https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-fringe-groups-are-using-qanon-to-amplify-their-wild-messages
Germany’s politics are being manipulated online. But the perpetrators aren’t the much-talked-about Russian trolls accused of meddling in U.S. elections. They aren’t bot accounts, either. They’re conspiracy theorists riding on an American hoax.
The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory falsely accuses virtually all President Donald Trump’s foes of being involved in a Satanic pedophilia and cannibalism ring. Its nebulous nature, branches of which include belief in time travel and reptilians, makes it a prime conspiracy theory for paranoid Americans. But the German far right—or at least people who support it—are jumping on the U.S.-based theory, according to a new study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism think tank. Now those troll armies are using QAnon as a megaphone for their own causes.
“We came across new international far-right networks that are active in Germany, promoting the far right’s political and cultural agenda and attacking the AfD’s [far-right party Alternative for Germany] political opponents,” the ISD study’s authors wrote. “The US-based conspiracy network QAnon has emboldened a German version, linking violent and anti-democratic conspiracy theories across the Atlantic.”
The study tracked down German QAnon groups on messaging apps like Discord, where conspiracy theorists made memes calling for people to vote for far-right parties in Bavaria’s 2018 elections, or abstain from voting altogether. The tactic is similar to the voter suppression efforts allegedly used by Kremlin-backed trolls during the 2016 presidential election, where Russian accounts targeted American (and especially African-American) Facebook users with memes discouraging them from voting. But these users weren’t Russian.
In the run-up to the Bavarian election in October 2018, ISD traced hashtags that supported the AfD. Eighty-three percent of those tweets were traced back to Germany, suggesting a local campaign instead of foreign interference. Of those tweets, 1.7 percent also used the hashtag #QAnon, while another 1.3 percent used the hashtag #Q. Other posts used hashtags with German translations of popular QAnon slogans. One of the most prolific accounts using pro-AfD hashtags had a QAnon reference in their username, the study found.
“Accounts spreading QAnon conspiracy theory content boosted pro-AfD campaign hashtags simultaneously,” the study found. “For example, some accounts using hashtags such as #DrainTheSwamp, #HillaryForPrison and #DrainTheDeepState were also found to systematically boost pro-AfD hashtags such as #linksliegenlassen, #MerkelMussWeg, #AfD and #AfDwirkt – often in the same tweet.”
While the overlap of pro-AfD and QAnon hashtags might seem small, it doesn’t account for the coordinated trolling campaigns popular in QAnon circles. German Q fans worked in private chat groups to roll out memes that could be bulk-posted on Facebook and Twitter