ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Germany's far right has mobilised online during the fourth wave of far-right politics in the country. Crucially, the chapter highlights the important interrelationship between online and offline mobilisations. First, it introduces the broad online nexus of far-right parties, movements, communities, and alternative media outlets, comprising organisational characteristics that range from the highly formal to grassroots-like properties. Second, it explores what topics and issues have received the most attention by the German far right online and how these topics have been framed. The chapter discusses immigration, climate change, a critique of ‘gender ideology’, and the COVID-19 pandemic as particularly prominent issues. Finally, it also analyses how increasing platform regulation and policing by private and public actors push the German far right towards platforms, such as gab, VK, Telegram, or towards the Dark Net, where activists radicalise even further. All in all, this will illuminate the multifaceted way digital media is used by a variety of German far-right organisations to forge their complex interactions with each other, with technology, with German mainstream media, and not least with global digital corporations.
