10 2GM Monday January 3 2022 | the times
News
The number of visits to hate-filled “in-
cel” forums, where users discuss raping
women, has increased more than six-
fold in nine months, data shows.
Since March, UK web traffic to three
of the largest incel — meaning involun-
tary celibate — websites has grown
from 114,420 monthly visits to 638,
in November, web traffic analysis by
The Times and the Centre for Counter-
ing Digital Hate (CCDH) has shown.
Users on the sites hailed Jake
Davison, who shot dead five people and
himself in Plymouth last year, as a hero
and called for “all women to be raped at
least once”.
The most extreme of the three sites,
incels.is, saw a spike in traffic after the
Plymouth shooting in August, rising
from 200,000 visits in July to 280,
in September. Davison frequently ref-
erenced incel terminology in YouTube
videos and had ranted that “women are
arrogant and entitled beyond belief”
days before the mass killing.
Two of the three sites are run by
Alexander Ash, a shadowy figure who
has previously contributed to academic
papers on the topic of incels.
Anne Speckhard, director of the
International Centre for the Study of
Violent Extremism, who collaborated
with Ash on a research paper, said she
later regretted it, having not realised
how extreme some of the material on
the forums was.
Ash declined to comment.
The term incel refers to those who
feel aggrieved by their inability to form
sexual relationships with women. Ini-
tially a diverse movement, it has co-
alesced around internet forums, where
men relate tales of sexual failure and
vent their fury against women. In
recent months, incels have delighted in
the spate of women being spiked with
needles while out at nightclubs.
Incel forums operate at the discre-
tion of the site’s hosting company,
unless the government has decided to
intervene.
The DNS [Domain Name System]
server provider for the incels.is site is
Cloudflare, an American web company
that has previously been criticised for
not banning websites with hate speech
content. The company has provided
services to at least seven terrorist orga-On the hoof The Duke of Buccleuch hunt encountered strong winds in Hawick on the Scottish borders on New Year’s Day. The Scottish government is consulting on whether to tighten the laws on hunting
CHRIS STRICKLANDnisations, including Al-
Shabaab, according to
the Huffington Post.
Imran Ahmed, chief execu-
tive of the CCDH, said that up to
this point incels had largely been treat-
ed as an eccentric internet subculture,
but called on tech companies to do
more in recognising and removingMassive rise in use of incel sites
that call for women to be raped
Tom Ball hateful content. He said: “Make no mis-
take, incel communities are bound to-
gether by an ideology which preaches
hatred of women, and has inspired
deadly real-world attacks. The web-
hosting services and other companies
who are enabling incels need to stop do-
ing business with disgusting hate
groups — or regulators, law enforce-
ment and legislators must and will step
in to protect the public.”
Jonathan Hall, Britain’s independent
reviewer of terrorism legislation, said it
was not yet possible to say whether
hateful incel content could be deemed
terrorism.
“There is a great deal of discussion
about the use of violence in the incel
world,” he said. “What’s hard for the
authorities is knowing if and when this
talk may result in real-world violence. If
there’s a run of terrorism convictions
relating to the incel ideology, it will be
easier to conclude that some incel prop-
aganda is illegal terrorist content.”
The draft Online Safety Bill will put a
duty on service providers to restrict “il-
legal content” and leaves it up to service
providers to decide what content it
would, and would not, be a terrorism of-
fence to disseminate.
Adam Hadley, execu-
tive director of Tech
Against Terrorism, a
UN initiative work-
ing with the global
tech industry, said
the bill was not
nearly radical
enough. “It strikes
us as absurd that
the Online Safety
Bill proposes to
make executives at
tech companies crimi-
nally responsible but not to
make users who post that con-
tent criminally responsible for doing
so,” he said.
Cloudflare did not respond to a re-
quest for comment.
‘Damaging’
cyber attack
on Defence
Academy
Nadeem BadshahA cyber attack on the UK’s Defence
Academy — possibly by Russia or
China — caused “significant” damage,
a retired high-ranking officer has said.
Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who
left the armed forces in August, told Sky
News the attack, discovered in March
2021, meant the Defence Academy was
forced to rebuild its network. He said he
did not know if criminals or a hostile
state such as China, Russia, Iran or
North Korea were responsible but the
damage has yet to be fully rectified.
In his first interview since he left the
military, Stringer added: “It could be
any of those or it could just be someone
trying to find a vulnerability for a ran-
somware attack that was just, you
know, a genuine criminal organisation.
“There were costs to... operational
output. There were opportunity costs
in what our staff could have been doing
when they were having to repair this
damage. And what could we be spend-
ing the money on that we’ve had to
bring forward to rebuild the network?
There are not bodies in the streets but
there’s still been some damage done.”
No sensitive information is thought
to have been stored on the network.
The school, in Shrivenham, Oxford-
shire, teaches 28,000 personnel, diplo-
mats and civil servants a year and
moved more online in the pandemic.
Stringer said “unusual activity” was
discovered by contractors and “alarm
bells” started ringing. He said there
were “external agents on our network
who looked like they were there for
nefarious reasons”.
The MoD said: “In March 2021 we
were made aware of an incident
impacting the Defence Academy IT
infrastructure. We took swift action
and there was no impact on the wider
Ministry of Defence IT network.”Behind the story
I
n the days and
weeks following
the Plymouth
shooting, when
Jake Davison
killed five people and
himself, incel forums
were abuzz with
chatter (Tom Ball
writes).
Many users
expressed admiration.
Writing a day after
the shooting, one user
posted on the site
incels.is: “What a
hero I hope he is in
heaven [right now].”
Another user wrote
on the same site: “A
new hero has risen.”
A third said: “One of
us! One of us!”
Similar posts were
made on other incel
websites. On
looksmax.org, which
describes itself as “a
community dedicated
to... the art of
improving your
appearance”, one user
wrote: “Poor Jake, I
wish he was still with
us.” Other users
questioned why
Davison did not shootmore “Stacies”, the
term used to refer to
women whom incels
view as sexually
unattainable.
One user wrote in
response: “Because he
was low IQ. If he was
a high IQ incel he
would have shot up a
feminist rally or
joined a feminist
community and taken
their addresses.”
Davison, 22, below,
killed his mother,
Maxine Davison, 51,
Lee Martyn, 43, and
his three-year-old
daughter Sophie,
Stephen Washington,
59, who was walking
his dog and Kate
Shepherd, 66.
In a series of online
video messages
Davison described
himself as an incel, a
reference to the
movement of
“involuntary celibate”
young men who
blame women for
their sexual failings.
Davison, who was
autistic, spoke about
mass shootings,lamented his virginity
and said women had
low IQs.
After the shooting,
Davison was
frequently likened to
Elliot Rodger on incel
forums. In 2014
Rodger stabbed to
death three fellow
students in California
and shot another
three before killing
himself.
Rodger left a 137-
page “manifesto” and
a YouTube video
revealing that he
carried out the attack
because of his hatred
for people in
relationships. Forum
users hailed Davison
as “a new ER”.
However, counter-
terrorism officers
exploring Davison’s
motivation ruled
out incel
beliefs,
saying
they
were
not
behind
the
attack.- to
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