A Reimlinger founded the public Nördlinger WhatsApp group from Fridays For Future. What moves Walter Price and how the chat of the Oettinger group was taken over by moped fans
FromMatthias Link
A global demonstration day of the Fridays For Future movement (FFF) will take place on Friday, March 19. Also in the public Nördlinger WhatsApp group of
Fridays for Future there is a call to participate in the demonstrations. Whether it is also in
Nördlingen there will be an event is still unclear. Walter Price, the initiator of the chat group, could imagine holding a rally. Unlike in the neighboring cities of the region,
Donauwörth and Aalen, FFF in Nördlingen still has few supporters. But who are the founders of the Nördlinger WhatsApp group from FFF and how did the group come about?
Walter Price is 54 years old and comes from
Reimlingen. In December 2019, he founded FFF’s public WhatsApp group, which anyone can join. He is one of the administrators. He only founded the group, he says, because someone has to take the initiative. He wanted to lower the inhibition threshold for young people, but so far without success. The group currently has eleven members. Price would like committed young people to take over and continue the group, because he would “like to pass the baton on”. Among the members of the Nördlinger group there are apparently also FFF activists from other parts of Bavaria who want to be networked. If you look at the recent chat messages, you will mainly find calls for petitions, television notices, letter campaigns, web seminars on photovoltaic systems, photos and news from climate policy – or, as is now the case, efforts to get a demonstration or rally off the ground. The WhatsApp groups are a central medium through which the local and regional groups of FFF are organized, via www.fridaysforfuture.de it is possible to find the Nördlinger group and the corresponding invitation link.
At 54 years of age, Walter Price is far removed from the young people who support the FFF movement worldwide, but he shares the ecological idea. Of the members of the Nördlingen FFF chat group, Price only knows two more personally.
Together, the three originally come from the “Donau-Ries Alliance 100% Renewables by 2030”. The goal of this citizens’ movement is “the complete, decentralized, citizen-oriented renewable energy transition by 2030 at the latest”, as stated on the alliance’s website. The alliance has an essential common goal with FFF: compliance with the Paris Climate Agreement, in particular the 1.5 degree target. The three activists are also linked by the solar energy development association.
Price founded the Nördlinger FFF chat group after experiencing a disaster in the Oettinger FFF chat group. The Oettinger Group, Price recalls, was supported by young people, but moped fans were able to get an administrator account in November 2019 when there were problems with spam bots. These are computer programs that automatically distribute advertising messages on the Internet and in chat groups. The moped fans then threw the other administrators out and posted numerous photos of their mopeds – a hostile takeover of the group. Price then left the chat group and founded his own for Nördlingen, even if it had not been very popular so far. It looks different in Donauwörth. There the FFF chat group has 65 participants and local politicians like Albert Riedelsheimer are among them. The Ostalb group (Aalen, Ellwangen and Schwäbisch Gmünd) even has 197 members.
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