 Welcome to the talk, mind the trap, the net politics of the AFD in the German parliament. Miriam Seyfried is giving this talk, she's the best person to do this because since 2016 she's been working in the Bundestag as part of the Green Party about net politics subjects and she could feel how all the different parties, especially the AFD, are putting their thoughts forward. One welcome to Miriam. Yeah, very welcome also from me to this talk on the net politics of the AFD in the German parliament. I am speaking as a private person here today, I'm not representing any party, I am not a member of any party. The AFD, obviously due to their right wing nature, once entering the parliament, has mainly pushed towards subjects such as migration, inner security, Muslims, Islam and in public obviously the discourse is mainly about the racist contributions they were making and it was mainly covered what they were doing in this regard. To give you two examples, the AFD parliamentarian Kuyo in September went really deep into the right wing lingo and the second example, Birgit Malzak-Winkerman also in September in one of her presentations as part of the public health discourse, she was fantasizing about all the different diseases that refugees are bringing into our country and that's why every migrant should per se be put into quarantine once they enter. Those are obviously talks that you do not want to listen to, you make you feel quite nauseous to be honest and I realized that in all this noise, this racist anti-Islamic noise, there was very little that was covered about their net politics. So whenever I talk to people, a lot of times their reaction was the AFD is doing something in net politics because nobody really looks out for that and they don't really watch out and they don't see that they are active and they don't know what parliamentarian is putting efforts in this regard. So quick question, who of you please raise your hands, could name one member of the parliament of the party of the AFD who is focusing their work on net politics or has been aware of what the AFD is putting forward when it comes to net politics? No hands are raising as far as I can see from my booth, she can see three hands from her stage, so there's three people raising their hands and I think that's very very telling, so who if not you would have realized that this discussion is going on and I find that quite telling and threatening and it's a good example of I know I mean this is just an anecdotal evidence of this room and obviously the the party itself is not connected to net politics and this is obviously not surprising because covering net politics in the parliament they usually just cover what the big coalition and how they're in discussion with the democratic opposition and that usually is like this, the CDU and the SPD are suggesting something silly like the state Trojan horse and then the opposition files against this and what the AFD is saying about these things nobody really knows and covers, they're even in the groups within the AFD's standpoint is quite irrelevant in the debate but they're still there and they are participating in these debates and they're talking in the different groups and they show up at net politics discussions outside of parliament and maybe even within realms that you're active and that's why we have to deal with this and this is why I want what I want to cover today this kind of perspective that like this kind of view that's kind of out of view this dead point we want to shed some light on that and to start I would like to ask Alexander Gaoland the head of the AFD it's commonly known that me personally I don't have a tight connection towards the internet I'm not a professional of this of these questions I can just see the problem and we all see the problem that places of employment are being taken away by digitalization and we haven't really thought about this but strategically about digitalization I can't really say anything and I wouldn't say that we have this and I mean now we could say that everything was said but we still have a bit of time so we can dive deeper into this subject so first of all fundamentally the AFD currently has 91 members in parliament that's because some people exited the party after the election such as Frau Capitri and you can show these see these four people who are party less these are former members of the AFD and you can see that they are the largest party in opposition right now they have more members than the left party and the plenum in the parliament they sit all the way to the right next to the AFD you can see the pizza slice all the way to the right that's the AFD parties section in the parliament and as the biggest party of in within the opposition they have the right to talk fast because they are the largest party in opposition and in relation to the others they get more time to talk that is within the plenum and within all the other groups of discussion so they can talk about any subject matter they can file anything they can suggest new laws they can file a smaller or a larger things in talks where professionals are being invited they can suggest professionals and they can also suggest subjects that professionals are being invited to parliament on most not political discussions are usually happening next to the plenum as part of the group digital agenda and there's obviously other there's like the inner the inner security so there's like it's about like basically more better digital infrastructure there's all sorts of groups that deal with digitalization so there's the commission of artificial intelligence and then there's the the commission for professional education in the digital world and these commissions are only there during one legislative period and they usually deal with one specific topic or question and beyond that the fractions and the AFD can send out representatives who are not necessarily parliamentarians to give you two examples they can be part of the of the of the board for the net politics and things like that and in those they can also send out representatives and we're mainly interested in three parliamentarians of the IFT those are the three that are part of the commission for digital agenda and artificial intelligence and it's the three of these that's over Kamann over Schultz and Joanna Quota I've had a few quite tasteless jokes about this trio of two men and one woman but I'm gonna refrain from going deeper into this ten days ago this news popped up over Kamann left the party surprisingly and we don't really know much why he left I've got my suspicions but I'll maybe get into that a little bit later and it's quite interesting I'm gonna try to inform myself on his website maybe he talks about rights about why he left the party but then I realized there wasn't much and they basically turned off his website straight away that usually means that the party and the parliamentarium itself himself didn't separate in a very good manner and fashion but because he's still part of the commissions he I'm gonna I'm gonna cover his participation so I'm gonna leave out the fact that he's left the party but I will cover what he put forward in within the commissions so if you look at these three and you observe them and I mean I can see them while I work I sit in these commissions and and I sit in the plenum I can see and you can realize that they have a quite normal manner of communication they're not as loud and rowdy and normally when you see on the internet you on Twitter and YouTube you see quite aggressive violent behavior it's usually quite extreme and you might remember Gauland when he said we will hunt the members of other parties in relation to these these three are quite quiet and they're quite normal and conform like composed and they don't use violent language as much as other members of the party and in compared to other members they don't really belong to the hard line right neo-nazi so the FDA has a there's a page where you can see the relationships within the party who's the furthest right and who is not so far right and I looked up the three members that we're looking at and to show you the contrast I will show you the analysis of the tats that covers the people okay so Peter Felzer is a former member of the German Army and is in a diverse super right publications in the beginning of the 90s he was a member of quite right-wing party that doesn't exist anymore Felzer's hobbies are to deny that the Holocaust existed and anti-semitism and in relation to that the relationships for the people that we're looking at are quite harmless come and for example there was some of his employers his staff have relations to the economic circles same goes for Schultz and Joanna Quota was used to be part of the CDU and she has relationships to like within compared to other members of the party they're quite conservative but from the surface viewed from the surface they're not super right-wing and racist and you can obviously tell they can tell from the way that they do politics and the way that they act within parliament the center of so there's a basically there's a center that looks at on social sociological center that focuses on how people act within parliament and they look specifically at the AFT members so there's a difference between what happens within parliament then in comparison to local governments so I'm going to read this quote I'm going to try to translate this so movement oriented are living in situative moments in which they are trying to separate from the parliament and they will and they understand themselves as a voice for the right and they're trying to mobilize people within the street so this is a categorization for people of the of the party that are really trying to rile up people on the roads they want to motivate people to walk out on the streets and and get aggressive and they just kind of want to get this kind of feedback of like finally someone is saying something so these are members of the parliament that as themselves deny the parliament and then there's another member of these of the party that are called the parliament oriented and they try to be less and they want to they want to be known for professional participation in the plenum and they want to work argumentatively and they are trying to strategically position the AFD as a party that's a bit further right to the union of its Christian Democratic Union and they want to aim to establish the party itself as a professional party within parliament so they are different to the parliamentarians who are trying to basically cause disruption within parliament so they don't from this standpoint do not like they don't want to so they're trying to be a bit more calm a bit more quiet and in this study from this Institute VZB they are looking at these two positions and these two criterias for the federal parliament and I think it can be very well applied to the people in the national parliament too and so I would say there are two wings in the national government in the AFD which are basically the same so the net politicians are mostly orientated in this people looking for coalition and to cooperate so so net politicians don't really stick out in the commission they are doing their work according to parliamentary work they are chatting in breaks with other parliamentarians they happy birthday in a very nice way to them they agree with people from other opposition parties or also cooperate on their amendments and vote with them so yeah let's look at what they are actually talking content-wise so when I started looking at what they are what topics they are covering I found out three categories they are talking about so one of them is anti-european and nationalist the second option is to be the myth of being a victim or like talking they are being a victim and the third thing is they just agree with everyone else and don't bring up any of their own points but just agree to the others an example for the first category the anti-european or nationalist is they disagree with anything coming from the EU level and this is very much according to the origin of the party so they are against any EU legislation and if it would be according to them we would be separating to this so so the new data protection law was like a big thing recently and there are good reasons why this is an issue and yeah another example is there was experts being invited oh no the commissioners were talking about the talk and the commit like the topics in the commission and they were talking about an international meeting and the FD politician was saying international stuff is not really our thing so that's interesting because the internet is very much about the internet internet is very much about international exchange so they should maybe be against anything which has to do with the internet and on the other side they are trying to be a victim about everything so for example with social bots they have used themselves to argue against censorship and the freedom of speeches being restricted so they are using the tools to argue against they say their own positions are being evicted from the internet because there is no real freedom of stage but like this position can only be argumented if you are saying racist positions sexist positions hate speech should be covered by freedom of speech but from my position that's not the case and so the AFD does do a lot of amendments to the government and it is a lot about freedom of speech and we have two examples about this so they did two amendments about reconquista internet which was a thing initiated by Bömermann who is a German comedian and they one asked another thing about the welcoming app which helps refugees to be welcome in Germany and there was another one about in the media and another one about democracy which is a program about democracy and the the program that the AFD is right extremist so they had a lot of questions about this and there is a lot of discussions where the AFD manages to turn the topic around to their favorite topic so there was one discussion which was about digitalization but he somehow managed to continue talking about the refugee crisis so very often in the majority of cases they don't have their own position regarding that politics but they just agree to everything the other says other other parliamentations are saying so it was about the hacking of the government and the other opposition parties were saying this is not like worked on completely and the AFD just agrees and says yeah we are all in agreement about this and here we have an example about this this is a speech by Uwe Kammann about the head commerce commission about artificial intelligence so the artificial intelligence shouldn't be about party parties but it's about and I think we should just follow along this because this is about economic development and we should follow this and my party will work on this with our expertise I don't want to look into the past too much because I don't have the time because then we would be here until tomorrow the question is how constructive and how we should look for the future of our country and that's important thing to agree on so to summarize regarding politics the AFD doesn't really have their own positions or their own propositions they disagree with European policies and they just leave the topic if they are don't have something new to say and just come back to their core topics of migration and in many cases they just agree with the other parties and are trying and this is where I see a big problem because when they AFD is always agreeing with you it's easy to forget that actually the AFD is very right-wing and is having a lot of racist positions they are voicing quite clearly but during this net political debates and net politics they seem nice they act normally but like in reality they aren't they are part of the AFD which is very racist so the AFD is not the only ones around and here we have an amendment about the digital thing of the government so like hip started people can visit the government and there's a question number two from this why are only experts from the economy being invited and not for example from the chaos communication congress or from the digital digital community so they align with our position so I hope you're not too happy that they are in agreement with us so it's a trap so there was one thing about the where they were asking about Republica and the financing of this conference and they were asking the parliament to cut the finances for the Republica and it was about the army and the Republica didn't want to invite the army to have to be at the conference and the AFD was like this can't go on so we should cut finances so this is kind of interesting because the DigiGas and the Republica have a lot of people in common they are a personal unity and on the one side the AFD is asking about inviting the DigiGas but then if a Republica they are in opposition to some so in preparation for this talk I've talked to a lot of people and how they are dealing with the AFD and for I would say the how the AFD is behaving there are three categories again one way to deal with the AFD is to just deal with the AFD like with any other party there is like a breakfast thing where people are politicians working on that politics are invited and they are just inviting politicians from all parties and they are also inviting the people from the AFD the second way to deal with the AFD is to just to use demarcation and don't communicate this to the outside world and they are not talking to the AFD they often say we are only talking to democratic parties but you only find this out when you are talking to them directly you can't see this just from their public work and the third way to deal with the AFD is to clearly state that you are in this agreement with the AFD one statement I really liked was about quantum computing in the Commission for Digital Agenda and they can invite experts to these commissions and they get then the experts get invited and can talk to the presidential petition about the topic and the AFD invited someone and didn't didn't the AFD didn't tell the people the experts they were inviting so the government was inviting the expert but wasn't at first wasn't aware that he was invited by the AFD but when he found out he didn't like to come and then the other parties were saying well we would also like you to come so he in fact came to the hearing and he in his opening statement he made it very clear that he was anti-racist and so on and that he was sad about the situation he wasn't invited in but he still wanted to talk about quantum computing so that was a nice example another example is netpolitik.org which is a German net political website and organization so they also have a position which where they clearly state that they are asking all parties which have been in the government but not racist organizations and also the TTC is published a statement and in 2005 the club published a position that they are disagreeing with any right positions right wing positions and that was back in 2005 and this and another example how we can handle this is from the open knowledge foundation in Berlin and they are in a complex where there is a lot of other companies and they noticed that in one other of these organizations there was a Nazi working there and they did some research and this person is involved with combat 18 and was in demonstrations by the AFD and then they were thinking what could we do and they did some action so they talked to the people within the organizations and checked if they were in agreement and we like talked about what they could do and there were a couple of different suggestions on what to do but they were all in agreement that something needs to be done and then they also communicated with the other organizations in the same building and talked to the mobile beratung against an organization working against right organizations in Berlin and they were like we can't evict them from the house ourselves but we can place stickers at their doors to make clear that right wing positions aren't welcome in this building and make clear that they won't be in agreement with these types of positions and also makes this a subtle statement to this Nazi working in the same building so take example on this and talk about the issue with other people and you don't have to invite anything new you can look at other organizations have policies about this when you are invited and the AFD is also invited one position can be that you won't be attending this meeting you can use this paper by the cause communication club you can also refer back to the berliner consents which was an agreement between the parliamentary parties in berlin from the parties in that time at in the Berlin Parliament and all the democratic parties agreed to not make refugees talking points for their campaigns and here again the mbr mobile beratung against right extremism in berlin is an organization which is a place you like an organization you can talk to if you want some help how to handle right wing positions in the AFD so we're coming back to the to overcome on and let's we aren't sure why he left the party's AFD in this press statement he said there was there were disagreements with it in the party about policies and there aren't really a lot of other experts within the party about net politics so that's a bit confusing and in this tweet we we can see that they kind of liked working with him and he was very engaged in the work he was doing and maybe this can be about the other politicians in the AFD not being in agreement with this strategy to cooperate with other with other parties to cooperate with the other parties in opposition to greens the left party and they are a lot more looking to be in disagreement and fight against these parties so if you're interested in this I I would argue that you can just look at their speeches in the parliament online you don't need to invite them to their to your own events and I would like to ask you within your organizations to find clear positions against the AFD and don't fall for the trap of this neutral positions in agreement the AFD is forcing within the parliament and because I feel that this style of working in cooperation is on the decline because like him leaving the party is an example of these politicians looking for cooperation might be leaving the party right now so the AFD within the national government will continue to be revising history and stating clearly racist positions and yeah thank you so much for being here thank you Miriam all right you know the game there's five microphones if you're leaving please don't just stay but if you absolutely have to please use that exit over there so five microphones please position yourself at the microphones or go online and short questions please because we are short on time hi thank you so much for this great talk what I would be interested in is the AFD would is usually portrayed as a law and order party and that's kind of in conflict to the fact that they are themselves on a bunch of watch lists so how does the AFD position themselves well there's a lot of discrepancies within like there's a lot of even when you look at freedom of speech like all these little inquiries they usually file that I gave examples on they usually file for something like somebody mentioned that the AFD is right extremist party and then they usually claim defamation and being victims but when it's about their positions the borders of freedom of speech are a completely different thing there's usually cognitive dissonance between these two things and you can see these in in all way shapes or forms and you can't logically understand their standpoint on this numb microphone number four please I had a question I have a question on the subject of freedom of speech for your own freedom of speech we are all fighting for but for the freedom of speech of others there's a lot less people fighting so if the AFD is claiming they're fighting for freedom of speech of others and they're raising like the question is are they trying to stand in for others right to freedom of speech or just their own in the past year I did not realize once where the AFD would have tried to stand in for others rights to freedom of speech I will let you know if I do see that happening other questions we still got time does the internet have a question I don't think so ah oh microphone number two I would be interested in what the AFD has their position on security policies and safety and they're being watched but like I would be interested in that particular realm I'm sorry I think I'm the wrong expert like I am wasting my time away in the commission for digital agenda and that's not part of that I'm sure that you could have a great talk on the subject how the cognitive dissonance looks in that regard but I can't really give you examples and pull anything out of the hat because I am not in that commission I'm sorry microphone number five please hi I have a question how is the AFD positioning itself when it comes to the new EU copyright that's a good question I'm trying to go over all the different positions to all the EU topics they usually mash up a bit I don't want to lie I don't want to tell lies up here so I'm gonna refrain from saying something here and I'm sure that Miriam Reder would be somebody good to talk to about this Julia Reder is a parliamentation in the European Parliament who is specializing in copyright issues and I realize that the AFD when this is a topic is in disagreement with EU policies or they are just absent and they are holding big speeches oh it's in about the EU parliament so in every case where they could have a different proposition of how to approach this they were just absent and didn't talk about it but like copyright law is not my field of expertise okay we still have room for one more question thank you so much for this talk I would be in agreement with you in the sense that you are calling for people to position themselves against the AFD I think that's really important not just as a singular person but also as an organization my question is how can we take these facts that you're talking about like specific reactions by the AFD how can we collect them and use them argumentatively against the all present argument that the AFD is a democratic party which I think it only is in a limited way but how can we collect them and share them to form a positioning as a group I mean everybody's free in and how and which way they want to do this and what platform they want to use and how they want to how you want to collect it there's a bunch of material that's there where you can inform yourself and where you can all the talks that I've shown you they're in the media take of the German parliament all the parliamentary discussions are videotaped and you can look at them you can download them you can see all the inquiries they file for it's a bunch of data it's a whole big pile of data that you can deal with and that you can sift through I'm always happy to be able to focus on one specific aspect for this talk but like taking this whole long list and scrolling through it through all the small inquiries and weapons from the 3d printer a lot of stuff on health public health a lot of stuff on inner security and this pot they they file a lot of small inquiries and you can you can sift through that by yourself the material is there it's publicly available all right that was it thank you Miriam and thank you guys also