribute not only messages filled with hate speech – but, Telegram is also a most valued tool for anti-government rallies and so-called hygiene rallies. At these rallies, a dangerous mix of German romantics, New Age people, right-wing extremists, and outright Neo-Nazis come together.
It appears that Telegram’s ability to offer extremists to run closed chat rooms and its anonymity has aided German right-wing extremists and adjacent Neo-Nazis in their goal to destroy democracy.
Thomas Klikauer teaches at the Sydney Graduate School of Management at Western Sydney University, Australia. He has over 600 publications including a book on the AfD.
Meg Young is a Sydney Financial Accountant and HR Manager who enjoys the outdoors, good literature, foreign music and in her spare time - works on her MBA at WSU, Australia.
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