• A man in Germany, known publicly only as Damian N., posts a short comment on X, calling government-funded workers “parasites.” The post is tiny. At the time he was raided, it had roughly a hundred views. Even now, it has only a few hundred.
• Despite the post’s obscurity, police arrive at Damian’s home at six in the morning. He says they did not show him the warrant and did not leave documentation of what they seized.
• Police pressured him to unlock his phone, confiscated it, took photos, fingerprints, and other biometric data, and even requested a blood sample for DNA.
• One officer reportedly warned him to “think about what you post in the future” and said he is now “under surveillance.”
• The entire action was justified under Section 130 of the German Criminal Code, which is meant to prohibit inciting hatred against protected groups.
• Government employees are not such a group, which makes the legal theory tenuous at best. Damian’s lawyer says the identification procedures and possibly the raid itself were illegal

Germany has built a sprawling ecosystem around “online hate”: specialized prosecutor units, NGO tip lines, and automated scanning for taboo keywords. The model is compliance first and legal theory second.

Once you create an apparatus like this, it behaves the way bureaucracies behave. It looks for work. It justifies resources by producing cases. A tiny X post with inflammatory language becomes a target because it contains the right keyword, not because it has societal impact.