Domestic terrorismWhite Nationalist groups growing much faster than ISIS on Twitter
The number of White Nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers on Twiter had multiplied more than 600 percent in the last four years — outpacing ISIS in all social media aspects, from the number of follower counts to the number of daily tweets, a new study found. The study’s author notes that ISIS has gained a reputation for effectively using Twitter for propaganda and recruitment, but that White Nationalist groups have excelled even more in exploiting the medium. The report says that unlike the campaign Twitter has been conducting against ISIS, White Nationalists are continuing to use the service with “relative impunity.”
Flag of the Nationalist Socialist Movement // Source: wikipedia.org
The number of White Nationalists and self-identified Nazi sympathizers on Twiter had multiplied more than 600 percent in the last four years — outpacing ISIS in all social media aspects, from the number of follower counts to the number of daily tweets, a new study found.
“White Nationalists and Nazis outperformed ISIS in average friend and follower counts by a substantial margin,” the report said. “Nazis had a median follower count almost eight times greater than ISIS supporters, and a mean count more than 22 times greater.”
Reuters reports that the Program in Extremism at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber & homeland Security analyzed eighteen accounts of major White Nationalist groups and organizations such as the American Nazi Party, the National Socialist Movement, and other organizations, most of them located in the United States.
The accounts analyzed saw a significant increase in followers — from about 3,500 in 2012 to 22,000 in 2016. The study’s author notes that ISIS has gained a reputation for effectively using Twitter for propaganda and recruitment, but that White Nationalist groups have excelled even more in exploiting the medium.
The report also notes the decline in ISIS’s influence on the social media platform as Twitter continues to block the accounts of the Islamist group and its followers. The company said that in August it shut down about 360,000 accounts since the middle of 2015 for what the company regarded as threatening or promoting terrorism.
The report says that unlike the campaign Twitter has been conducting against ISIS, White Nationalists are continuing to use the service with “relative impunity.”
“On Twitter, ISIS’s preferred social platform, American White Nationalist movements have seen their followers grow by more than 600 percent since 2012,” the study states. “Today, they outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day.”
A representative for Twitter referred a Reuters journalist inquiring about the report to the company’s terms of service that prohibit “hateful conduct.”
One reason for the dramatic rise in White Nationalist following and posting on Twitter is the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. The study found that White Nationalist users are “heavily invested” in the Republican candidate, whose policy positions and rhetoric White Nationalists find appealing. Tweets mentioned Trump more than other popular topics among the White Nationalist groups.
Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke has gone beyond using Twitter to promote Trump, to record a get-out-and-vote robo-call message to tens of thousands of followers across the country.
The GW study notes that “White Nationalist users referenced Trump more than almost any other topic, and Trump-related hashtags outperformed every white nationalist hashtag except for #whitegenocide within the sets of users examined,” the report says. “White genocide” is the belief that non-white immigrants arriving in the United States – and the support they receive from government policies — are dooming the “white race” to extinction.
“Social media activists tweeted hundreds of times per day using repetitive hashtags and slogans associated with this trope,” the study says.
The study also says that findings suggest that racist violence related to the White Nationalist movement – for example, the killing by Dylann Roof of nine African Americans at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina — has “increasingly been tied to online activity.”
The study notes that links to violence notwithstanding, Twitter finds it challenging to limit the use of the platform by White Nationalists because their communities are “less cohesive than ISIS networks, and less concentrated on Twitter,” and because such use raises freedom of speech questions.
“While the extreme violence of ISIS has understandably elevated concerns about the threat the organization presents, other extremist groups are able to watch its success and learn from its tactics, both on social media and offline,” the report says. “Studies of ISIS activity, while useful, examine only a fraction of the violent extremist landscape.”
Thus, Twitter did not try to stop the ugly racist attacks by White Nationalists on Leslie Jones, following the July release of the “Ghostbusters” reboot.
— Read more in J. M. Berger, Nazis vs. ISIS on Twitter: A Comparative Study of White Nationalist and ISIS Online Social Media Networks (GW Program in Extremism, September 2016); also see J. M. Berger, Without Prejudice: What Sovereign Citizens Believe (GW Program in Extremism, June 2016); and J. M. Berger and Heather Perez, The Islamic State’s Diminishing Returns on Twitter: How suspensions are limiting the social networks of English-speaking ISIS supporters (GW Program in Extremism, February 2016)
