Berlin - Twitter
user Eylin Tabbert regularly lashed out against Hillary Clinton during the US
presidential campaign. Within hours of a truck ploughing into a crowd at a
Christmas market in Berlin, she turned her focus on a new target: Angela
Merkel.
“Blood on her
hands: Merkel’s open borders blamed for refugee truck terrorist deaths,”
Tabbert posted on Twitter, above a manipulated picture showing the chancellor
spattered in blood beside an image of the truck used in the attack.
Eylin
Tabbert, who has about 4 000 followers and tweets dozens of times a day
under the handle “EylinHurt,” is just one of multiple users now posting angry
or abusive messages about Merkel.
Since Monday
night’s attack, the chancellor’s Facebook page has been flooded with hundreds
of negative comments, many written by accounts with just a handful or no
visible Facebook friends. On Twitter, dozens of users who backed Donald Trump
are now posting identical text and images targeting Merkel, suggesting they are
robotic accounts -- so-called bots -- waging a larger attack.
“There’s a lot
of evidence that there are now targeted attempts to massively attack Merkel,
including with bots,” said Simon Hegelich, a political scientist at Munich’s
Technical University who has studied the manipulation of social networks. “A
lot of accounts that pretty obviously are pro-Trump bots are now joining the
anti-Merkel debate.”
Isn't it repulsive to hear the #fakenewsmedia seek to demonise patriotic Germans as "far right" even as #Merkel destroys Germany?
— David Vance (@DVATW) December 21, 2016
The truck
rampage that claimed 12 lives and left about 50 injured has given fresh
ammunition to opponents of Merkel and her migration policy. Her decision to
sanction an influx of more than a million refugees since the beginning of 2015
has already polarized German society, and further questions over security could
threaten her chances of winning a fourth term in federal elections next fall.
Hate posts
With Merkel
warning of the most contentious German election in years, social media provides
her critics with the chance to employ the same tactics that Trump’s opponents
credit with helping him win the White House. Hegelich said the online attacks
on Merkel show patterns similar to psychological operations, or psyops,
deployed by governments to influence opinion in their favour.
When Bloomberg
tweeted a news story about Merkel’s response to the attack, it generated dozens
of comments, almost uniformly deriding Merkel and her refugee policy, many of
them couched in offensive language.
“Hate posts and
fake news affect the campaign,” Michael Fuchs, deputy parliamentary leader of
Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, said in an e-mail. “We saw that in
the US and we have to do something about it.”
The CDU is
bracing for more online attacks and plans to boost the number of staff who
monitor and respond to hateful posts targeting Merkel, a party official who
asked not to be named discussing campaign strategy said last month.
The German
government has vowed to regulate hate speech and fake news on social media.
Twitter Inc. had no immediate comment when asked about the phenomenon, however,
the company has reacted to complaints it’s not doing enough to curb hate speech.
Last month, the network introduced tools that allows users to report hateful
conduct and block individual words, phrases and emojis.
Fake accounts
While it’s
unclear who’s behind these attacks, unleashing fake social-media accounts isn’t
expensive or difficult, according to Hegelich. Anti-Merkel activists can
buy 10 000 fake Facebook accounts for about $750. The same number of
Twitter accounts can be had for about $500, he said.
Aside from bots
and trolls - humans that spend hours online spreading hate - Europe’s populist
politicians were quick to offer their opinions on the Berlin tragedy.
Nigel Farage, the Brexit cheerleader whom Trump suggested should be
Britain’s ambassador to the US said on Twitter that “events like these will be
the Merkel legacy,” while Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch anti-Muslim Freedom
Party, posted the image of Merkel with her face and hands covered in blood.
‘Merkel’s dead’
Looming on
Merkel’s right in Germany’s political spectrum is the Alternative for Germany
party, which at its inception in 2013 campaigned against euro-area bailouts but
which took off last year after it switched its focus to immigration. The AfD’s
rise has been accompanied by street rallies featuring anti-Merkel posters and
slogans, and the party has been feeding anti-Merkel messages to its Facebook
following of more than 300 000. Marcus Pretzell, a regional AfD chairman,
posted on Twitter that the Berlin victims were “Merkel’s dead.”
“I won’t comment
on every individual thing floating around the Twitter world,” Steffen Seibert,
Merkel’s chief spokesman, told reporters Wednesday when asked about some of the
more aggressive posts. “Let me just say that I read many tweets every day that
are self-discrediting.”
Merkel is facing
an election campaign in which the Internet is set to play a bigger role, with
an increasing number of Germans turning to social media to get their
news. By next year, Germans will spend more time online than watching TV,
according to researcher eMarketer.
Streaming live
German news
channel N24 streamed its Berlin attack coverage live on Facebook and got a
record 14.7 million views, more than triple the amount of the most-watched
video in Germany last year, according to marketing news site
Absatzwirtschaft.de. Breitbart News, the conservative website whose former head
Stephen Bannon is Trump’s chief strategist, is planning to expand into Germany
to capitalize on the trend.
Yet there’s
evidence to suggest that moderate voices won’t be easily drowned out as the
election approaches. Many people defended Merkel on social media, backing her
stance on refugees and saying the Berlin attacks had nothing to do with
migration. Pretzell’s Twitter post was met by swift and plentiful criticism
from other users. N24’s most popular Facebook comment during the attacks, liked
about 7,000 times, supported Merkel, saying she was not to blame and urging
people to stand together instead of spreading fear and mistrust.
The fallout from
the Christmas-time attack in the capital may result in a temporary boost for
the AfD, according to Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg
Bank. But it’s unlikely to help the left-of-center forces that polls suggest
are the only viable alternative to Merkel, given Germany’s proportional system
of voting and in-built bias toward coalition governments.
“If there’s any
impact of this terror attack, it might be short-term, possibly a little shift
towards the ultra-right, the anti-immigrant right, but that would not
strengthen the left-wing forces in any way,” Schmieding said on Bloomberg
Television. “So the political outlook for Chancellor Merkel is a little bit
more cloudy, but she still looks likely to win the next election.”
Bloomberg News
reached out to Eylin Tabbert on Twitter for comment on her posts. There was no
immediate response.
-With assistance from Birgit Jennen and
Nicholas Brautlecht.