Facebook use linked to rise in attacks against immigrants in Germany

Facebook posts containing anti-refugee rhetoric may be linked to rises in hate crimes against refugees in Germany, research has suggested.

Researchers from Oxford University Press found that a rise in anti-refugee posts on a far-reaching anti-immigration Facebook page were tightly associated with a spike in crimes perpetrated against refugees – particularly violent incidents such as assault.

While the researchers are not claiming that social media itself is directly responsible for causing crimes committed against refugees, they suggest that sites including Facebook may help to propagate violent crimes by acting as a platform for extreme opinions.

The report, published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, examined posts made on the Facebook page of far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

The AfD has rapidly become the most popular far-right political movement in the country since its foundation in 2013, and has more than 300,000 Facebook followers and a wider reach than any other German party, the report found.

German municipalities with AfD users were three times more likely to experience an anti-refugee attack during the time the team monitored posts and crimes, with 3,171 out of the total 3,335 attacks on refugees occurring in areas with AfD Facebook page users, it claimed.

This correlation disappeared when either Facebook or the wider internet was affected by outages, either locally or across Germany. During weeks when areas experienced Facebook outages, the number of posts related to refugees made on the AfD page fell by 24 per cent, suggesting that Facebook outages reduced the probability of a hate crime by 12 per cent.

Fall in hate crimes

“We think our paper can only be a starting point for understanding how social media causes changes in our lives,” said Karsten Müller, one of the paper’s researchers.

“It would be crucial to have additional empirical evidence. Our findings on hate crime suggest that the stakes are high.”

The findings echo those of an earlier 2018 study that discovered German towns with an above-average use of Facebook experienced more violence against refugees.

“Right-wing anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts violent crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage,” its authors wrote.

“Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online hate speech and real-life violent crime.”