After my debacle with the Kubrick letter, I now have the chance to redeem myself. This one was not too difficult. It all started with a post on LinkedIn, which contained a link to this article.

The first thing I always do is to follow the links it contains. Of course, you have to be very stupid to link to a page which doesn't support your claim. Well, in this case it didn't. That made me suspicious, so I took a closer look. The words "racists" and "rapists" are very similar, which is peculiar for a hand-written sign. That couldn't be good.

In that case, refer to Google search. Simply issue the link and it will return all similar pictures. That did the trick. The original text reads "Will trade racists for refugees". It wouldn't be too hard to reproduce the image, but fortunately others have already done that for me.

So, yes, now we knew it was a fake. Other bloggers on the right wing of the political spectrum found out as well and eradicated their pages as quickly as they could.

But where did it come from? Who started all this? It took me about an hour to come up with a hypothesis. The American thread of this viral started with a post on "Red Alert Politics" - who got it from the Christian "ShoeBat.Com", by the way. Interesting enough, it contained a screenshot of a Facebook page - the same one "American Thinker" referred to.

It is not too difficult to fake a Facebook screenshot, but this forger wasn't very interested in covering his tracks - so why do such a time consuming edit? More so, I found several screenshots of the very same Facebook page in various places on the web - all consistent. This seems to confirm that the picture was actually posted there.

I thought it was time to take a closer look at that page. First, it was named "Rote Antifa Front", which was abbreviated to "RAF". That was the name of a German terrorist organization, the "Rote Armee Fraction". Second, there was no contact information whatsoever. Third, the page is now renamed to "Internationalsozialistische Antifa". Why should an organization rename itself overnight?

So I decided to work the other way around and track the German "Antifa" organization to see if I would bump into this page. But no. Never got there. But this one has the proper credentials. So the former was probably a "trolling page", created to discredit the "Antifa" movement.

The picture in question proved to be a lot older than both the links and the posts. This is probably its prototype.

So this is what probably happened. Someone creates the prototype shortly after the Cologne incident. It is picked up by somebody else, who does a quick edit and makes the picture in question. The "Antifa troll" thinks it is a nice addition to his or her collection and posts it. It is quickly picked up by "Red Alert Politics", who does no research whatsoever - and the whole thing goes viral.

But the scam is quickly discovered. The "Antifa troll" gets cold feet, takes it off Facebook and renames his site - which is still accessible by the old URL, by the way. Some right wing bloggers realize to their horror it is a hoax and go offline as quickly as they can. "ShoeBat.Com" simply reports it.

But it is too late. Because most of 'em pick up the news from secondary sources, the meme continues to spread. This is a clear example what happens when you blindly believe everything on the net and don't do your research properly!

If I - an amateur, for Pete's sake! - can do all this in a hour or so, I don't know why a professional journalist can't do this. Maybe it says a lot about the current state of investigative journalism - and is the future to dedicated bloggers.

And that's a shame. Because that means we will never see another Watergate. That's a real threat to democracy. No matter on which side of the political spectrum you are..

Update