I am fascinated by news agencies copying the official numbers from the police. I was there. We were stuck most of the time because even the large areas near the Reichstag were overcrowded. From what I can say I guess it was way closer to that 250k of people the organizers were talking about.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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The main difference between police and organiser numbers is generally that organisers measure how many came in total, which is what they care about, while police measure how many where present at the same time, because that's what they care about.
It's not some grand fucking conspiracy.
I don't see a conspiracy here, it's more like a bit of frustration of some parts of the press not doing their jobs. Fact checking police numbers is one of them.
Also: Speaking about "then thousands" at a protest gives another vibe than speaking about "hundred thousands" or "a quarter of a million" which is closer to the truth and makes a democratic protest seem smaller than it is.
The press is to blame, yes, but the issue is not fact checking but not ever explaining why those numbers generally don't match up. Could be as simple as "Police report 160k simultaneous protesters, organisers 250k total". Make it clear, with two simple words, that the method of counting is different and thus both numbers can be true at the same time. Because otherwise the reader is going to think "one of them is lying" while the numbers, at least in Germany, tend to be pretty spot-on.
Can we start a metric for measuring a protest size relative to its country population?
Then get some benchmarks from historical protests? Ex: famous civil rights protest had 0.8% population turnout.
Then you could say more objecively if a modern protest represents a historical turnout...
Germany's population is around 83 million, Berlin would be around 3.5 million. So 160k is a lot (4.5% of Berlin's citizens).
Further reference: the largest demo in Berlin was the protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and counted around 500,000 participants.
See that's useful information thank you
The protests in Berlin are not the only ones. According to rather conservative police estimates since beginning of this year around 870.000 people throughout Germany protested against the right shift/Afd and that would be around 1% of the whole population of the country.
If you’re trying to find out, for all practical purposes the US doesn’t protest. They just bitch online.
Lmao the sign on the left
It's genious.
Can you explain it for me? The aFd one? I know the AFD party of course
It looks like a dick and balls.
Oh, duh, that's fantastic