Tens of thousands of posts on TikTok use Nazi speeches and marching music

An investigation by Sky News has found more than 72,000 posts on the social media platform TikTok containing recordings of Nazi speeches and marching music in videos, audios and soundtracks.

The investigation included a search of TikTok in early September that revealed 50,023 posts incorporating speeches by Adolf Hitler and other prominent Nazis, including Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels, all spouting antisemitic vitriol. To appeal to a younger and wider audience, the speeches were mostly set to a music genre called Drift Phonk that is popular on TikTok. It is understood that the music in the videos has been used without knowledge or permission of the creators.

Some 50 of the most popular posts had more than 13.7 million ‘likes’ between them.

One of the 72,534 posts consists of an Adolf Hitler speech with a face-paced soundtrack. In the speech, he claims that Jews are working to undermine peace in Europe. This compilation is available on more than 100 posts on TikTok. Another Hitler speech found by Sky News had been used in some 10,300 videos.

Other examples include a post that reportedly blames Jewish people for the ‘Islamisation of Europe’, while another post features an image of an interracial couple accompanied by text stating: “By mixing white with black, white disappears.”

Another post, featuring an image of a Nuremberg Rally accompanied by a Hitler speech, had been ‘liked’ by more than 56,000 users. Comments included “Modern society absolutely needs [Hitler],” which has been ‘liked’ 1,695 times. Another comment says of the Nazi leader: “We miss you.”

Sky also found a further 22,511 posts using sounds from the German marching song Erika. While Erika does not have explicitly political lyrics, it has strong associations with Nazi Germany. Its composer, Herms Niel, was a member of the Nazi Party and served as musical conductor at the Nuremberg rallies. Thousands of TikTok posts using Erika included images of Hitler, swastikas or the Nazi flag.

According to Sky’s analysis, videos using these compilations have attracted high levels of engagement by users of TikTok.

When contacted by Sky News, Pastel Ghost, an artist whose music was used in the creation of this content said that she was unaware that her music was being used in this way and found it “shocking and deplorable”.

A spokesperson for TikTok told Sky News that as soon as the videos had been brought to TikTok’s attention, the content had been “immediately removed for breaching our strict policies against hate speech”.

The spokesperson added: “We regularly train our safety professionals and update our safeguards to detect hateful behaviour on an ongoing basis, and we remove 91% of this type of content before it is reported to us.”

Campaign Against Antisemitism has long called for tougher regulations on social media sites and that social networks proactively search for and remove hate speech from their platforms.