Sharp rise in neo-Nazis using social networks

German neo-Nazis are looking increasingly to social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube to propagate racial hatred and recruit new members, an official study released Thursday indicated.

The Federal Agency for Political Studies said around 6,000 far-right posts had been found on social networks in Germany last year, about three times as many as in 2009.

Agency chief Thomas Krueger told reporters as he presented the findings that the use of such websites by right-wing extremists had “escalated dramatically”.

“We must not give ground to the far right and their hate propaganda,” he said.

Krueger said the sites themselves must clean house and do a more thorough job of enforcing their own rules of conduct with the help of other users who alert them when offensive videos and slogans appear.

“We need users who defend our fundamental values and fight off neo-Nazis,” he said.

Stefan Glaser, the head of the division studying the far right at jugendschutz.net, a group seeking to crack down on the problem on the Internet, said neo-Nazis often tried to mask their racist content with coded messages.

He cited a recent video showing men in white masks carrying flaming torches through the deserted streets of a town at night, which he said was a warning of a purported “death of the German people” due to immigration.

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the main domestic intelligence service, said in a report this month that the number of right-wing extremists in Germany had fallen by 1,600 last year to some 25,000 nationwide.

But those judged potentially violent rose by 600 to 5,600.

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Google Plus steadily gaining ground in social networking space

BOSTON: Google’s latest offering ‘ Google Plus’ is steadily gaining ground in the social networking space, so far dominated by Facebook , with the internet giant’s social network attracting about 20 million visitors in the initial three weeks and nearly half of these visitors hailing from US and India .

According to estimates by research firm ComScore, Google Plus had 19.93 million unique visitors between June 29 and July 19 period.

The top two countries in this estimate are the US and India. Of the 19.93 million visitors, 5.31 million were from the US and 2.85 million from India.

Another 0.87 million users came from the UK, 0.71 million from Germany and 0.50 million from France.

“I have never seen anything grow this quickly,” vice president of industry analysis at ComScore Andrew Lipsman said.

Google Plus, launched on June 28, is Google’s answer to rival Facebook.

It lets users post photos, messages, comments and other content from a selected groups of friends.

The service was started as a field trial and the project is by invitation only, which means people can join only if a current member invites them.

Eventually, Google plans to incorporate features of Google Plus in its other services, such as its YouTube video site.

Google CEO Larry Page had last week said that Google Plus had more than 10 million users.

Page said there are “more opportunities for Google today than ever before”.

It will be some time before Google catches up with Facebook’s scale of more than 750 million users. The other popular micro-blogging site Twitter has more than 200 million registered accounts.

Through ‘Google Plus’, the internet giant aims to garner a share in the lucrative social networking space that has so far been dominated by the Mark Zuckerberg led popular site.

The service has features like ‘Circles’, ‘Sparks’, ‘Hangouts’ and ‘mobile’.

Through Circles, Google targets Facebook’s features in which a user’s information is shared by default with a large number of his or her friends including their work colleagues and acquaintances, rather than only their close personal friends.

Its “Huddle” feature lets users send text messages to several different people at once, known as group texting.

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