Germany – On Saturday, February 3, the Twitter account Alt Right Leaks began releasing screenshots, video and audio from an alt-right Discord server called ‘Reconquista Germanica.’ Leaked video shows users discussing how to create fake accounts en masse in order to exploit algorithms against opponents of the alt-right. The leaked tutorials and planning meetings appear to focus primarily on YouTube, but touch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as well. Discord, a free text and voice chat program marketed to gamers, has been widely adopted by many white supremacist groups.

One of the main participants in the server, listed as a ‘VIP’, is Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian ‘New Right’ ‘Identitarian’ movement. The Discord server ‘Reconquista Germanica’ appears to be populated with mostly German-speaking users, as all the voice and text chat contents leaked so far have been in German. Some English subtitle translation is provided in the leaked video below:

https://twitter.com/AltRightLeak/status/959874527927955461

A few days later, Alt Right Leaks posted another recording of a Discord voice chat meeting which was held to coordinate a ‘raid’ on a target YouTube account. In what they called a “psychological warfare” operation, the raid organizers described how to quickly switch through using different sock puppet YouTube accounts to bombard it with large amounts of dislikes and negative comments.

Alt-right Discord users discussed impersonating Syrians in order to encourage anti-immigrant sentiment among Germans, who they saw as more vulnerable to the opinions of foreigners. They also encouraged using fake Syrian identities to convince Syrian refugees in Germany that it was safe for them to return home.

“Today’s battlefield is the internet, we can directly influence minds with this…”

“Lefties can only react in two ways to this. Either they start believing, which is good, or they don’t, but then we seed distrust in their ranks so that they can’t trust anyone.” 

– Discord users in the Reconquista Germanica server planing a sock puppet YouTube raid 

https://twitter.com/AltRightLeak/status/960620214302990337

Full audio of raid can be heard below, including instructions “to impersonate Turks and Syrian refugees to spread misinformation; including telling Syrian refugees that the civil war is over and that they can go home.”

The leaks also include a graphic showing the apparent hierarchy of the Discord server, which, like many other alt-right groups, is based on a military-style chain of command.

“The Alt Right discord server is structured militarily with people giving orders and following orders from top to bottom… The military structure in the Alt Right discord server mirrors that of the third Reich with ranks such as “Paladin” “Sturmtruppe” “Feldjäger” and “Offizier”

– @AltRightLeak

Also provided were a series of screenshots appearing to discuss various technical aspects of conducting influence operations using mass dislikes and comments from fake YouTube accounts.

https://twitter.com/AltRightLeak/status/959903081491320839

https://twitter.com/AltRightLeak/status/959903208838713351

https://twitter.com/AltRightLeak/status/959903361725353984

On Sunday, February 4, Alt Right Leaks tweeted selections from a document entitled “Handbuch für Medienguerillas (Handbook for Mediaguerillas), Raidtutorial V3.1.” Screenshots from the manual show instructions given to “Electronic shock-troops” to create fake twitter accounts and “farm followers” by exchanging follows with other participants in their fake account scheme.

Another section, “Memetic Barrage Fire“, describes how to take over Twitter hashtags by making minor variations in recurring tweets in order to fool spam detection algorithms.

 

“We have a meme manager. With it we collect and administrate memes for our operations.” pic.twitter.com/ER6DPFVKkn

— Alt Right Leaks (@AltRightLeak) February 4, 2018

The person behind Alt Right Leaks recently indicated they were taking a break for a few days but would soon continue leaking materials from the Reconquista Germanica Discord server. Their most recent release is a video of a Discord chat in which members of the group discuss whether to target German YouTube personality SallyIsG4y for a sock puppet raid.

https://twitter.com/AltRightLeak/status/961043197307883521

Discord responded for our request for comment on the Reconquista Germanica server by providing the following statement:

We are aware that there are users who are attempting to organize raids and circumvent detection, which is against our Terms of Service. We employ a variety of measures to detect this activity and stop this behavior, and those measures resulted in the server being detected and shut down. We will continue to be aggressive in addressing violations to our TOS and investigating and taking immediate action against those bad actors.

Google (who owns YouTube) has not responded to our request for comment.

Last year, Unicorn Riot received and published an extensive amount of internal Discord communications from alt-right and neo-Nazi organizations involved in Unite The Right in Charlottesville. Browse all our Charlottesville Discord stories here, search the archive of messages in our public Discord Leaks database, and stay tuned for more upcoming Discord stories in 2018.

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