“Like Attack” on NPD Facebook page

On 27 January 2014 – the International Holocaust Remembrance Day – the iniative „Laut gegen Nazis“ („Loud against Nazis“) asked all of their members and every democrat via a YouTube video to show their protest against Nazis. The NPD Facebook page was to be flooded by creative slogans.

„The NPD continuously stirs up hatred against citizens with an immigrant background. We will no longer sit idly by! We want to show them together that Germany is a diverse nation. And we are going to use their greatest fear: We are going to overrun the NPD!“ This is what was written on www.likeattack.de – a website specifically designed for this campaign by Laut gegen Nazis. Everyone who was interested was able to read on this website what they had to do in order to make the campaign a success: first, they had to „like“ the NPD Facebook page in order to be able to comment on their posts. The comments ranged from funny slogans such as „Cats instead of skin heads!“ and „Flower Power instead of White Power!“ but also included clear statements against right-wing extremism such as „No human is illegal“. Laut gegen Nazis urged everyone to „unlike“ the page again after they left their comments: The Nazi Facebook page was not supposed to gain more friends in the long run.

The campaign was a complete success! The administrators of the NPD Facebook page clearly had a lot of trouble deleting the anti-Nazi comments as quickly as possible. Some posts were visible for over ten hours! The entire media lanscape, ranging from Der Spiegel to the Handelsblatt and the Berliner Zeitung, covered the campaign. The Handelsblatt concluded in their article: „The iniators want to stand up against right-wing extremist propaganda. What may be remembered is the slogan of the campaign: „We are many. We are diverse.“