What Happens When a Major Political Party Gets Fact-Checked on YouTube
In May 2019, a German YouTuber named Rezo posted a fifty-five-minute video called Die Zerstörung der CDU—the Destruction of the CDU—a meticulous, footnoted critique of Germany’s ruling center-right party covering climate policy, wealth inequality, and the party’s voting record in the EU Parliament. It accumulated millions of views in days, was followed by dozens of other German creators making their own anti-CDU content, and landed right before the European Parliament elections. The party’s response was to do approximately nothing, then panic, then release a badly received counter-video. And then Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer—AKK, the CDU’s new chair after Angela Merkel stepped back from the leadership—floated the idea of regulating political speech online before elections.
Her argument, delivered after internal party meetings, was this: if seventy newspaper editors coordinated to tell voters not to support the CDU before an election, it would be considered electoral interference. Why should YouTubers be different? It’s the kind of analogy that sounds reasonable for about five seconds before it collapses. Newspapers operate within press freedom frameworks, which the CDU presumably supports. Critics making videos are private citizens exercising speech, which the CDU also presumably supports. The difference is that one of these things hurt her party and the other didn’t, and AKK apparently found the regulatory solution more appealing than asking why millions of young German voters found a fifty-five-minute video more persuasive than anything her party had produced.
She acknowledged the CDU had handled it very slowly and very late,
that their response was not the handling you need in an election campaign.
True enough. The proposed solution to this failure—labeling it asymmetric campaign mobilization
and suggesting that online speech requires different rules before elections—reads as exactly what it is: a powerful institution discovering it no longer controls the information environment and reaching for legal tools instead of doing the harder work of having better arguments.
On the matter of what she actually tweeted—that when influential voices call for voters to abandon democratic parties of the center,
this is a question of political culture—the irony is that the parties most likely to describe themselves as defenders of democratic values are historically the ones most likely to respond to criticism by trying to silence it. Convenient timing, also, that the EU had just passed sweeping copyright enforcement legislation, the so-called upload filters, that critics had warned would give platforms and governments new levers to remove content from the internet. In the wrong hands, a filter designed to protect copyright holders looks remarkably like a filter you could use for other things.
The CDU is not the party it was under Merkel, who at least understood that governing requires a basic tolerance for being argued with. What AKK demonstrated in this moment is a party in the process of becoming what parties become when they lose contact with why they exist—retreating into authority, mistaking criticism for attack, imagining that suppressing the noise is a substitute for having something to say. The under-thirties who watched Rezo’s video already knew this. The CDU’s response confirmed it.