Creepy government-funded 'anti-hate' organisation run by a weird Egyptian man becomes Germany's first official internet censor under the Digital Services Act

These Trusted Flaggers are charged with eradicating "hate speech" and "fake news" from social media; platforms that ignore their Trusted Flagging can be fined or face other serious sanctions.

Are you one of those schoolmarm hall-monitor types?

Do you have a screechy voice and do you enjoy looking down your nose at other people?

Do your favourite pastimes include complaining to the manager, telling teenagers not to say bad words and levelling self-superior moral disapproval at everything you don’t like?

Well, then the European Union is just the place for you! Under our fantastic new Digital Services Act (DSA), you can engage in all these recreations, and what is more, you can do so in an official capacity, as a Trusted Flagger!

In places like the United States, censorship is a thing that the three-letter agencies and the major social media platforms have to hash out among themselves behind closed doors. Things are different here in Europe, where the DSA has imposed upon all of us a totally legal censorship regime for the purposes of cracking down on notionally “illegal” internet content. Any censorship regime of course requires censors, and that’s where you, the aspiring Trusted Flagger, come in. This is your golden opportunity.

It’s like this: The DSA requires all EU member states to empower a “Digital Services Coordinator” to enforce our happy new internet rules. And Article 22 of the DSA requires these Coordinators to appoint “Trusted Flaggers” to run about the internet reporting content violations, so that wrongthink can be deleted without unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles or “undue delay.” The DSA obligates all major social media platforms to take Trusted Flagger reports superseriously. They will be the new traffic policeman of our information motorways.

You’ll be happy to know that literally anybody can apply to become a Trusted Flagger, provided he can demonstrate that he has “particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying and notifying illegal content,” that he is “independent from any provider of online platforms,” and that he “carries out his activities … diligently, accurately and objectively.” In Germany, our Digital Services Coordinator is the Bundesnetzagentur, the federal agency responsible for regulating telecommunications. They are accepting Trusted Flagger applications at this very moment! All you have to do is fill out this brief online form! It’s amazing.

Klaus Müller, President of the Bundesnetzagentur, explains his newfound Digital Services Corodinator-authorities in this way:

Have you ever been annoyed, surprised or possibly horrified when you saw images, videos or texts on social platforms where people were defamed or discriminated against, possibly in violent confrontations, and you thought, you shouldn’t have to read or see that? Or where products were offered that couldn’t possibly be real? Many people encounter these kinds of things every day. The European Union has said that what is forbidden in the normal analog world must also in future be forbidden in the digital world. And thanks to the Digital Services Act, the Bundesnetzagentur now bears responsibility for this.

What can we do for you? Well, you can give us your complaints, you can give us information, you can help us to take action against platforms that do not react to your reports … You can help us identify systematic risks that we will address either together with the European Commission in Brussels or here in Germany, so that platforms are a safe place. What we will not do is censor content. That is not our job. It is, however, our job to ensure that people are safe and perhaps a little happier when using social networks and e-commerce platforms. That is our job, as the Federal Network Agency, as the new Digital Service Coordinator.

I want to implore the aspiring Trusted Flaggers among you not to lose heart at Müller’s claim that his new internet policing enterprise will not “censor content.” This is just a polite fiction he has to maintain to keep rabble who are still enamoured of quaint outdated concepts like freedom of expression off his back. In fact he hopes that you, his legions of Trusted Flaggers, will censor as much content as possible. This is why in the very next breath he emphasises that it is his job – and by extension, your job – not merely to make “people … safe,” but also to make them “happier.” As we all know, censorship concerns the enforcement of social and political harmony, particularly in that uncouth and untamed realm known as the internet. It is all about feelings, and it is especially about weaponising hurt feelings to make the online world a less threatening place for pink-haired gender lunatics, the racially aggrieved and everybody else with stupid and shrill political ideas.

In case you are a total idiot (which Trusted Flaggers are likely to be), our Digital Services Coordinator has published an entire sixteen-page instruction manual to help you through the Trusted Flagger application process. These instructions include a helpful appendix enumerating all the things they want you to flag. The third such category of Flaggable Things is “Disallowed Speech,” which includes the usual boring stuff like “defamation” and “death threats,” but also stretches well beyond the bounds of the merely illegal to encompass “discrimination” and “hate speech” too. These, happily, are terms borrowed from Anglosphere race activism discourse; they are totally alien to those sections of the German Criminal Code governing speech. While the DSA claims to be all about targeting illegal content, our aspiring Trusted Flaggers can take heart that those who have busied themselves with applying the DSA have a much more expansive vision. They’re going to make everyone happier online, and as we all know campaigns to make people happier always turn out well in the end.

The applications are rolling in, and our Digital Services Coordinator is happy to announce that he has approved our first Trusted Flagger to assist in forcing websites like X, Instagram and Facebook to remove not only “illegal content,” but also “hate speech and fake news very quickly and without bureaucratic hurdles … to make the internet a safe space.” And who is this first Trusted Flagger, you ask? Well, it is an internet tattle-tale operation run by the Baden-Württemberg Youth Foundation and funded by the Green-controlled Family Ministry.

They call themselves REspect! In this video, two women pad around a trendy loft apartment explaining what exactly it is that they’ve been up to at REspect!

Basically, REspect! accept complaints about potentially illegal speech via a form on their website and report as much of this content as possible to the police. In seven years, they’ve received almost 72,828 separate reports and filed 20,532 criminal complaints. What makes REspect! particularly qualified to Trustedly Flag, is their eagerness to reach beyond the bounds of the law. In their promotional video, they emphasise that it is important to report even perfectly legal content, because this helps with their “statistics” and assists them in advocating for “changes to the law.” Now, as Trusted Flaggers, they can use their legal leverage over social media platforms to get a lot of this perfectly legal content deleted.

For people wont to rail about online anonymity, REspect! are not very forthcoming about who, precisely, they are. I’m sure this is an oversight; surely there is nothing dishonourable, underhanded or secret about Trusted Flagging, and no reason any Trusted Flagger would want to conceal his identity. While the REspect! website contains not a single personal name, it does have an immensely helpful section on “our team,” where they assure us that they’re a lot of people “from different fields working together in an interdisciplinary way.”

What unites us is our shared commitment to having better interactions with each other online and working to combat hate speech, conspiracy theories and fake news. Even though it’s not always easy, we have a lot of fun doing this, and we enjoy the feeling that we’re doing something good!

Indeed, I imagine that Trusted Flagging must be deeply fun. It must yield the kind of satisfaction that you can only get from telling other people what to do, what to say and how to think, and having the power to shut them up when they won’t listen to you.

REspect! also provide this cartoon of themselves …

Third from the left and third from the right you can see the two women from the REspect! promotional video linked above.

… which as far as I can tell is the only available image of the first Trusted Flagger team approved to operate in the Federal Republic of Germany. This is no way strange or odd or anything, and I for one particularly enjoy the prospect of Mr Antifa Half-Hair on the left scrutinising my tweets. The internet needs more Trusted Flagging from people like him.

Now, it is of course not true that we know absolutely nothing about REspect! As journalists at NiUS have discovered, and as anybody can confirm by doing a bit of googling, we know that its director is an apparently Egyptian man named Ahmed Haykel Gaafar. His is the caricature on the far right in the cartoon above. Gaafar has a degree in Islamic Studies from Al-Azhar University in Cairo and he’s spent his career studying “hate on the internet.”

Ahmed Haykel Gaafar. Source.

Initially, the good Mr Gaafar was delighted to be director of the first officially designated Trusted Flagger in Germany, and he betook himself to LinkedIn to bask in the glory …

“First Trusted Flagger in Germany!” jubilates Ahmed Haykel Gaafar.

… but in the days since he has been eagerly deactivating all of his social media accounts. I cannot imagine why.

It is an unfortunate yet necessary aspect of censorship, that the content creators everybody wants to police are frequently highly talented personalities with millions of followers, while their Trusted Flaggers are invariably complete nonentities, with few accomplishments to their name and precious little in the way of ideas or original thoughts. An uncharitable observer might posit that there is an element of resentment in the project of Trusted Flaggery, and wonder whether it is an activity that appeals most of all to those who find themselves always on the losing end of online arguments and targeted by humour they barely understand. We know better of course. We know that Trusted Flaggers are not at all butthurt unsuccessful social media users eager to stop people making fun of them and that their desire to promote “happiness” and “better interactions” is in no way self-interested.

Thus you should draw no conclusions at all from the fact that Mr Gaafar, newly minted Trusted Flagger Internet Policeman, appears to have produced almost no online content of his own anywhere. The only relevant thing that your humble blogger can find with his name on it, is a brief article on “Hate Speech in the Covid Era: A Practical Report from the Work of the ‘respect!’ Reporting Office.” He wrote this back in 2021, when the Baden-Württemberg cry-to-teacher factory were apparently still calling themselves “respect!” in all lowercase letters with an exclamation point and not REspect! with two uppercase letters and an exclamation point. In that piece, Germany’s first Trusted Flagger mainly counts internet hates and tracks their rise over time, but in his introduction he also finds the space to say a few wise words about “hate speech” as he understands it.

Gaafar begins by noting that “hate speech is an elastic and multifaceted term” – one that includes such variegated things as “conspiracy myths, othering, over-generalisations, spreading fake news, constructing a compulsion to act and justifying existing acts of violence or discrimination.” You might have thought that only inciting violence was hate speech, but Gaafar sees farther. He knows that “othering” is hate speech. He knows that merely justifying somebody else’s past discriminatory act can be hate speech. What characterises hate speech, Gaafar goes on to say, are things like “snide insinuation” and the expression of “bias,” both of which we must presume he will strive to eradicate from the internet in his new role as a Trusted Flagger. (Fortunately this post, which contains no snide insinuation whatsoever, will lurk safe from Gaafar’s noble if censorious claws.) Hate speech, Gaafar says, “not only target[s] a discriminated group or person,” but also “exhibit[s] a triangular complex consisting of animosity that is directed towards a particular group and that addresses a public audience.”

The unsympathetic will object that Gaafar’s remarks apply to vast swathes of human expression. In particular, they will say that literally any statement to an audience about something other than that audience will “exhibit a triangular complex” much like that in my diagram. What they are missing, is that this is precisely why hate speech is so insidious and why Trusted Flaggers are so important! Almost anything can be hate speech, and perhaps almost everything is hate speech. Since hate speech is not a clearly defined legal category – is not, in fact, described or forbidden by the German Criminal Code at all – who can define it for us, if not Trusted Flaggers writing obscure papers in defunct state-funded journals that nobody reads?

Despite what you may hear from some crazy right-wing extremists, therefore, the real scandal is not that Gaafar has been appointed Germany’s first Trusted Flagger, oh no. The real scandal is that we do not yet have any other Trusted Flaggers. We will need millions of them if we are to stamp out this insidious plague of triangulatory complexes in which people say bad things to some people about some other people. In our battle against hate speech it may even prove necessary to destroy the greater part of past and present written human expression. The harvest is plentiful and the labourers few.