No depth goes unplumbed on the far-right forum 8chan. Its threads reveal a seething, toxic mass of rabid anti-semitism, neo-Nazism, Islamophobia, gratuitous violence, coded inside jokes and conspiratorial ravings published by anonymous users.
Nothing has changed in the days after the Australian alleged gunman Brenton Tarrant, 28, came to 8chan boasting of the imminent massacre in Christchurch.
Posts have since praised Tarrant as a “hero” and called for copycat attacks, or alternatively, denounced him as a pawn in a false flag conspiracy.
Describing itself as the “darkest reaches of the Internet,” 8chan is just one of a series of online forums populated by the extremist right.
Studies in the UK say that far-right forums are growing in number, giving a bigger platform to violent, racist messaging.
It begs the question: Why is it that users are flocking to the Internet’s abyss, and what roles do such forums play in radicalizing those in the far right, alongside newspapers, broadcasters, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook?
There are no simple answers.
Geoff Dean, a terrorism expert at Griffith University in Australia, has spent a large chunk of his career attempting to understand such forums, their role in radicalization and the ways security agencies can identify high-risk individuals — those most likely to move from rhetoric to action.
“It’s about all I think about,” he said.
The starting point for coming to far-right online groups, whether fringe forums or those on Facebook, is an attraction to extreme views; a tendency to view the world in black and white; and an inability to countenance opposing views, he said.
That could be encouraged by exposure to material in traditional media or from the divisive rhetoric of governments.
“A lot of people have extreme views; They’re black-and-white thinkers,” Dean said.
“It’s very simplistic. It’s either right or wrong. They don’t have any sophisticated way of knowing it, they believe the fake news,” he said.
“They get exposure in the mainstream media. It’s very easy for them to become attracted to a Facebook group, or a forum, or a page that reinforces that. People love to have their own ideas validated because it gives them a sense of self-worth and self-identity,” Dean said.
The forums are given potency by their ability to provide a sense of social connectedness among like-minded individuals and their tendency to become “echo chambers” — places where contrary views are not expressed in any form.
“All you’re doing is breathing the same stale air as the other people,” Dean said.
“That deepens their commitment, because if people spend a lot of time on forums like that, what happens is the repetitive going over things hardens their neural pathways to only think in extreme ways,” he said.
“People become attracted to it, they become obsessed by it, then they get fixated. At that point of fixation, that’s the most worrying point, because they get enough incitement from these forums to say: ‘Well now I’m going to do something about it,’” Dean said.
There can be little doubt that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have a problem with extreme, far-right messages. Studies, time and again, have shown that the algorithms employed by YouTube and Facebook push conspiracy theories and far-right propaganda into the feeds of users.
A report from research institute Data & Society last year found that YouTube had become a breeding ground for far-right radicalization.
Those already interested in conservative or libertarian ideas became exposed to white supremacy or extreme nationalist content, the report found.
The messaging was promulgated by the algorithm YouTube uses to recommend videos to individual users. There are also academics, media commentators and celebrities who promote a wide range of right-wing political positions.
“Discussing images of the ‘alt-right’ or white supremacism often conjures a sense of the ‘dark corners of the Internet,’” the report said.
“In fact, much extremist content is happening front and center, easily accessible on platforms like YouTube, publicly endorsed by well-resourced individuals and interfacing directly with mainstream culture,” it said.
Extreme, far-right content is similarly pervasive on Facebook.
A 2016 study by researchers at Griffith University, including Dean, examined the online presence of “new-style” radical far-right groups, and found that their Facebook messaging was spreading to tens of thousands of Australians.
For example, Reclaim Australia, at the time, had 63,593 Facebook subscribers and the United Patriots Front had 27,348, the study found.
In January, YouTube said that it would “begin reducing recommendations of borderline content that could misinform users in harmful ways.”
It cited flat-earth theories, Sept. 11, 2001, conspiracies and phoney miracle cures as examples.
Yet the Christchurch terror attack shows conspiratorial and far-right content is still spreading across YouTube and Facebook in considerable volume.
Australian National University radicalization expert Clarke Jones has extensively studied extremism in its various forms.
He said that the process of radicalization is complex and cannot be attributed to any single platform.
“To find an individual pathway or to blame one particular aspect is not really effective. You’ve got to be able to take a step back and look at what’s taken place from many different fronts,” Jones said.
Far-right radicalization is caused by a “melting pot” of factors, including exposure to far-right messaging online, he said.
Radicalization, he said, is as much about individual psychology and the mind’s resilience as it is about exposure to extremist content.
“Most people would have resilience to work through that or say what they feel on social media, as we’ve seen over the last three days on both sides since the attacks, but there are those who are less resilient, and who act it out,” he said.
In a speech to the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce on Monday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison reminded social media companies that they “carry social responsibilities.”
The government has already signaled it would seek to find ways to prevent Facebook from transmitting videos of the kind live-streamed in the Christchurch terror attack.
So far, Morrison has said little about attempting to counter the radicalization of individuals in far-right forums such as 8chan.
However, Joe Burton, a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, said that it is a critical lesson that must be learned in the wake of the Christchurch attack.
The task is difficult, because when such forums are shut down, they simply “go dark,” moving behind encrypted platforms, out of the reach of security agencies or tech companies, he said.
Nonetheless, Burton said that it is a problem that must be addressed to combat far-right extremism.
“The spread of fake news and propaganda on the Internet creates a perfect platform to increase fear, anger and anxiety,” Burton wrote in a piece for The Conversation.
“These are the psychological conditions from which acts of violence are committed,” he said.
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