Extremists & social mediaWhite supremacists use social media aid, abet terror

Published 24 April 2019

Before carrying out mass shooting attacks in Pittsburgh and New Zealand, white supremacist terrorists Robert Bowers and Brenton Tarrant frequented fringe social networking sites which, according to a new study, serve as echo chambers for the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism and racism, and active recruiting grounds for potential terrorists.

Before carrying out mass shooting attacks in Pittsburgh and New Zealand, white supremacist terrorists Robert Bowers and Brenton Tarrant frequented fringe social networking sites which, according to a new study, serve as echo chambers for the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism and racism, and active recruiting grounds for potential terrorists.

The new study, the second in a series of reports co-authored by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, reveals for the first time how fringe social media sites such as Gab, 4 Chan, and 8chan act like virtual “round-the-clock white supremacist rallies” where hateful notions of Jews and other minorities are openly espoused and closely associated with violence as a solution.

ADL says that researchers analyzed millions of conversations on Gab, the site frequented by Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Bowers, and 8chan, the site favored by Christchurch mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant. The results showed disturbing patterns of increasingly hateful rhetoric after the shootings and also revealed linkages between hateful words and conspiratorial ideas about Jews, showing how these ideas spread and mutate across the platforms.

“The data we’ve gathered is the strongest evidence yet of how white supremacists are taking advantage of fringe online social networks to spread hate and encourage likeminded followers to head down the path to violence,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO and National Director. “Bowers and Tarrant were deeply conversant in the conspiratorial language of these echo chambers and used coded racist and anti-Semitic language to spread fear and attempt to recruit others into violent acts.”

The new study, Gab and 8chan: Terrorist Plots Hiding in Plain Sight, is being submitted into the record of the House Judiciary Committee hearing on white supremacy and extremist use of social media taking place today on Capitol Hill.

The ADL-NCRI study, which employed various data-mining techniques to identify and decode white supremacist rhetoric, analyzed approximately 36 million comments on Gab from August 2016 to January 2018. Researchers deployed machine learning algorithms and frequency analysis to map how strongly words of hate associate with one another and link together hateful and genocidal notions about Jews, migrants and minorities.