Authors: Jamie Bartlett
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An impressive number considering that for its first two years the site was nothing more than a photograph of a squirrel with enormous testicles.
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SomethingAwful users continue to attack other boards and forums in a similar way.
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The former ‘President’ of GNAA is considered to be a hacker and troll named ‘Weev’.
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A ‘black fax’ is a fax of a black page, sent to waste the ink of the recipient’s fax machine.
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Suler’s six factors are dissociative anonymity (my actions can’t be attributed to my person), invisibility (nobody can tell what I look like, or judge my tone), asynchronicity (my actions do not occur in real time), solipsistic introjection (I can’t see these people; I have to guess at who they are and their intent), dissociative imagination (this is not the real world; these are not real people) and minimisation of authority (there are no authority figures here, I can act freely).
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You have been trolled.
I FIRST MET
Paul in a working men’s club in a town in the north of England one cold autumn evening. He looked young, with a handsome face, short dark hair, and tattoos that climbed up his neck. He was good company: polite, attentive and quick to laugh. In short, Paul and I got on very well. Until, that is, talk turned to politics. ‘Just think of the beauty that will die, Jamie,’ he explained. ‘What do you think the world will be like under black or Paki or brown rule? Can you imagine it? When we’re down to the last thousand whites, I hope one of them scorches the fucking earth, and everything on it.’
Paul is a one-man political party, a propaganda machine. He spends all day, every day, trying to spark a racial awakening among white Britons. He runs a popular blog about ethnocentrism and White Pride, and produces and posts videos attacking minority groups. He opens his laptop and shows me his recent activity: a heated debate with members of a left-wing political group; messages of support for the Greek Golden Dawn party; communications with
white supremacists in the United States. He loads up his Facebook and Twitter pages. Thousands of people, from all over the world, follow Paul’s breathless output on social media. Online, he has found a community who share his beliefs and appreciate his posts. He has also attracted an equally vocal group dedicated to opposing his views and taking him offline. He lives in a one-dimensional world of friends and enemies, right and wrong – and one where he has been spending increasing amounts of time. The digital Paul is a dynamic, aggressive and prominent advocate of the White Pride movement. The real Paul is an unemployed thirty-something who lives alone in a small house.
On the train home after one of our interviews, I texted him a note of thanks. As usual, he replied immediately: ‘You’re very welcome Jamie :-) Have a safe journey back. PS I really enjoyed it.’ But unlike previous meetings, very soon afterwards our correspondence slowed. The usually vocal Paul went quiet. His social media activity stopped. Maybe, I allowed myself to hope, our meetings had made a difference? Or maybe the police had finally worked out who he was? Perhaps something worse?
Paul is not alone in finding the internet a perfect place to spread his message. It has become a vital platform for political groups around the world. From Barack Obama’s Facebook electioneering in the US, to the Occupy movement’s flash mobs, to the Italian comedian-cum-politician Beppe Grillo’s digital reach, the battle for ideas, influence
and impact is moving online. Over the last decade, Paul and thousands of people like him have eschewed the traditional stomping grounds of the nationalist movement in favour of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They were among the first political groups to do so. Extremist organisations, denied a platform on mainstream media and unable to propound their beliefs in public, were particularly attuned to the opportunities that new outlets and platforms gave them. In the eighties and nineties, for example, the American white supremacist organisations Stormfront and the Aryan Brotherhood created and maintained popular support groups on Usenet and Bulletin Board Systems. (In fact, Stormfront started life as a website.) According to Alexa – a company that ranks website traffic – the far-right British National Party’s website is significantly more popular than either Labour’s or the Conservative Party’s. Blood and Honour, the epicentre of the extreme neo-Nazi music scene, has dozens of open YouTube pages and closed online discussion forums. Stormfront’s website –
stormfront.org
– hosts a long-standing forum, which has close to 300,000 members, who between them have posted close to ten million messages. Twitter is especially popular among neo-Nazis, who will often take a username including the numbers 14 and 88. Fourteen refers to the ‘14 words’ (‘we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’), while 88 refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet. HH:
Heil Hitler
. According to researchers at King’s College London, neo-Nazis use Twitter not only for disseminating ideas and sharing propaganda, but also for maintaining a coherent sense of self-identity. ‘The House of Rothschild must be destroyed if we are to save our race! 14/88. Sieg Heil!’ posts one user I find after a cursory search. Some nationalists find children’s
chat rooms or innocuous-sounding Yahoo groups in which to meet. Anglo-Saxon history discussion boards are particularly popular among English nationalists, where hundreds of users with names like ‘Aethelred’ and ‘Harold’ discuss how to establish a purer, whiter England. In early 2007, supporters of the French nationalist party the Front National became the first European political party to set up a political office in the virtual world ‘Second Life’, prompting a wave of online protests from other users. The same year, its xenophobic avatars visited a virtual mosque, sat on the virtual Koran and posted anti-Semitic slogans, before activating a hacker script that automatically ejected everyone from the building. The Jewish human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates that as of 2013 there were 20,000 active ‘hate’ websites, social network groups and forums online. The number is growing every year. The online world has become a haven for racists and nationalists, giving political extremists an opportunity to voice their opinions, share ideas and recruit supporters.
Nick Lowles, director of the campaign group Hope Not Hate, has been working for anti-fascist groups since the mid-nineties. Nick tells me the internet ‘has given the ordinary person access to far-right groups in a way that was impossible a decade ago’. It is also changing the demographic of the typical nationalist, explains Nick. It’s no longer the jackbooted skinhead he used to target. The modern nationalist is young, time-rich, technologically literate – able to quickly and easily connect virtually to like-minded people around the world. People like Paul.
The most infamous of this new breed of online extremists is Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing extremist who killed
seventy-seven people in a terrorist attack in Norway in July 2011. After leaving school he started to work in customer services, but his talent for computer programming led him to start his own computer programming business. By his early twenties, the young Breivik was spending hours each day reading online blogs and articles about the imminent end of the white race and the threat of ‘cultural Marxism’ to European culture. He became convinced that Islam was taking over Europe, and that violent resistance was the only way to curb its rise.
In the years leading up to his attacks he wrote, under the pseudonym Andrew Berwick, a 1,516-page manifesto titled
2083: A European Declaration of Independence
. It is part memoir, part practical manual for what he saw as a coming race war. Large chunks of it were copied and pasted from the net (he later admitted in court that he’d taken a lot of it from Wikipedia in particular), from sources as eclectic as the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, to the British television presenter Jeremy Clarkson, whose
Times
article about multiculturalism Breivik quoted at length.
Unusually for a terrorist attack of this size and scale, Norwegian security services believe Breivik acted entirely alone – a ‘lone wolf’ with no accomplices or co-conspirators. The term was popularised by the American white supremacist Tom Metzger in the 1990s, when he advised fellow neo-Nazis committed to violent action to act alone, in order to evade detection. According to Jeffrey D. Simon, author of
Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat
, the lone wolf is ‘the most innovative, most creative and most dangerous’ type of terrorist. Lone wolves aren’t restricted by ideology or hierarchy, and don’t need to worry about alienating their group or organisation.
More importantly, their lack of communication can make them difficult to identify. In Simon’s view, the wealth of easy-to-access information facilitates the rise of lone wolves. The number of lone wolf cases has increased steadily over the last decade, including the Islamist Major Nidal Malik Hasan who murdered thirteen fellow soldiers at the Fort Hood army base in Texas in November 2009, in protest, it is believed, at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Breivik was a lone wolf: but he did have a network. He believed social media – especially Facebook – would help the white ‘resistance movements’ fight back against the multiculturalism he detested, because it offered new opportunities to push propaganda and connect with like-minded individuals around the world. He wanted to distribute his manifesto to sympathisers, whom he hoped would use it to further the nationalist cause, and perhaps even imitate him. So, over the course of two years, he painstakingly created a vast virtual community, using two Facebook accounts to connect to thousands of fellow extremists across Europe. In
2083
, he documents the long hours spent on the monotonous, but important, task of finding them:
I’m using Facebook to target various nationalist-related groups and inviting every single member [to become my Facebook friend] . . . aaaaarrrrggh:/ It’s driving me nuts, lol . . . I’ve been doing this for 60 straight days, 3–4 hours a day . . . God, I wouldn’t have imagined it was going to be this f...... boring :D
Breivik was after email addresses – which he gathered by requesting and becoming friends with Facebook users.
By early 2011 Breivik had thousands of Facebook friends and
contributed to several online blogs, including the right-wing Norwegian site document.no, where he commented on a number of articles criticising Islam. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Breivik had also been a registered member of Stormfront since October 2008, using the handle ‘year2183’. By June 2011, he’d farmed 8,000 ‘high quality’ email addresses; ‘Ofc, it’s a quite tedious task,’ he admitted, ‘but then again, I can’t think of a more efficient way to get in direct touch with nationalists in all European countries.’
Breivik saw opportunities everywhere online. Wikipedia, he suggested, was a good place to nudge public opinion through carefully editing pages. He played the online shooting game
Call of Duty
to hone his shooting skills (he was also a fan of online games like
World of Warcraft
) and advised fellow resistance fighters to use the anonymous browser Tor to evade government detection. Towards the end of
2083
, Breivik made a plea to all patriots to ‘create a nice website, a blog and establish a nice-looking Facebook page . . . to market the organisation’.
Suddenly in July 2011 the usually vocal Breivik went quiet. His social media activity stopped. On the morning of 22 July, he posted a YouTube video urging comrades to embrace martyrdom. A few hours later he emailed his manifesto to over 1,000 of the addresses he’d harvested from Facebook. At 3.25 p.m. he detonated his home-made bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight, before travelling to Utøya Island, where he shot and murdered a further sixty-nine activists from the Norwegian Labour Party who were attending a youth camp.
Exactly who received
2083
remains a mystery. Around 250 people
in the UK were sent a copy. Some of them were supporters of a very popular English Facebook page that Breivik had ‘liked’ using a pseudonym in early 2010, and that he praised in his manifesto. This is where Paul’s journey began.
The English Defence League is characteristic of a new wave of loosely related nationalist movements growing across Europe. Its ideology is difficult to pin down, but it combines a concern that large-scale immigration – especially from Muslim countries – is destroying national identity with a belief that the elite, out-of-touch liberal establishment don’t know or care what this is doing to ordinary people. It is usually ostensibly non-racist, claiming to support equality, democracy, freedom and traditional British (or sometimes Christian) culture. Above all, it believes Islamic and British values are incompatible.
Since the Second World War, membership of formal political parties in the UK has fallen from over three million in the 1950s to under half a million in 2013. Unlike a traditional political party, membership to the EDL is open to all: it demands no money, energy or time. By 2012, the EDL had become one of the most recognisable street movements in the UK. Supporters had held hundreds of demonstrations across the country, and joined the Facebook group in their thousands. For a nationalist group, its rapid success was unexpected and unprecedented. At its peak in 1973, when the UK was gripped by fears about immigration, the extreme right-wing party the National Front
had approximately 14,000 members. The British National Party’s peak membership, in 2009, was roughly the same. It took these parties years of concerted campaigning to accumulate these numbers. It took the EDL months. As of April 2014, over 160,000 people have ‘liked’ the EDL on Facebook – which is the same number of likes as the UK Labour Party. It has local branches in every region of the country and demonstrations, protests and events take place every month as supporters flit easily between the online and offline world. Its size and scale belie its humble origins – a simple Facebook account.