Belgian far-right MP Dries Van Langenhove, who as an independent is part of the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang group in the Chamber, was the man responsible for creating troves of racist and sexist posts in online chat groups of the extreme-right student group Schild & Vrienden, revealed an investigation on Thursday, reported Mediahuis newspapers.
Van Langenhove and 11 of his associates will know on Friday if they will receive penalties for violating Belgium's anti-racism laws, after a report from public broadcaster VRT in 2018. In March 2021, Van Langenhove's parliamentary immunity was lifted.
An IT expert was able to recover 70,000 messages from Schild & Vrienden, a student group Langenhove founded. These messages were quickly deleted from Facebook and the social messaging service Discord by the group after VRT exposed them in 2018 for promoting neo-Nazi ideology and memes related to the alt-right in the US.
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Van Langenhove denied the claims and used the publicity to gather support from young far-right supporters. While officially he remains independent, Vlaams Belang recruited him on their list of candidates in one of Flanders' constituencies.
He is a hugely popular figure amongst Vlaams Belang voters, with many young, male voters flocking to him during Belgium's last elections in 2019, which saw the group win 18.5% of voters in Flanders, a 12.6 point uptake compared to the 2014 elections.
Political advertising on social media
Facebook and other social media platforms have boosted the far-right in Flanders by allowing the group to find potential voters and target them with political advertising. In the past, Facebook/Meta has come under fire for its collection of user data without people's consent as well as how it sells this data to third parties, who then show these users ads based on their user profiles.
VRT reporting revealed that Vlaams Belang alone spent almost as much on Facebook/Meta and Google as all the other Flemish parties together.
The EU is in the process of implementing laws that will curb disinformation and political advertising on platforms in its Digital Services Act. A draft report is under way between the Parliament and the Council that will consider transparency and targeting of political advertising.
