When I was in junior high school back in the early 1960s, we were taught about children in East Germany who were encouraged by the authorities to report their parents for counterrevolutionary activity. The kids would tell their teachers, the teachers would notify the Stasi, and the unmarked van would show up in the dead of night to carry the offending parent away.

Sixty years later, it appears that the intelligence services of the German Federal Republic are honoring their predecessors in the DDR. Children, beware: Your parents may be far-right extremists!

Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from the online news portal Nius. The translator’s comments are in square brackets:

Be careful what you say at home…

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution calls on schoolchildren to “report right-wing content”

On February 28th, Deutschlandfunk published a report from the program Agenda with Jörg Müller, the head of the Brandenburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution, about the right-wing danger in social media and gaming. The focus of this article is the large reach that the AfD achieves on TikTok. The audience does not find out exactly what potentially dangerous content is involved.

Müller reports on his visits to schools: “I ask every school class, how often have you actually reported a right-wing video? Often this isn’t done and then I get a response a few weeks later that they have now reported videos.”

What this means is that children are actually encouraged to report and are later asked whether they have complied with Müller’s request. The extent to which schoolchildren can classify political content and evaluate whether it is justiciable is not discussed.

TikTok may only be used from the age of 13 and only with parental consent. The app also offers special security measures for minors that can be activated. Wouldn’t it then be the responsibility of parents to take action against questionable content in case of doubt?

Müller encourages reports below the criminal liability threshold

“What should you report if no crime has occurred?” the moderator wants to know from the head of the Brandenburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution [Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency]. He emphasizes once again that he asks the children to use the reporting function diligently; after all it is easy to use: “You just have to tap! And I would always recommend doing that,” says Müller, referring to the “incitement and hate speech” reporting centers at the state criminal investigation offices and the Federal Criminal Police Office.

Schoolchildren are manipulated

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution monitors extremist accounts on social networks and it is therefore the authority’s job to take action against content that is punishable. Müller does not seem to know in detail which guidelines the networks use to censor content. He relies on mass reporting: “I actually believe that companies also have their own counting methods. The technology has also intervened there and if channels are reported often enough, then they are blocked, deleted or at least the content is searched.

One cannot help but get the impression that schoolchildren are being used to remove political opponents from social media. This is apparently best achieved with mass reporting and this requires numerous users, in this case schoolchildren, to eagerly report content.

Afterword from the translator:

Why does this sound to me like something along the lines of “People with the wrong opinions have no place in our tolerant and cosmopolitan society”??

I’m pretty sure that many elderly Germans know this from NAZI Germany and from the DDR. Children at school were recruited by the Gestapo/STASI to spy and inform on their parents, family, friends, fellow students and teachers. In Germany it seems, informing on people for wrongthink to the “authorities” is in the genes.

No matter what one might think about Napoleon Bonaparte, he understood the German psyche to perfection and used it against them to the fullest, like all dictators. He said; “There is no more a good-natured, but also gullible people, than the Germans. No lie can be devised too grossly, the Germans believe it. For a slogan/narrative that was given to them, they persecute their compatriots with greater zeal and bitterness than their real enemies.”