Table 1: Organizational Form and Prevalence of Social Media Manipulation in Germany Initial Government Politicians & Private Civil Society Citizens & Report Agencies Parties Contractors Organizations Influencers X, Predominantly AfD X though their connection to political parties (AfD) is unclear Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Blank spaces indicate no evidence was found. Strategies, Tools, and Techniques While state actors are generally not engaged with blocking or filtering content online, in 2015 the Federal Court of Justice ruled that blocking websites was a last resort if it is only way to end copyright infringements (Auswärtiges Amt, 2018; la Cour, 2019). In February 2018, the first case of blocking was enforced by the Munich regional court for the first time, which compelled Vodafone to block kinox.to for uploading illegally owned content. Most other instances of removal online relate to search engine results rather than to content as such. Nevertheless, with the introduction of the Network Enforcement Act there have been several instances where content was removed, causing controversy amongst online communities and the act’s potential chilling effects remain concerning (Freedom House, 2019). The 2017 elections saw the use of microtargeting infrastructures provided by Facebook by all major parties, even though the creation and use of complex voter profile databases is limited due to European and German data protection laws. Nevertheless, such techniques are increasingly being used for elections, with most parties refusing to talk openly about their datadriven strategies (Dachwitz, 2017). Fake news spread by third parties remains a larger issue though, which is one of the reasons why Facebook teamed up with German news agency DPA to fight fake news with fact checking for the 2019 European Election (Der Spiegel, 2020a, 2020b). Moreover, several lawmakers have called for a crackdown on social media bots after MPs were flooded with messages on social media and via email during the debate on the UN migration pact in late 2018. It seems as if over one-quarter of the messages and tweets were from bots. Reportedly, you can buy around one thousand bots for under €10 in Germany (Deutsche Welle, 2018). In terms of social media use by politicians and parties, most parliamentary parties have official social media accounts. The AfD in particular seems to be quite successful online, continuously scoring high engagement numbers. However, it looks as if this success is partly due to fake accounts: in early 2019 a local AfD account was caught in what has been dubbed a “fakeaccount-fail” where they gave positive praise in a comment on their own post (Figure 4). Other users made them aware of this error and the comment was quickly deleted. What likely happened is that the administrator of the AfD page forgot to change profiles when commenting on the post (Focus Online, 2019). 147