'Nazi Shazam' App Combats Far-Right Music

Germany clamps down on banned songs
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 4, 2013 12:10 AM CST
'Nazi Shazam' App Combats Far-Right Music
A far-right protester shouts in front of a line of riot police officers in Berlin earlier this year.   (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Want to stop neo-Nazis using music to spread hate? There's now an app for that. Police in Germany have developed a app dubbed "Nazi Shazam" which can detect banned far-right songs within seconds, Der Spiegel reports. The country's authorities have identified more than a thousand songs with racist or Nazi-praising lyrics and banned them from being accessed by people under 18. Police say the software will allow them to react instantly if banned songs are played at concerts, far-right gatherings, or on Internet radio stations.

Authorities consider hate songs a "gateway drug" to the far-right scene. "Music is indeed a weak spot through which young people can easily be recruited into neo-Nazi circles," a spokeswoman for the Network Against Nazis website tells the Guardian. "A song can plug teenagers straight into the ideology conveyed through the lyrics." The neo-Nazi songs span genres from punk to heavy metal to folk and even rap music. "We've come across pretty much everything but far-right swing bands," says an expert on the far-right. (More Germany stories.)

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