Florian Rötzer

Florian Rötzer
Born	December 20, 1953 Landshut
Interests	Telepolis
German journalist. Former manager of [Germany's oldest independent online magazine Telepolis.]]

Florian Rötzer is a German journalist and book author. He co-founded and was editor-in-chief of the online magazine Telepolis (operated by the Heise publishing house) for nearly 25 years, starting in 1996, making it one of Germany's oldest Before that, he worked as a freelance author and publicist specializing in media theory and aesthetics and as an organizer of numerous international symposia.

Telepolis editorial change

Until 2020, under Rötzer, Telepolis, owned by the media conglomerate Heise Medien, covered a number of deep politics topics with relative freedom. According to Rötzer Telepolis was a "grey area in which the discourses of the majority can meet those of the minority, in which there is no exclusion, but integration, in which there is no information war, but a playful competition of opinions, which could also be called a discourse free of domination, as long as the truth is not prescribed, but sought. There can be missteps, there are false paths, perhaps even outlandish thoughts are promoted: it is the productive life of the agora, the foundation of democracy before any decision-making."

On January 1, 2024, Telepolis put a disclaimer on older articles before January 1, 2021. The articles were now introduced with a preamble: "This is an older post. The views, opinions and other statements expressed in this text may not correspond or no longer correspond to the current journalistic principles of Heise Medien and the Telepolis editorial team. For reasons of transparency, we will nevertheless leave the following article online. Further information on the work of Telepolis and the principles of our work can be found in our mission statement."

Telepolis editorial change

Until 2020, under Rötzer, Telepolis, owned by the media conglomerate Heise Medien, covered a number of deep politics topics with relative freedom. According to Rötzer Telepolis was a "grey area in which the discourses of the majority can meet those of the minority, in which there is no exclusion, but integration, in which there is no information war, but a playful competition of opinions, which could also be called a discourse free of domination, as long as the truth is not prescribed, but sought. There can be missteps, there are false paths, perhaps even outlandish thoughts are promoted: it is the productive life of the agora, the foundation of democracy before any decision-making."

On January 1, 2024, Telepolis put a disclaimer on older articles before January 1, 2021. The articles were now introduced with a preamble: "This is an older post. The views, opinions and other statements expressed in this text may not correspond or no longer correspond to the current journalistic principles of Heise Medien and the Telepolis editorial team. For reasons of transparency, we will nevertheless leave the following article online."

In 2024, Telepolis announced that it had completely deleted all articles published before 2021. In that year, the current editor-in-chief Harald Neuber took over the management of the magazine from his predecessor Florian Rötzer, who had founded Telepolis in 1996. As a justification for the massive deletion, which is estimated to have resulted in the loss of more than 50,000 articles, Neuber wrote that the texts were "initially taken from the archive" because "one could not guarantee their quality in a blanket way. In his statement, Neuber justified this with an assessment by the US (CIA-close) rating portal NewsGuard, which classifies Telepolis "with the full score as 'very credible'".

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Rötzer denounced the operation as "Stalinist cancel culture" that erases "almost 25 years of history, including the Internet, in order to adapt uncritically to the mainstream and in line with the market", in order to "correct or falsify history".

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