Reconquista Internet
Reconquista Internet (RI) was founded in late April 2018 after comedian Jan Böhmermann, a German TV personality, announced the effort during the popular German satirical news show Neo Magazin Royal. Böhmermann posted a link to a private discord group on his Twitter account, and over 8,700 people joined in the first three hours.
RI is unusual in that it was created to respond to content from one specific source. The group was started to counter hateful speech being spread by Reconquista Germanica, (RG) “a highly-organized hate group which aimed to disrupt political discussions and promote the right-wing populist, nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)” (Garland et al, 2020,103).
RI’s motto is “Wir sind nicht GEGEN etwas. Wir sind FÜR Liebe und Vernunft und ein friedliches Miteinander” ("We are not AGAINST anything. We are FOR love and reason and peaceful coexistence.") Some members nonetheless stick to the initial call to action, which included a rather different motto: “We are the jerks who spoil the fun of the internet for the jerks who spoil the fun of the internet for us,” (“Wir sind die Wichser, die den Wichsern, die uns den Spaß am Internet verderben, den Spaß am Internet verderben.”) For them, “spoiling the fun” for the members of RG included a variety of responses, including infiltrating RG’s Discord channels and flooding them with German idioms translated into English just “because it made us laugh,” said one member. But many RI members did follow the suggestion to “troll with love”, avoiding vitriol and hate in their responses.
RI is also one of the few counterspeech efforts that have been studied by scholars to discover whether they are effective, in this case at diminishing hateful content online. The findings are encouraging. Joshua Garland, a computer scientist at Arizona State University, and his colleagues studied the impact of RI on online discourse in Germany. They collected over 9 million tweets originating from RG and RI. The authors created a classifier to identify and code speech as hate speech, counterspeech, or neither.
From 135,500 “fully-resolved Twitter conversations” that took place between 2013 and 2018, the authors found that after RI formed, the intensity and proportion of hateful speech apparently decreased. The authors note that “this result suggests that organized counter speech might have helped in balancing polarized and hateful discourse, although causality is difficult to establish given the complex web of online and offline events and process in the broader society throughout that time” (109).
Featured Resources
Countering hate on social media: Large scale classification of hate and counter speech;
Impact and dynamics of hate and counter speech online
RI’s motto is “Wir sind nicht GEGEN etwas. Wir sind FÜR Liebe und Vernunft und ein friedliches Miteinander” ("We are not AGAINST anything. We are FOR love and reason and peaceful coexistence.") Some members nonetheless stick to the initial call to action, which included a rather different motto: “We are the jerks who spoil the fun of the internet for the jerks who spoil the fun of the internet for us,” (“Wir sind die Wichser, die den Wichsern, die uns den Spaß am Internet verderben, den Spaß am Internet verderben.”) For them, “spoiling the fun” for the members of RG included a variety of responses, including infiltrating RG’s Discord channels and flooding them with German idioms translated into English just “because it made us laugh,” said one member. But many RI members did follow the suggestion to “troll with love”, avoiding vitriol and hate in their responses.
RI’s impact has been measured by researchers, unlike most other counterspeech efforts. Prof. Joshua Garland of Arizona State University and his colleagues studied the impact of RI on online discourse in Germany. They collected over 9 million tweets originating from RG and RI. The authors created a classifier to identify and code speech as hate speech, counterspeech, or neither. From 135,500 “fully-resolved Twitter conversations” that took place between 2013 and 2018, the authors found that after RI formed, the intensity and proportion of hateful speech apparently decreased. The authors note that “this result suggests that organized counterspeech might have helped in balancing polarized and hateful discourse, although causality is difficult to establish given the complex web of online and offline events and process in the broader society throughout that time” (p. 109).