Telepolis

German internet publication with a focus on (geo)politics

 https://www.telepolis.de/  
Started: 1996
Founders: Armin Medosch, Florian Rötzer

Owner: Heise

Telepolis is a German Internet magazine founded by journalists Armin Medosch and Florian Rötzer and owned by the media conglomerate Heise Medien, with a focus on privacy, science, culture, internet-related and general politics and geopolitics. Harald Neuber took over as editor-in-chief in January 2021; In December 2024 all articles published before 2021 were removed to be put through "quality control", by which almost a quarter of a century of reporting was deleted.

The move might be related to the building up of military infrastructure around Europe, to complicate the search for arguments against US imperialism by German speaking peace activists.

History

Telepolis published a lot of articles after 9-11 that were skeptical and pointed out the inconsistencies of the official narrative. During the time it was headed by Florian Rötzer, it's editorial policy was generally very critical of US wars in the Middle East.

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."

Deletion of archive

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'".

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".

Quincy Institute

Telepolis publishes translated articles by the Quincy Institute.

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