TikTok guru fakes advertising videos for the party

A supposed AfD TikTok guru is calling for videos of strangers to be used for AfD advertising posts. Now the AfD and the “Identitarian Movement” are distancing themselves from him.

New trouble in the AfD: A social media expert close to the party is calling on people to fake TikTok videos online. Users are supposed to upload posts of women and girls who are actually dancing to other music and add an AfD song to them. The goal: to fake a social media trend and advertise the party. The man behind the idea used to work for Maximilian Krah and is considered a staunch supporter of the party.

Party youth accounts have been enthusiastically sharing the young women’s videos on social media in recent days. A British dancer is one of the victims of the hoax and is reacting indignantly: “I am absolutely disgusted and feel violated.”

Behind the action is clearly a man who is considered one of the brains behind the AfD’s success on TikTok, but whose activities are now becoming too much for the AfD: Erik Ahrens, a kind of TikTok guru who puts himself on a par with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

Ahrens used to work for Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s top candidate for the European elections, and had set up a self-selected “TikTok Guerrilla” as a channel on the short message app Telegram. He taught activists how they could help Krah’s videos gain more visibility. To date, Ahrens provides more than 2,000 members of the channel with tips on how to create pro-AfD content and attract attention with it.

But with his latest instructional video, he may have gone too far: In it, he explains in detail how popular TikTok dance videos from other users can be modified and given a song that promotes the AfD – without regard for the copyright and personal rights of the TikTokers who originally posted the dances online.

Specifically, the aim is to make the song “Germany needs the AfD” more popular among young people. The song has been circulating on social networks since June. With appropriate images, the network algorithms are designed to show the song to as many users as possible. One ulterior motive says a lot about the image of women: “Women are strongly influenced by peer pressure. If girls see a lot of videos like this, they end up actually doing it,” says Ahrens’ video on the Telegram channel. A trend is to be born with the help of fake videos.

Ahrens therefore shows “how to make such videos yourself”. He goes on to say: “Then you can shit all over the internet.” First, he advises looking for a “video of some girl dancing” on YouTube. Girls who don’t sing in their videos are apparently a little safer from such abuse. Ahrens: “If they were singing, it would be stupid with their lips, then you’d be more likely to notice that it’s fake.”

He then demonstrated how he simply downloads a short video of a dancing young woman, re-edits it with minimal effort and puts the AfD song over it. The AfD advert is ready, with an attractive young woman dancing enthusiastically to the AfD rhythms. “That’s enough, people believe that,” he says. He has already written on the X platform: “That we are indoctrinating German young people with right-wing ideology and are really getting goosebumps.”

For his instructions, he uses a video by Lizzie Clark from Leeds, England. She told t-online on Monday: “I am absolutely disgusted and appalled that the AfD is using my content to advertise itself.” In the original, she dances to a completely different melody – the “Friendships Song” by Pascal Letoublon with the chorus “I lose my love to you.” The influencer reported that it makes her “sick” that her picture is now being used together with the “hateful views” of the AfD. “I absolutely do not agree with the views of these right-wing extremist fascists.” Neither Ahrens nor anyone else from the AfD asked her.