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February 25, 2019 05:15 am PST

German neofascists used Qanon to expand their reach

Germany's Alternative For Germany (AfD) party (previously) are an insurgent neofascist movement with ties to senior mainstream politicians and the country's super-wealthy would-be oligarchs; the party put on a hard push in the the 2018 Bavarian elections and their meme warfare was full of familiar voter-suppression tactics, from garden-variety disinformation to exhortations to stay home on election day.

Also prominent in the group's messaging: hashtags and tropes from the US far-right conspiracy theory Qanon (previously), an incoherent toxic stew of antisemitism, murder accusations, numerology, Islamophobia, and other pathologies of the moment.

The connection between Qanon and AfD comes from an unreleased report from the London School of Economics-affiliated Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which bills itself as an "anti-extremist think tank"; some details of the study have been reported in the German and US press.

The researchers traced the inclusion of Qanon-affiliated hashtags in AfD social media, including German translations and adaptations of popular Qanon tags (e.g. #linksliegenlassen, #MerkelMussWeg); as with the US-based Qanon activists, the German Qanon phenomenon was driven by small numbers of incredibly prolific social media users -- not bots (Erin Gallagher's research found that Qanon tweeters posting 500+ messages/day were often "older retired people with a lot of free time").

There's evidence that US-based Qanon activists forged alliances with German neofascists; some popular fascist hashtags ("#ChemnitzIstDerAnfang") originated with US Qanon accounts.

Qanon is becoming a kind of ideological signifier among far-right groups: members of the far-right who have adopted the yellow vest for street demonstrations in Canada and the UK have been spotted decorating the vests with Qanon memes and carrying Qanon-boosting signs. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Fx0wclmjjUI/afd-and-qanon.html

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