Network-Enabled Anarchy: Excerpts from the Report

During opportune moments of vulnerability, these groups take advantage of social unrest over major events such as the COVID lockdowns and George Floyd’s killing. The target of much of the recent outrage in these events has been the most visible institutional manifestation of state authority and raw power: the police [4].

Extremists use opaque memes and coded language at a massive scale. They often communicate simultaneously across several web platforms as well as in the offline world. Our previous, bigdata approach in unveiling online emerging threats was rapid and proved effective. It helped to overcome the shortcomings of manual investigation (manual investigation involves individual researchers looking at links and investigating users one click at a rime) and qualitative characterization which, by themselves, cannot meet the challenge of analyzing such an enormous and multi-component system. Our research was the first to provide an in-depth characterization of the emerging threats against police by the extreme libertarian-anarchist movement, the Boogaloo; our assessment proved accurate, with terror attacks against law enforcement appearing only months after the report, including fatalities

To date, though there have been anecdotal claims of similarly organized, violent anti-fascist and anarcho-socialist extremism, those claims have not been clearly supported by evidence. We thus deployed the same mixed computational/open source investigation approaches that we used to uncover threats of libertarian anarchist violence in order to determine whether we could detect potential threats of anarcho-socialist extremism.

Our primary research question was whether memes and codewords, private or fringe online forums, and hybrid real-world/online militia—the three characteristic tactics that support outbreaks of extremist violence for both Jihadi and Boogaloo extremism—are also prevalent in anti-fascist and anarcho-socialist groups.

We articulate three specific aims to address this research question:

·  Do anarcho-socialist memes and codewords, like those of Jihadi, Libertatrian-anarchist, and white supremacist extremists groups, appear during episodes of political violence?

·  Are anarcho-socialists extremists employing fringe and private online forums to communicate and recruit followers in the same ways in which Jihadi groups and libertarian anarchists do?

·  Are there anarcho-socialist online/real-world hybrid militias and weapons enthusiast groups that mirror libertarian-anarchist extremist groups such as the Boogaloo which constitute a potential threat to the public and to law enforcement?

To analyze the use and prevalence of memes and other coded language and activity, we performed analyses on over ten million social media comments ranging from mainstream platforms (such as Twitter) to fringe online forums on Reddit. Throughout the research, we examined whether the same extremist themes and actions that are characteristic of both Jihadi and Boogaloo extremists—themes such as violent revolution, martyrdom, and having a utopian narrative, and actions such as terror attacks—are also found in extremist groups espousing anti-fascism and anarcho-socialism.

Topline Findings and Recommendations

·  Though these findings are preliminary and should serve as a basis for future research, we can draw several conclusions from what we discovered:

·  An online structure supporting anarcho-socialist extremism appears to be rapidly growing.

·  Many of the features of anarcho-socialist extremism seem to parallel the key tactical structures documented in libertarian-anarchist and Jihadi extremism: Use of memes, cloistering in fringe and private online forums and organizing militias.

·  The appearance of posts with anti-police outrage and/or memes and coded language increased over 1,000% on Twitter and 300% on Reddit in recent months during social justice protests.

·  Extreme anarcho-socialist fringe online forums on Reddit use memes calling for the death of police and memes for stockpiling munitions to promote violent revolution.

·  Extreme anarcho-socialist fringe online forums on Reddit underwent growth in membership and participation during the quarantine and recent social justice protests

·  Anarcho-socialist militias which explicitly glorify Martyr narratives, classic authoritarian narratives, and revolutionary narratives are now formally organizing—and are growing.

— Groups such as the Socialist Rifle Association have more than doubled in membership since quarantine.

·  We find evidence that both militia and anarchist networks play key roles in the recent social justice protests from controlling perimeters at CHAZ [CHOP] to coordinating nation-wide anarchist-inspired violent protests online.

·  We find evidence that regional feeds for highly interconnected anarcho-socialist militias and violent anarchist networks are proliferating rapidly across Twitter, Reddit and Facebook(.

·  We find evidence of innovative cyber strategies being used on Twitter by anarchist networks and shared by socialist forums on Reddit: for example, links for 3-D printed weapons, instructions for using laser technology to blind targets, and real-time online coordination of offline rioting and anti-police violence such as setting fires, throwing projectiles, and using fireworks/munitions.

·  We find evidence that violent anarcho-socialist networks played an active online role in preparing for and coordinating real world riots nation-wide and in real time.

Conclusions and Recommendations
This list of events scratches the surface of several such episodes over a nationwide escalation over the course of recent protests. Even as these sophisticated groups recruit members in uprisings, activists are voicing concern that protests are being increasingly overtaken by violent resistance to police and becoming less about the important work of social justice reform and racial equality. [36] Quarantine, economic hardship, social unrest, and ideological attacks against law enforcement provide extremists from white nationalist to anti-fascist with fodder for recruitment. Without tools for law enforcement to detect the planning and coordination of these cyber swarming events, police will be operating blind.

While this report is suggestive rather than conclusive, these data hint that insurgent behavior, stochastic terror and even attacks on vital infrastructure may be fomenting, and even indicate the possibility of a mass-casualty event. The need for regular, reliable and responsible reporting with methods such as those used in this briefing with similar computational techniques is now imperative.

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3. Network Contagion Research Institute, Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and Viral

Insurgency (February, 2020) (online at https://ncri.io/reports/cyber-swarming-memetic-

warfare-and-viral-insurgency-how-domestic-militants-organize-on-memes-to-incite-violent-

insurrection-and-terror-against-government-and-law-enforcement/).

4. Network Contagion Research Institute, COVID-19, Conspiracy, and Contagious Sedition

(June 2, 2020) (online at www.ncri.io/reports/covid-19-conspiracy-and-contagious-sedition-

a-case-study-on-the-militia-sphere/)

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10. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-charged-deputy-ambush-scrawled-

extremist-boogaloo-phrases-blood-n1230321

11. https://www.wsj.com/articles/alleged-followers-of-boogaloo-movement-face…

linked-to-protests-11592920008

….

36. apnews.com/96be8a461ab0f3886fc1723607c926e7