7 March 2020 | New Scientist | 41Undercover with
online extremists
Julia Ebner (pictured left) infiltrated the
hidden forums where extremists hang out.
Her experiences reveal how shady groups
hijack social media and video games to
spread hate, she tells Helen Thomson
O
N 15 March 2019, 51 people were
killed in two consecutive shootings
at mosques in Christchurch,
New Zealand. The first of the attacks was
live-streamed on Facebook for 17 minutes.
But social media wasn’t only used on the day.
It is thought that the accused gunman was
radicalised online by far-right extremists
before immersing himself in an internet
subculture of white supremacist ideology.
In short, his journey from personal trainer
to gunman was fuelled by social media.
It is an increasingly familiar phenomenon
and few people understand it better than Julia
Ebner, a counter-extremism expert at the
Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, UK.
Over the past decade, she has seen digitaltechnology transform almost every aspect
of how radical groups work. She has watched
extremists use digital platforms, from
anonymous message board 8chan and instant
messaging app Telegram to YouTube and
Facebook, to disseminate their ideologies,
recruit and radicalise new members, and
inspire them to carry out violent attacks.
A couple of years ago, Ebner realised that
the best way to understand online extremists
is to infiltrate their hidden forums. She went
undercover, joining dozens of groups, from
white nationalists to radical misogynists, to
see from the inside how they operate – and
how to counter them. Ebner has documented
her experiences in her book Going Dark:
The secret social lives of extremists.
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