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[WedgeX]

To give its online presence an added boost in the week or so leading up to the election, AfD hired Harris Media, a right-wing digital advertising firm based in Austin that has worked on campaigns for Ted Cruz and, briefly, Donald Trump. The firm is led by Vincent Harris, whom Bloomberg once dubbed “the man who invented the Republican internet.” Harris had an immediate impact on AfD’s digital campaign, according to Spiegel Online. While the AfD once hoped a Facebook post would garner 1,000 reactions, Harris Media dramatically extended the reach of AfD’s digital arm. AfD representatives told Spiegel that the bloody tire tracks post, for example, reached “a massive number of users” and potential voters. This growth in numbers is largely due to the efforts of Harris Media, which brought new ideas to the campaign, as Spiegel describes:

These days, three of his employees march into the AfD offices in Berlin at 8 a.m. each morning, coffee-to-go cups in hand, and play grunge music for the staff and summon “priority meetings.” Above all, though, the advertising professionals make clear to their German clients that far from all Americans are fans of political correctness. One Harris staffer is reported to have asked an AfD politician why the party isn’t campaigning with “Germany for Germans” as its slogan? It put the AfD staffer in an awkward position. Germany for the Germans? No, he said, that’s a nationalistic slogan that even the AfD would prefer not to use.

But AfD needed Harris for more than just fine-tuning its already strong digital campaign. Because of the controversial nature of its advertisements, the party had long found it difficult to purchase ad space from German subsidiaries of Facebook and Google. AfD leaders have even gone so far as accusing Google of attempting to “sabotage” their campaign by blocking a website that was created by Harris Media. “The site villifies Merkel as a ‘perjurer’ and essentially as an accomplice to murder,” the Spiegel Online writes. “The AfD strategists have created a montage and a spooky flickering black and white portrait of Merkel with the square around Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the background, where an Islamic State-linked terrorist killed 12 people with a semi-truck in December 2016 and injured many more.” Google reportedly blocked the website’s launch on September 11, later justifying its decision by alleging the ad could “hoax the customer” and contained “dangerous and degrading” content that violated company policy.

Harris Media can address the issue of access, helping AfD bypass German subsidiaries to get their ads through. “The team at Harris Media just places quick calls to the companies’ headquarters in Silicon Valley, sources say, where the agency is very well-networked as a result of its many successful political campaigns for the Republicans,” Spiegel writes. “AfD’s orders are then simply put through to Germany from the United States.”

While working for Patrick in 2013, Harris launched “DewFeed,” a parody of BuzzFeed that consisted of cat gifs attacking Patrick’s opponent David Dewhurst for being too moderate. Last fall, Harris Media produced a controversial video for neoconservative American interest group Secure America Now, depicting a fake future in which Germany had been “infiltrated” by “Jihadi fighters” from Syria. “Welcome to the Islamic State of Germany,” the narrator says in accented English at the beginning of the video, before inviting viewers to see “everything Germany has to offer,” including hikes through forests filled with IEDs, celebrations of arranged marriages and human trafficking at Oktoberfest, and cathedrals converted into mosques. Harris’s handiwork did not go over well in Germany, according to the Washington Post, and the satirical video was panned in the German media for—in addition to being such a transparent attempt to drum up Islamaphobia—sloppily using a video clip portraying an arriving Austrian train instead of a German train, and strangely highlighting only three European cities in a map scene: Berlin, Paris, and Nantes, a French city of 300,000 people. Still, the video drew over a million views on YouTube.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-da...y-helped-the-alt-right-rise-again-in-germany/

Not sure anyone wanted this American export to increase. Yet here we are.

 

[Dingens]

seems weird that they'd go for and American alt-right outlet when the American right has proven over and over again to be completely out of touch with their European counterparts.

Well, at least this time it wasn't the evil Russians, right?

Spoiler

although that would've probably generated A LOT more interest

 

[Haly]

seems weird that they'd go for and American alt-right outlet when the American right has proven over and over again to be completely out of touch with their European counterparts.

Well, at least this time it wasn't the evil Russians, right?

Spoiler

although that would've probably generated A LOT more interest

If you read the article on Hope not Hate about the reporter who embedded himself in alt right cells across Europe, you get the impression that European nationalism movements actually admire and envy how far the alt right has penetrated the mainstream here in the States. It’s not about right vs left in this case but nationalists/ethnic-purists vs a world that’s become increasingly global.

 

[KernelPanic]

seems weird that they'd go for and American alt-right outlet when the American right has proven over and over again to be completely out of touch with their European counterparts.

Well, at least this time it wasn't the evil Russians, right?

Spoiler

although that would've probably generated A LOT more interest

Key takeaway is American company has connections with Google and Facebook to help get such advertising out there, not to mention their experience with right wing advertising.

The Russia thing is a bit of a distraction from American companies complicit in all this.

Edit:

https://twitter.com/edbott/status/914837209886244864

Facebook has put The Gateway Pundit at the top of its feed today. Google News promoted a 4chan thread. Silicon Valley, we have a problem.

No one should believe the bullshit that they're investigating or curbing fake news BS on their platform.

 

[Dingens]

If you read the article on Hope not Hate about the reporter who embedded himself in alt right cells across Europe, you get the impression that European nationalism movements actually admire and envy how far the alt right has penetrated the mainstream here in the States. It’s not about right vs left in this case but nationalists/ethnic-purists vs a world that’s become increasingly global.

well this may be true and all, but I somehow doubt those are the same people the AFD tries to target, because that sounds more like the NDP's audience.
I mean, the article itself stated, that most of the ideas Harris Media brought to the table were shot down because they are just unacceptable in Germany. Sounds somewhat out of touch if you ask me.
I guess they hired them only for their connections to tech companies like suggested below

Key takeaway is American company has connections with Google and Facebook to help get such advertising out there, not to mention their experience with right wing advertising.

The Russia thing is a bit of a distraction from American companies complicit in all this.

Edit:

https://twitter.com/edbott/status/914837209886244864



No one should believe the bullshit that they're investigating or curbing fake news BS on their platform.

yeah its kinda sad that this is happening and nobody gives a shit. Especially those who consider themselves "liberal".