Franziska Brandmann, the chairwoman of the Young Liberals, has founded a start-up to curb hate online and prosecute more perpetrators. The company has already won prominent clients in the pilot phase.
For Roderich Kiesewetter, hate messages like this are everyday life: “Kiesewetter should be hung up immediately. Vermin have to go.” “If I meet you asshole on the street, you’re dead, motherfucker.”
The CDU member of the Bundestag receives insults and death threats every day via email and on social networks. Especially since the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022, the Moscow-critical foreign politician has been showered with insults. He has repeatedly reported individual hate messages, so far with little success.
Malice on the internet is sadly normal. It is not easy for victims to defend themselves. Investigations are lengthy, if you want to prosecute perpetrators it is expensive, and the sheer amount of hatred and agitation is too much for many people.
“A systematic problem with hate online”
Franziska Brandmann wants to change that. She has often been extremely insulted online. Shortly after she was elected federal chairwoman of the Young Liberals in 2021, she experienced her first shitstorm. Brandmann had criticized a television program for sexist statements and was then showered with misogynistic hate comments on Twitter, Instagram and by email.
She was shocked, felt powerless, but was ultimately not prepared to simply accept it. “There is a systematic problem with hate online, but no systematic solutions. That’s why we have now founded a company to systematically address it.”
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With two friends – the data scientist Marcel Schliebs and the lawyer Alexander Brockmeier – Brandmann developed an AI-supported concept to filter out criminally relevant comments from a mass of hate messages and quickly report them.
The three founders called their start-up “So Done” – a play on words that is intended to express that they have had enough of hate and the fact that many perpetrators get away with impunity – and want to solve the problem themselves.
According to Brandmann, they trained their AI software on German criminal law and, among other things, manually evaluated more than 250,000 tweets. The idea: Victims no longer have to wade through masses of hate to find the comments that are actually actionable. Instead, they get a relevant selection and can then decide what they want to display.
1000 criminal complaints per month
Victims of online hate were already able to get help before. Non-profit organizations such as Hate Aid have reported several hundred insults every year and have also successfully warned or sued perpetrators. What’s special is the volume that “So Done” processes: The start-up currently submits around 1,000 criminal complaints per month. It bundles criminal complaints and reports them to the responsible public prosecutor’s office or police authority using standardized procedures.
In the pilot phase since 2023, the trio has gained 50 clients – including federal ministers such as Robert Habeck from the Greens, the FDP defense politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the SPD MP Ralf Stegner and Hendrik Wüst, the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia from the CDU. The human rights activist Düzen Tekkal, the scientist Carlo Masala and the Hoffenheim professional soccer player Marius Bülter also get help from Brandmann’s company.
Roderich Kiesewetter is now also relying on this support. “So Done” has just sent 400 reports for him at once to the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) in Baden-Württemberg. This means a lot of investigative work for the authorities, reports Andreas Taube, senior criminal director in the LKA’s state security department. “It goes far beyond what we normally process. We have brought together staff to deal with this mass.”
The chances that perpetrators will be identified are not bad – if hate messages are reported quickly and with well-prepared evidence – for example legally compliant screenshots. According to Taube, in the past the rate was 70%. Brandmann confirms similar experiences.
Authorities overburdened?
However, through projects like “So Done,” the number of reports could continue to rise sharply – while many authorities are struggling with a lack of resources and staff. “We’re still managing it at the moment,” says LKA state security officer Taube, “but of course it’s a challenge.”
The start-up founders now want to open their offer to other affected people. They finance their concept through warnings and civil lawsuits. “So Done” will receive fifty percent of any possible monetary compensation. “The charming thing about it,” says Brandmann, “is that the perpetrators pay us in the end.”
They also use the money for new lawsuits; financing legal costs is part of the entrepreneurial risk. This means: if perpetrators cannot pay, “So Done” gets nothing, even though the company pays in advance and the whole thing is free for the victims. So far it’s working, says the founding trio.
It publishes successful cases on its website – for example, a perpetrator was sentenced to pay 1,000 euros to a client for the insult “used lobby whore”, and 600 euros were due for an “asshole”. Money that is intended to hurt and also serve as prevention: Brandmann emphasizes that it is not primarily about maximizing profits, but rather “deterring the perpetrators.”