Investigations

Campact Asked 90 German Companies to Boycott 62 YouTube Channels for Hate Speech. It Won't Explain How It Picked Them.

Image AI generated.

In mid-August 2026, letters started arriving at the corporate communications departments of roughly 90 German companies — Aldi Süd, Edeka, dm, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Rewe, Booking among them. The sender was Campact, a left-leaning campaign group best known for online petitions, and the letters came with an attachment: a list of 62 YouTube channels the organization had decided were spreading hatred, disinformation, or support for the far-right AfD, and a request to stop advertising on all of them. Within a week, nearly 30 companies said yes.

Campact built the list itself, sorted the channels into its own categories — "AfD," "right-populist," "right-extremist," "conspiracy-ideological" — and mailed the results to advertisers as a fait accompli, not a public methodology. For some names on it, the case is straightforward: state domestic-intelligence agencies got there first. For others, the entire file appears to be a single video, or a report written by the NGO the channel had spent months criticizing.

The Adwatch Campaign

Campact calls the operation Adwatch. Around 15,000 volunteers used a tool the organization built to record which ads ran before videos on roughly 60 YouTube channels, ranging from small operations with 10,000 subscribers to ones pulling 800,000. The volunteers logged about 40,000 ad appearances. Campact then wrote to the companies that showed up most often, telling them their brand was funding, in the words of campaign lead Friederike Gravenhorst, content next to "hate, incitement, and conspiracy theories" that "no company would voluntarily place its logo next to."

62 channels named on the final list, sent to about 90 companies in mid-August 2026
Campact attributes 44 of the 62 to the AfD "Vorfeld" — the party's orbit of politicians, staffers, and affiliated media
The remaining 18 are labeled "right-populist," "right-extremist," or "conspiracy-ideological," including Nius, Tichys Einblick, the Swiss outlet Weltwoche, Epoch Times, and the Austrian channel AUF1
Companies were given a matter of days, not weeks, to respond before Campact's public tally of who had complied

One Interview, Five Years of Work

Jasmin Kosubek runs an interview channel she has built over five years, hosting guests across the political spectrum — left, liberal, conservative, right, academics, people directly affected by the topics she covers. She found out her channel was on Campact's list the same way the companies did: by reading it. Nobody from Campact had contacted her. The channel's classification as AfD-adjacent traces, by her account, to a single episode — a conversation with Götz Kubitschek, a publisher associated with Germany's New Right movement — lifted out of hundreds of hours of programming and treated as a verdict on the rest of it.

Kosubek is not alone in that description. Reporting on the list by Die Welt, which obtained and published it in full, found that for a number of entries the paper could not identify "nachvollziehbare Kriterien oder eine konkrete Beweisführung" — comprehensible criteria or concrete evidence — beyond a source citation that ranged from an individual clip to a claim made by another advocacy organization.

The Evidence Was a Report About Itself

Apollo News, an online outlet on the list, provides a specific illustration of that sourcing problem. Its editor-in-chief, Max Mannhart, says the outlet has repeatedly criticized the AfD itself, particularly the party's pro-Russian foreign policy positions, and has drawn attacks from AfD politicians as a result. Campact's basis for classifying Apollo News as part of the AfD periphery traces to a report from the Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung, an NGO whose own coverage Apollo News had previously criticized — meaning the evidence for the classification was, in effect, an assessment written by the subject of the outlet's reporting. Mannhart called pressuring advertisers to defund an outlet's operating budget "eine abstoßende Methode, die sich gegen den Gedanken der Pressefreiheit wendet" — a repugnant method that runs counter to the idea of press freedom.

A Few Days to Decide

Campact announced on August 24, 2026 that close to 30 companies had responded to its letter, split into two groups.

Already committing to adjust their YouTube blocklists: Aldi Süd, Kleinanzeigen, Indeed, XXXLutz, DEVK, Constantin Film, Wolt, Bergfreunde, Immowelt, Euronics, Axa, Berliner Wasserbetriebe, Milram, dm, Immoscout, Edeka, Flixtrain, Bifi, Klosterfrau, and Procter & Gamble
Reviewing the request: Miniatur Wunderland, LG Electronics, Krombacher, Sparkasse, Sumup, Lenor, Rewe, Booking, and Samsung

None of the responding companies conducted their own review of the 62 individual classifications before agreeing to act on the list. The letters gave them little room to: Campact's own materials describe a short response window built into a campaign that was already generating press coverage of which brands had and hadn't complied.

The Kellner Exception

Not every entry on the list is contested. Tim Kellner, a YouTuber with a large following, was named in North Rhine-Westphalia's 2023 domestic-intelligence report as a figure the state's Verfassungsschutz was monitoring within the right-extremist spectrum, and researchers at the Jena Institute for Democracy and Civil Society have independently catalogued his content as nationalist and conspiracy-oriented. That is a documented classification made by a public authority, not a Campact judgment call — and it sits on the same 62-name list as channels whose only cited "evidence" is a single video or a rival organization's report, with no distinction drawn between the two kinds of case.

A Lawsuit From the Milk Aisle

The Adwatch list is not the only Campact effort facing a legal challenge over how loosely it draws its lines. Theo Müller, the 86-year-old chairman of the dairy company that bears his name, is suing Campact over a separate 2026 poster campaign — 28,000 posters across 14 cities and 2.2 million stickers reading "Alles AfD, oder was?," a parody of Müller's own advertising slogan — which Müller's lawyers call a false factual claim that he bankrolls the AfD. The campaign followed Müller calling AfD leader Alice Weidel "a friend" after meeting her at the Bayreuth Festival. Müller says he has been a CSU member for 30 years and is not, and has no wish to be, an AfD member. Campact has declined to retract, arguing that Müller's public praise for Weidel amounts to material support for the party regardless of formal membership — the same reasoning, treating association as equivalent to endorsement, that put Kosubek's interview channel on the Adwatch list.

The Organization Doing the Judging

Campact finances itself entirely through donations — 24.6 million euros in 2024, from over 4.5 million supporters, with no state or party funding. It is not a small operation, and it is not new to legal fights: a Hamburg regional court ruled in January 2026 that the Nius outlet, one of the 62 channels on the Adwatch list, had to stop repeating false claims it had made about Campact's own funding. The organization has also lost fights of its own making. In October 2019, the Berlin tax office withdrew Campact's charitable status, citing a Federal Fiscal Court ruling against the similarly structured NGO Attac, on the grounds that Campact's day-to-day campaigning served ongoing political influence rather than the general political education a "gemeinnützig" designation is meant to fund. Campact had to repay roughly 300,000 euros in back taxes as a result.

Companies do not get 300,000-euro tax bills for taking a campaign group's word for it. They get a letter, a deadline measured in days, and a public tally of who complied — and for at least one video, one report, and one five-year body of work, that was the entire evidentiary record behind the request.

Filed from public reporting:

Campact Asked 90 German Companies to Boycott 62 YouTube Channels for Hate Speech. It Won't Explain How It Picked Them.

The Adwatch Campaign

One Interview, Five Years of Work

The Evidence Was a Report About Itself

A Few Days to Decide

The Kellner Exception

A Lawsuit From the Milk Aisle

The Organization Doing the Judging

Read more

A Hand-Tightened Blind Flange and a Botched Shift Handover Killed 167 Men on Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha Platform in 22 Minutes. No One at the Company Was Ever Criminally Charged.

Netflix Spent Six Years Telling Customers Love Is Sharing a Password. Once It Started Charging $7.99 a Month Per Shared Password Instead, Subscriber Growth Hit Its Best Year Since the Pandemic.

New York Paused Congestion Pricing for 'Affordability' Weeks Before a 2024 Election, Then Relaunched It at a Lower Price Once Voting Was Over. A Year Later, Traffic Was Down 11 Percent and the Federal Government Was Still in Court Trying to Kill It.

Twitter Cut Off the Third-Party Apps That Built Its Developer Ecosystem in January 2023 With No Warning. One of Those Apps Coined the Word Tweet and Designed Twitter's Bird Logo Before Twitter Had Either.