The Internet Is Fixed Now: Die Partei Quietly Took Over Thirty AfD Facebook Groups
Sometime in the summer of 2017, ahead of the German federal election, a satirical political party called Die Partei announced it had taken over more than thirty Facebook groups affiliated with the AfD—Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s populist far-right party—with a combined membership somewhere north of 180,000 people. Not through any meaningful technical exploit. They’d maneuvered themselves into admin positions and then quietly redesigned the groups to their own specifications.
Die Partei (literally "The Party") is a German satirical outfit that grew out of the Titanic magazine tradition—think The Onion if it fielded actual candidates and occasionally won European Parliament seats. Their propaganda minister on this operation was Shahak Shapira, an Israeli-German artist and comedian who’d already built a reputation for confrontational internet activism.
Their official statement was perfect: For some time now, social networks have been abused by shady groups to spread alternative facts in the most perfidious ways. Apparently neither the domestic intelligence agency, basic common sense, nor the host platform are capable of correcting this problem.
Then: We have good news. Our propaganda minister Shahak Shapira takes his role seriously and will not abandon you in this dark epoch of the information age. Don’t be afraid. We’re fixing the internet.
What I love about this is how airtight the meta-irony is. A party calling itself "The Party," with a self-appointed propaganda minister, seizing control of political Facebook groups and announcing the takeover in the language of a government press release. It fights authoritarian aesthetics by leaning so far into them that the whole thing collapses under its own absurdity. Whether it changed a single mind among those 180,000 members is a different question—satire rarely converts anyone. But as a demonstration that these platforms are porous, that admin access can be socially engineered, that the whole edifice is more fragile than it presents itself to be, it landed exactly right.
Die Partei got 0.4% of the vote that September. I doubt they were disappointed.