Who decides what counts as hate speech on the German internet? And who pays for it? A look at the Alfred Landecker Foundation reveals a network that simultaneously funds Germany’s most influential “extremism monitor” — and an AI designed to detect hate speech automatically.
The Foundation#
The Alfred Landecker Foundation was established in 2019 by Peter Harf, the long-serving head of JAB Holding — the investment company of the Reimann family, known for brands like Jacobs coffee, Douwe Egberts, and Krispy Kreme. The foundation is named after Alfred Landecker, a Jewish merchant murdered during the Nazi era. Its stated mission: Holocaust remembrance, combating antisemitism, strengthening democracy.
On the foundation board sits, among others, Joschka Fischer — former Foreign Minister, Green Party veteran, and Senior Strategic Advisor since 2008.
Funding #1: CeMAS — €2.8 Million#
As exclusive founding funder, the Landecker Foundation financed the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS) from 2021 to 2024 with €2.8 million. A further “substantial follow-on grant” followed.
CeMAS, led by Pia Lamberty, presents itself as a scientific authority against conspiracy ideologies and extremism. In practice, the institute is primarily known as a reliable agenda-setter for media and politics: whoever CeMAS labels a conspiracy theorist tends to appear in the next ARD report.
The criticism: Economic journalist Norbert Häring has sharply criticized CeMAS on multiple occasions — including Lamberty’s role during the Corona period. Häring accuses the institute of conducting scientifically cloaked defamation: CeMAS staff would “on demand vilify critics of the powerful as antisemites and conspiracy theorists using pseudoscientific jargon.”
Specifically, the criticism concerns Lamberty’s activities around the vaccination debate: anyone who raised questions about vaccine mandates or Corona measures risked being placed in the extremism corner by CeMAS.
Funding #2: “Decoding Antisemitism” — AI for Hate Speech Detection#
Less well known, but equally interesting: the Landecker Foundation also funded the project “Decoding Antisemitism” — an AI research project at the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at TU Berlin.
The project, launched in summer 2020 as a three-year pilot, aims to automatically detect antisemitic hate speech online — explicit and implicit, including irony, coded language, and veiled formulations. Partners included TU Berlin, HTW Berlin, King’s College London, and the HateLab Cardiff.
The question that arises: a single foundation simultaneously funds
- Germany’s leading “extremism monitor” (CeMAS), which influences political and media narratives
- an AI that automatically determines what counts as hate speech
This isn’t conspiracy theory material — these are publicly accessible funding structures.
What This Means#
One need not assume malicious intent to raise structural questions:
Who determines the training data? An AI that detects hate speech learns from examples — curated by humans. What ideology flows into that curation?
Who benefits? Platforms and authorities that deploy such tools delegate decisions about free expression to algorithms — whose underlying assumptions remain opaque.
Who watches the watchers? CeMAS is treated as a neutral scientific authority, yet is 100% dependent on a private foundation — which itself has a clear ideological mandate.
The Landecker Network is not a secret plan. It is publicly funded, publicly documented — and yet barely questioned.
Sources:
- Alfred Landecker Foundation, board: Wikipedia
- CeMAS follow-on funding: cemas.io
- CeMAS founding grant €2.8M: oppenhoff.eu
- Decoding Antisemitism (TU Berlin): depositonce.tu-berlin.de
- Decoding Antisemitism (Heise): heise.de
- Norbert Häring on CeMAS: norberthaering.de
