Dr Hans Jakob Schindler

It is very hard. The best guesstimate that you can make looking at what he has been communicating over the last couple of years is that He really belongs into this conspiratorial narrative category of extremists, which had been growing quite significantly since the Corona epidemic. And social media companies are really not doing anything against those people.

They are not quite effective in preventing Islamist terrorism content, which they know best. But conspiratorial narratives such as this, especially individualized conspiratorial narratives because he also felt personally persecuted by the German police, is something that these companies simply don't look at.

And the German security forces neither have the legal mandate nor the resources to monitor the entire Internet all the time.

Well, not necessarily, but he did say he is going to do an attack. He did say he's going to take revenge. So there were clear formulations. But the problem is – and this is going to be always a difficult thing of assessment for the security forces to go over –

Unfortunately, because the big social media companies, in this case X, where all of this material is, have not gotten better, but they've reduced their content monitoring capabilities and investments, you have so much hatred and so many fantasies of violence on the internet that it's really hard to distinguish what is just a person that is disturbed and just lives...

disturbed ideas out on the internet and which one of those is a person that then gets into a car and plows through a Christmas market.

That is the most fitting category when you say the police prosecutes me individually because I'm a critic of Islam and Germany as a society and the police attempt to Islamicize Europe. That is the kind of conspiracy narrative that denies the legitimacy of the system. That's the best fit. But he remains a very weird character.