BRUSSELS: It’s the premier martial arts group in Europe for right-wing extremists. German authorities have twice banned their signature tournament. But Kampf der Nibelungen, or Battle of the Nibelungs, still thrives on Facebook, where organizers maintain multiple pages, as well as on Instagram and YouTube, which they use to spread their ideology, draw in recruits 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 leverage mainstream social media for profit, despite Facebook’s and other platforms’ repeated pledges to purge themselves of extremism.
All told, there are at least 54 Facebook profiles belonging to 39 entities that the German government and civil society groups have flagged as extremist, according to research shared with The Associated Press by the Counter Extremism Project, a non-profit policy and advocacy group formed to combat extremism. The groups have nearly 268,000 subscribers and friends on Facebook alone.
CEP also found 39 related Instagram profiles, 16 Twitter profiles and 34 YouTube channels, which have gotten over 9.5 million views. Nearly 60 percent of the profiles were explicitly aimed at making money, displaying prominent links to online shops or photos promoting merchandise.
Click on the big blue “view shop” button on the Erik & Sons Facebook page and you can buy a T-shirt that says, “My favorite color is white,” for 20 euros ($23). Deutsches Warenhaus offers “Refugees not welcome” stickers for just 2.50 euros ($3) and Aryan Brotherhood tube scarves with skull faces for 5.88 euros ($7). The Facebook feed of OPOS Records promotes new music and merchandise, including “True Aggression,” “Pride & Dignity,” and “One Family” T-shirts. The brand, which stands for “One People One Struggle,” also links to its online shop from Twitter and Instagram.
The people and organizations in CEP’s dataset are a who’s who of Germany’s far-right music and combat sports scenes. “They are the ones who build the infrastructure where people meet, make money, enjoy music and recruit,” said Alexander Ritzmann, the lead researcher on the project. “It’s most likely not the guys I’ve highlighted who will commit violent crimes. They’re too smart. They build the narratives and foster the activities of this milieu where violence then appears.”
CEP said it focused 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 needs to be preserved, with violence if necessary. None has been banned, but almost all have been described in German intelligence reports as extremist, CEP said.
On Facebook the groups seem harmless. They avoid blatant violations of platform rules, such as using hate speech or posting swastikas, which is generally illegal in Germany.
By carefully toeing the line of propriety, these key architects of Germany’s far-right use the power of mainstream social media to promote festivals, fashion brands, music labels and mixed martial arts tournaments that can generate millions in sales and connect like-minded thinkers from around the world.
But simply cutting off such groups could have unintended, damaging consequences.
“We don’t want to head down a path where we are telling sites they should remove people based on who they are but not what they do on the site,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
Giving platforms wide latitude to sanction organizations deemed undesirable could give repressive governments leverage to eliminate their critics. “That can have really serious human rights concerns,” he said. “The history of content moderation has shown us that it’s almost always to the disadvantage 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 was grooming fighters with combat skills for political struggle.
In 2020, as the coronavirus raged, organizers planned to stream the event online — using Instagram, among other places, to promote the webcast. A few weeks before the planned event, however, over a hundred black-clad police in balaclavas broke up a gathering at a motorcycle club in Magdeburg, where fights were being filmed for the broadcast, and hauled off the boxing ring, according to local media reports.
The Battle of the Nibelungs is a “central point of contact” for right-wing extremists, according to German government intelligence reports. The organization has been explicit about its political goals — namely to fight against the “rotting” liberal democratic order — and has drawn adherents from across Europe as well as the United States.
Members of a California white supremacist street fighting club called the Rise Above Movement, and its founder, Robert Rundo, have attended the Nibelungs tournament. In 2018 at least four Rise Above members were arrested on rioting charges for taking their combat training to the streets at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A number of Battle of Nibelungs alums have landed in prison, including for manslaughter, assault and attacks on migrants.
National Socialism Today, which describes itself as a “magazine by nationalists for nationalists” has praised Battle of the Nibelungs and other groups for fostering a will to fight and motivating “activists to improve their readiness for combat.”
But there are no references to professionalized, anti-government violence on the group’s social media feeds. Instead, it’s positioned as a health-conscious lifestyle brand, which sells branded tea mugs and shoulder bags.
“Exploring nature. Enjoying home!” gushes one Facebook post above a photo of a musclebound guy on a mountaintop wearing Resistend-branded sportswear, one of the Nibelung tournament’s sponsors. All the men in the photos are pumped and white, and they are portrayed enjoying wholesome activities such as long runs and alpine treks.
Elsewhere on Facebook, Thorsten Heise – who has been convicted of incitement to hatred and called “one of the most prominent German neo-Nazis” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the German state of Thuringia — also maintains multiple pages.
Frank Kraemer, who the German government has described as a “right-wing extremist musician,” uses his Facebook page to direct people to his blog and his Sonnenkreuz online store, which sells white nationalist and coronavirus conspiracy books as well as sports nutrition products and “vaccine rebel” T-shirts for girls.
Battle of the Nibelungs declined to comment. Resistend, Heise and Kraemer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Facebook told AP it employs 350 people whose primary job is to counter terrorism and organized hate, and that it is investigating the pages and accounts flagged in this reporting.
“We ban organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission, or are engaged in violence,” said a company spokesperson, who added that Facebook had banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations, including groups and individuals in Germany. The spokesperson said the company had removed over 6 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally between April and June and is working to move even faster.
Google said it has no interest in giving visibility to hateful content on YouTube and was looking into the accounts identified in this reporting. The company said it worked with dozens of experts to update its policies on supremacist content in 2019, resulting in a five-fold spike in the number of channels and videos removed.
Twitter says it’s committed to ensuring that public conversation is “safe and healthy” on its platform and that it doesn’t tolerate violent extremist groups. “Threatening or promoting violent extremism is against our rules,” a spokesperson told AP, but did not comment on the specific accounts flagged in this reporting.
Robert Claus, who wrote a book on the extreme right martial arts scene, said that the sports brands in CEP’s data set are “all rooted in the militant far-right neo-Nazi scene in Germany and Europe.” One of the founders of the Battle of the Nibelungs, for example, is part of the violent Hammerskin network and another early supporter, the Russian neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin, also known as Denis Nikitin, has been barred from entering the European Union for ten years, he said.
Banning such groups from Facebook and other major platforms would potentially limit their access to new audiences, but it could also drive them deeper underground, making it more difficult to monitor their activities, he said.
“It’s dangerous because they can recruit people,” he said. “Prohibiting those accounts would interrupt their contact with their audience, but the key figures and their ideology won’t be gone.”
Thorsten Hindrichs, an expert in Germany’s far-right music scene who teaches at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, said there’s a danger that the apparently harmless appearance of Germany’s right-wing music heavyweights on Facebook and Twitter, which they mostly use to promote their brands, could help normalize the image of extremists.
Extreme right concerts in Germany were drawing around 2 million euros ($2.3 million) a year in revenue before the coronavirus pandemic, he estimated, not counting sales of CDs and branded merchandise. He said kicking extremist music groups off Facebook is unlikely to hit sales too hard, as there are other platforms they can turn to, like Telegram and Gab, to reach their followers. “Right-wing extremists aren’t stupid. They will always find ways to promote their stuff,” he said.
None of these groups’ activity on mainstream platforms is obviously illegal, though it may violate Facebook guidelines that bar “dangerous individuals and organizations” that advocate or engage in violence online or offline. Facebook says it doesn’t allow praise or support of Nazism, white supremacy, white nationalism or white separatism and bars people and groups that adhere to such “hate ideologies.”
Last week, Facebook removed almost 150 accounts and pages linked to the German anti-lockdown Querdenken movement, under a new “social harm” policy, which targets groups that spread misinformation or incite violence but didn’t fit into the platform’s existing categories of bad actors.
But how these evolving rules will be applied remains murky and contested.
“If you do something wrong on the platform, it’s easier for a platform to justify an account suspension than to just throw someone out because of their ideology. That would be more difficult with respect to human rights,” said Daniel Holznagel, a Berlin judge who used to work for the German federal government on hate speech issues and also contributed to CEP’s report. “It’s a foundation of our Western society and human rights that our legal regimes do not sanction an idea, an ideology, a thought.”
In the meantime, there’s news from the folks at the Battle of the Nibelungs. “Starting today you can also dress your smallest ones with us,” reads a June post on their Facebook feed. The new line of kids wear includes a shell-pink T-shirt for girls, priced at 13.90 euros ($16). A child pictured wearing the boy version, in black, already has boxing gloves on.
Neo-Nazis are still on Facebook. And they’re making money
https://arab.news/yagnq
Neo-Nazis are still on Facebook. And they’re making money
- By carefully toeing the line of propriety, these key architects of Germany’s far-right use the power of mainstream social media to promote festivals, fashion brands, music labels and mixed martial arts tournaments that can generate millions in sales
- Dozens of far-right groups that continue to leverage mainstream social media for profit, despite Facebook’s and other platforms’ repeated pledges to purge themselves of extremism
Facebook restricts war-related content in Palestinian territories, BBC investigation claims
- Local news outlets report 77% drop in audience engagement
- ‘Any implication that we deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false,’ Meta says
LONDON: A BBC investigation has claimed that Facebook significantly restricted access to news in Palestinian territories, limiting local news outlets’ ability to reach audiences during the ongoing Israel-Gaza war.
Research conducted by the BBC Arabic team found that 20 newsrooms in Gaza and the West Bank reported a 77 percent decline in audience engagement — a measure of the visibility and impact of social media content — following the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.
In contrast, Facebook pages belonging to 20 Israeli news outlets, including Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom and Channel 13, saw a 37 percent increase in engagement for similar war-related content during the same period.
“Interaction was completely restricted and our posts stopped reaching people,” said Tariq Ziad, a journalist at Palestine TV, which experienced a 60 percent drop in engagement despite having 5.8 million Facebook followers.
With international journalists restricted from accessing Gaza due to Israeli-imposed limitations, local media and social platforms have become critical sources of information around the world. But the disparity in engagement has underscored concerns about a growing “war of narratives” on social media.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has previously faced allegations of “shadow banning” Palestinian content. Critics, including human rights groups, claim the platform fails to moderate online activity fairly.
According to an independent report commissioned by Meta in 2021, the company said the loss of engagement was never deliberate, attributing it to a “lack of Arabic-speaking expertise among moderators,” which led to some Arabic phrases being inadvertently flagged as harmful or sensitive.
To test these claims, the BBC analyzed 30 prominent Facebook pages from Arabic news outlets and found an almost 100 percent increase in engagement.
Meta admitted to increasing moderation of Palestinian user comments in response to a “spike in hateful content” but rejected allegations of bias.
A spokesperson told the BBC: “Any implication that we deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false.”
However, internal communications reviewed by the BBC showed that Meta-owned Instagram’s algorithm had been adjusted shortly after the conflict began, with at least one engineer raising concerns about potential new bias against Palestinian users.
“Within a week of the Hamas attack, the code was changed essentially making it more aggressive toward Palestinian people,” the engineer told the BBC.
Although Meta said these policy changes were reversed, it did not specify when.
A similar investigation by Arab News revealed widespread reports of pro-Palestinian posts and accounts being suspended or banned during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 144 media workers have been killed since the start of the conflict, 133 of whom were Palestinians, making it the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history.
Two men arrested in London over attack on British-Iranian journalist
- Iran International journalist Pouria Zeraati was stabbed outside his home in March in what investigators have identified as a Tehran-orchestrated plot
LONDON: British police said on Tuesday they arrested two Romanian men over the stabbing of a journalist working for a Persian language media organisation in London in March.
Pouria Zeraati, a British-Iranian journalist who works for Iran International, sustained leg injuries in the attack near his home in Wimbledon, southwest London.
Counter-terrorism police led the investigation over concerns he had been targeted because of his work at the television news network, which is critical of Iran’s government.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said earlier this month that Nandito Badea, 19, and George Stana, 23, had been charged with wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and wounding.
London’s Metropolitan (Met) Police said the two men were taken into custody at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday after they arrived on a flight from Romania. They are due to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court on Dec. 18, the police said.
They had previously been detained by Romanian authorities on Dec. 4 and were returned to the UK by a national extradition unit.
British police, security officials and politicians have issued warnings about what they say is Iran’s growing use of criminal proxies to carry out attacks abroad. Iran rejects those accusations.
“This has been a long-running investigation and I am pleased we have reached a point where two men have now been charged and will face prosecution here in the UK,” said Helen Flanagan from the Met's counter-terrorism command.
Flanagan added: “Now that criminal proceedings are fully active here in the UK, I continue to ask people not speculate about the case or motivation so that the criminal justice process can run its course.”
Mother of missing US journalist urges Netanyahu to pause strikes on Syria to aid search for her son
- Austin Tice, a former Marine, was abducted in Syria in August 2012 while reporting on the country’s descent into civil war
- His mother says ‘credible information’ suggests her son is in a prison close to areas pounded by Israeli strikes
LONDON: The mother of missing American journalist Austin Tice, who was abducted in Syria 12 years ago, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pause airstrikes on Syria so that rescuers can search safely for her son.
In a letter addressed to Netanyahu, Debra Tice said her family has “credible information” that her son might be in a prison close to the Syrian capital, Damascus, and appealed for a halt to nearby Israeli military operations.
“We are aware that your military has an active campaign in the area, preventing rescuers from approaching and accessing the prison facility,” she wrote.
“We have no way of knowing if the prisoners there have food and water. We urgently request you pause strikes on this area and deploy Israeli assets to search for Austin Tice and other prisoners. Time is of the essence.”
The prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment, The New York Times reported.
The Israeli military has been bombing weapons depots and air defenses in Syria in what it described as an attempt to prevent military equipment falling into the hands of extremists.
Austin Tice, who before becoming a journalist served as an officer in the US Marine Corps, was kidnapped on Aug. 13, 2012, while reporting from Syria as the country descended into civil war. He was 31 years old at the time. The only evidence of his capture and captivity remains a 47-second video released in September 2012 that showed him bound and blindfolded.
In the 12 years since then, the US government has maintained its belief that he was alive and in the custody of the Syrian government. No group or organization has publicly claimed responsibility for his detention.
The fall of the Assad regime this month to rebel forces led by militant group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham sparked renewed efforts to locate Tice. It comes as thousands of prisoners, including the regime’s political opponents, civilians and foreigners, have been freed from detention centers in Damascus.
Debra Tice believes her son is held in a prison located beneath a Syrian military museum in the Mount Qasioun area near Damascus. She described a system of tunnels thought to connect the facility to a government palace and nearby neighborhoods.
Citing anonymous sources, Reuters reported on Monday that Tice managed to escape from his captors after just five months of captivity but was recaptured by forces loyal to Assad. Credible information about his whereabouts grew increasingly scarce over the years, though US officials remain cautiously optimistic that he is alive.
The recent escalation of Israeli attacks on targets in Syria raised concerns that Tice might have been killed in the airstrikes or trapped underground. US officials also fear that power cuts in Damascus prisons, orchestrated by Assad’s forces before he was toppled, could have deprived underground cells of breathable air.
Hopes were briefly raised this week amid reports that an American man had been spotted in Damascus. However, he turned out to be Travis Timmerman from Missouri, who had been freed by rebel forces. He was arrested this year for entering the country illegally after traveling to Syria on a “spiritual mission.”
The State Department said on Monday no US government officials are in Syria to assist in the search for Tice but finding him remains a “top priority.”
Concerns continue to grow over the fate of remaining detainees in the country, particularly in areas still affected by military strikes and instability.
Media watchdog condemns Israel over killing of 4 Gaza journalists, demands accountability
- Iman Al-Shanti, Mohammed Al-Qrinawi, Mohammed Balousha, and Ahmed Al-Louh were killed between Dec. 11 and 15
- At least in two cases, the attacks were described as ‘deliberate,’ Committee to Protect Journalists reported
LONDON: The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned Israel’s recent attacks in Gaza, which have killed four journalists in the past week alone, and renewed calls for the international community to hold Tel Aviv accountable for its actions against media workers.
“At least 95 journalists and media workers have been killed worldwide in 2024,” CPJ’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg said in New York. “Israel is responsible for two-thirds of those deaths and yet continues to act with total impunity when it comes to the killing of journalists and its attacks on the media.”
Between Dec. 11 and 15, Israeli forces carried out multiple deadly strikes targeting media workers in Gaza, killing Iman Al-Shanti, Mohammed Al-Qrinawi, Mohammed Balousha, and Ahmed Al-Louh. Sources claim that at least two of the journalists were clearly identifiable by their press vests and accused the Israeli army of deliberately targeting civilians in the area.
On Wednesday, Al-Shanti, a 36-year-old journalist who worked for Al Aqsa Radio and contributed to Al Jazeera’s AJ+ platform, was killed alongside her family in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood.
On Friday, Al-Qrinawi, editor at the local Snd news agency, was killed with his wife and three children in an Israeli strike on Al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
That same day, Balousha, a 38-year-old journalist reporting for Dubai-based Al Mashhad Media, died in a direct Israeli drone strike while returning from a medical checkup in northern Gaza City. Al Mashhad described the attack as deliberate.
On Saturday, Al-Louh, a 39-year-old freelance journalist who contributed to multiple outlets, including Al Jazeera, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Nuseirat camp in Gaza City. He became the seventh journalist from Al Jazeera to be killed during the war.
Following Al-Louh’s death, Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson for Arabic media Avichay Adraee accused him of being a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. However, as in similar past claims, Adraee failed to provide evidence to support the allegation. Al Jazeera condemned the killing as a “war crime” and part of a “systematic targeting of journalists in Gaza aimed at intimidating and deterring them.”
According to CPJ, at least 133 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the conflict 15 months ago, making it the deadliest conflict for journalists since record-keeping began. The real toll is believed to be significantly higher.
Media watchdogs and international organizations have repeatedly called for Israel and its leaders to be held accountable for what some human rights groups describe as ethnic cleansing. However, these demands have so far failed to produce tangible results.
The CPJ reached out to the Israeli military’s North America Media Desk, asking whether the IDF was aware of civilian presence in the areas it bombed and if journalists had been targeted for their work. The IDF replied that it required more time to investigate but did not specify a timeline for its response.
TikTok turns to US Supreme Court in last-ditch bid to avert ban
- Justice Department calls TikTok threat to US security
- Trump says he has a “warm spot in my heart” for TikTok
WASHINGTON: TikTok made a last-ditch effort on Monday to continue operating in the United States, asking the Supreme Court to temporarily block a law intended to force ByteDance, its China-based parent company, to divest the short-video app by Jan. 19 or face a ban.
TikTok and ByteDance filed an emergency request to the justices for an injunction to halt the looming ban on the social media app used by about 170 million Americans while they appeal a lower court’s ruling that upheld the law. A group of US users of the app filed a similar request on Monday as well.
Congress passed the law in April. The Justice Department has said that as a Chinese company, TikTok poses “a national-security threat of immense depth and scale” because of its access to vast amounts of data on American users, from locations to private messages, and its ability to secretly manipulate content that Americans view on the app.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington on Dec. 6 rejected TikTok’s arguments that the law violates free speech protections under the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
In their filing to the Supreme Court, TikTok and ByteDance said that “if Americans, duly informed of the alleged risks of ‘covert’ content manipulation, choose to continue viewing content on TikTok with their eyes wide open, the First Amendment entrusts them with making that choice, free from the government’s censorship.”
“And if the D.C. Circuit’s contrary holding stands, then Congress will have free rein to ban any American from speaking simply by identifying some risk that the speech is influenced by a foreign entity,” they added.
The companies said that being shuttered for even one month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its US users and undermine its ability to attract advertisers and recruit content creators and employee talent.
Calling itself one of the “most important speech platforms” used in the United States, TikTok has said that there is no imminent threat to US national security and that delaying enforcement of the law would allow the Supreme Court to consider the legality of the ban, and the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump to evaluate the law as well.
Trump, who unsuccessfully tried to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, has reversed his stance and promised during the presidential race this year that he would try to save TikTok. Trump takes office on Jan. 20, the day after the TikTok deadline under the law.
The law would “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration,” the companies said in their filing. “A federal law singling out and banning a speech platform used by half of Americans is extraordinary.”
Asked on Monday at a press conference what he would do to stop a ban on TikTok, Trump said that he has “a warm spot in my heart for TikTok” and that he would “take a look” at the matter.
The companies asked the Supreme Court to issue a decision on its request by Jan. 6 to allow, in the event it is rejected, for the “complex task of shutting down TikTok” in the United States and to coordinate with service providers by the deadline set under the law.
The dispute comes amid growing trade tensions between China and the United States, the world’s two biggest economies.
‘RIGOROUS SCRUTINY’
TikTok has denied that it has or ever would share US user data, accusing US lawmakers of advancing speculative concerns.
TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said after the filing that “we are asking the court to do what it has traditionally done in free speech cases: apply the most rigorous scrutiny to speech bans and conclude that it violates the First Amendment.”
In its ruling, the D.C. Circuit wrote, “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
Without an injunction, the ban on TikTok would make the company far less valuable to ByteDance and its investors, and hurt businesses that depend on TikTok to drive their sales.
The law would bar providing certain services to TikTok and other foreign adversary-controlled apps including offering it through app stores such as Apple and Alphabet’s Google, effectively preventing its continued US use unless ByteDance divests TikTok by the deadline.
A ban could open the door to a future US crackdown on other foreign-owned apps. In 2020, Trump tried to ban WeChat, owned by Chinese company Tencent, but was blocked by the courts.