At a Glance

Thorsten Koch, MA, PgDip has been a writer and researcher since the year 1995. As a journalist, Koch has made a career in, successively, the fields of regional, IT, financial and economic, as well as in political reporting. What is more, Koch has been an NGO manager and consultant since 1996. He served, among other roles, as a Senior Expert on Mauritania for Amnesty International.

From 2017 onward, Koch has engaged in the fields of soft counter-extremism and countering hate speech, chiefly by making use of the LinkedIn platform, where he has built a large following and with his respective posts attaining around 2,000 impressions per day.

To date, the non-profit initiative Policyinstitute.net maintains four project websites:

Emphasis is placed on soft counter-extremism, on means to avert hate speech and to grapple with disinformation, so to help stakeholders implement soft solutions in order to maintain good order and democratic values.

de-news.net, on the other hand, first consisted of the two English-language news projects GermanPolicy.com and GermanCorrespondent.com. More recently, the website journal-allemand.com was established. It contains selected pieces of news about Germany in the French language.

Koch’s latest news venture is HightechBeyond.com. It carries the latest trends in electronics.

Portfolio at a glance:

  • journalism, media and communications
  • soft counter-extremism
  • preventing and countering hate speech
  • countering mis-/disinformation
  • capacity building in the north of Africa
  • IT testing and reporting
  • human rights

Underscoring Koch’s proficiency in his fields of expertise, he holds an MA in Mass Communications with Merit, a Postgraduate Diploma in Islamic Studies with Distinction, as well as a certificate equivalent to a CAS – with Honors – in Migration and Society.


 Further Reading: