Online Extremism with Heidi Beirich

In this episode, we interview Heidi Beirich, Ph.D, founder of the Global Project against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), which monitors and counters increasingly transnational hate movements. Today, we discuss the increasing danger of online extremist movements, including Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE), the 764 Movement, and the increasingly dangerous True Crime Community (TCC). 

Transcript

Unknown: 1:02

Hello, I'm Captain Matthew Turner, and welcome to another episode of the GSA SEP podcast. In this episode, we're tackling digital radicalization with Heidi Beyrich. Heidi Beyrich is an expert on extremism and the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She has tracked extremists for more than two decades and frequently speaks with a press as an expert. She holds a PhD in political science and is the co-editor of Neo-Confederacy, published by the University of Texas Press. To start us off, How do you define digital radicalization in simple terms? I think the simplest way to put it is somebody being sucked down a rabbit hole of information into things like white supremacy or neo-Nazism, it's usually a progressive situation where a person is introduced to some kind of material, gets likes it, or is intrigued by it, continues to dig further and further, and frankly, the way algorithms work on social media and other places, once you start down one particular path, you tend to get more and more and more information of the same kind, so the algorithms can sort of help a person to become radicalized into extremist ideologies, any kind. I mean, it's not just white supremacy, this could be Islamic extremism, the conspiracy world, you know, a whole range of things. So, what first got you interested in studying this space? Well, I studied extremism in graduate school. I wrote a dissertation about Spanish fascism, basically. So, I've been interested in far-right extremism for a very long time, whether it's, you know, Latin American authoritarian states or Hitler's rise in Germany. My family, my mother's from Germany, so had a particular interest in, in that, and then it's just evolved with the rise of the internet to see processes that just did not exist, you know, in the 1990s If you wanted to get in touch with the Klan or some kind of other extremist organization, or learn about them, it's not like you could use the phone book, you know. If you happen to meet someone who was involved in it, then you could have a radicalization process that happens that way. But it was pretty hard to find these things now. It's, you know, one entry into Google, and you're off to the races, or on social media, or on fringe sites like Telegram. There's so much hate content, it's, it's amazing. And, like I said, this is radicalization can take different forms. So, this is also true of conspiracy content, Islamic extremism, and all other kinds of extremist movements. You say it can take many forms, but is there a pathway that we see that it typically looks like that? Is a question that people in my space have been asking and trying to figure out for a long time now, and there doesn't seem to be a specific way that a person gets radicalized, you know. I've spoken to a lot of former extremists, and they are radicalized in very different ways. The women, primarily, that I've spoken to were radicalized through boyfriends, not necessarily online, so it was their personal relationships. I mean, I'm generalizing here. In other cases we have seen people, a good example of this is Dylan Roof, the mass shooter from 2015 in at the Black Church in Charleston, who clearly started searching for a few items around the killing of Trayvon Martin, the black kid in Florida, and at that time the way that Google worked, it was a very problematic algorithm that they've changed since then. This was sort of 2013 ish, when this began, and at the time when you would search for Trayvon Martin, you would very quickly land on websites in that case that pushed white supremacist messages and Dylann Roof. We even tried to reconstruct the path he took by looking at how Google worked at the time, and it didn't take long to get from Trayvon Martin to websites like that of the White Supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, which is now a defunct organization, or American Renaissance, which is not a defunct organization, and then when you finally looked at Dylann Roof's manifesto that was found after the shooting, you could see that the ideas that he had imbibed came directly from those particular websites. So that's his path. There's a whole process out there in white supremacy about trying to red pill people. This goes back to the Matrix movie, the red pill versus the blue pill, and the idea is that when they get somebody who seems to be interested in some of their issues, they will aggressively try to court them with propaganda and transform them into. To a white supremacist or a neo-Nazi, there's a guy in a group called the Proud Boys, which is still around, who wrote a book on red pilling, like how essentially what this book said is, how do you radicalize someone, and the way he described it was you start with softer issues that might appeal, in this case we're talking about white supremacy to conservatives, maybe issues around crime or talking about race, but not being explicit about it, and you try to lead the person on into more and more extreme ideas. This is really a phenomenon of social media, where people can interact with each other, as opposed to what happened with Dylann Roof, where he was just reading material and becoming radicalized, so these are all very different pathways. Then, then, of course, there are pathways in the real world that don't have to do with the online space. Families radicalizing their kids, right? Your parents are clansmen, maybe you become our clan people, you become involved in that, or you learn, meet somebody at work, so it really depends. The one thing we do know is that if you're most of the cases where people are radicalized, they are somehow force-fed more and more radical material. That's why I pointed to the algorithms as an issue, but just as important is that personal contact with extremists in online scenarios, you know, I've also read transcripts from trials where white supremacists are discussing how they became involved with this group or another, and the pathways are different depending, but I would say more often than not, there is somebody from a hate group who has figured out that this person may be susceptible. The scariest way to get radicalized, and this is something that I think is actually quite terrifying, involves relatively new groups, are these outfits that seek out young children and get them to do things, you know, either post sexual material, show themselves cutting themselves, I don't know, do something to make them afraid that the material be public and force them, almost hijack them into extremist groups. This is very common in the true crime community. It's extreme fringes, another part of that world called the calm groups, like 764 They're targeting the youngest people they can, and using these really malevolent tech techniques to suck people into their universe, and you know, warning to parents to pay attention to what your kids are looking at online. Actually, the reason I asked you on this podcast is, in my emergency department, we're actually starting to see some like pediatric patients coming in that have been involved in these networks, and they're being brought in by their parents, who are like, "Hey, like, I saw my kid was messaging this horrible stuff on Discord with these people that I've never heard of. So, thank you for coming on. Think it's a really important issue that emergency medicine physicians in general should be more aware of. You've made me think of something just now when you brought up Discord, and this is something I didn't mention. The gaming world is also poison content moderation, there is even worse, generally, than on sites like Facebook, or something, you know, the mainstream social media sites, and the way kids play games, the people they're playing with, that they're communicating with through their headsets and whatnot, it's a very easy place to draw children into, or, you know, teens into extremist ideas. Also, these extremists create games, right? They layer them onto, you know, I'm not very good with the lingo about gaming, but you can sort of take parts of a game and manipulate it. I think it's called a mod, and then you make that mod, that modified game, something that pushes hate ideas. So that's another universe. Once again, a call out to parents to pay attention to what their kids are doing online. Oh, absolutely. Roblox is a huge one, I know that, and it's uh aimed at a very young audience. I never played it, it was a little after my time, but there's a huge radicalization, just community on Roblox. We at my organization, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, have had conversations with Roblox about these issues, because we've documented, you know, games that involve, say, assassinating political figures, like killing Donald Trump, killing Hillary Clinton, what, you know, Obama, they're shooting games like that, shooting immigrants, all kinds of things like that, that are real troubling, or games that have been modified just to loop in a whole bunch of white supremacist propaganda, racist images. It's a problem changing tack just a little bit. You mentioned the true crime community, which is something that we're starting to see more and more in, I think. General public's awareness. There's been a number of news articles about it lately, though most people, when I talk with them about it, still aren't really that aware. So, I guess when we look at the online true crime community, does it have any sort of overlap with any of those other radicalization pathways? Well, first of all, I should say the true crime community at first evolved just fans that were into true crime, right over time, parts of that world have become more radicalized, sharing videos, we call them gore videos of people being killed, harmed, et cetera, and injecting neo-Nazi imagery and white supremacist symbols and ideas into parts of the community, I just want to make clear that not everybody who's in that true crime community is necessarily an extremist. It's just unfortunate that it's a bit of a hijacking by extremists of an area where lots of people show up in that process. I don't think it's significantly different than you find in other places. There are people who are opportunistically targeting individuals, so maybe you're interested in serial killers, for example, and you know people love serial killer stuff on TV, right? But then maybe somebody who's in the community starts saying, well, why don't you take a look at Dylann Roof, or why don't you take a look at Elliot Rodger, who was a misogynist who shot a bunch of women in Santa Barbara, or why don't we talk about school shooters, you know, the Columbine shooters, who are very popular in these fringe or areas, and there have been, you know, unfortunately quite a few people out of the true crime community and the Calm, which is sort of allied with it, and I should also say this is all over the place, this is like on TikTok, this is on Telegram. There's not like a place you go. There are communities devoted to these things that include extremist elements on many different sites, but you try, you try to lure people into the more extreme ideas, and we have had these shootings, like for at schools, at the Annunciation Church, for example, in Minnesota, where the killers had been in those communities, gotten sucked down rabbit holes, began to praise mass murderers, they called them saints online, so Saint Dylan, Saint Elliot, and get there's this idea that, you know, I want to go, I'm going to do a mass shooting, I'm going to become famous instead of the person, the insignificant person that I feel that I am, and I'm going to kill more people than the last person killed. So, we've had examples of that, and manifestos and diaries that have shown people who've gotten sucked in first TCC, then into the com, then eventually into all the gore stuff, and then eventually decide I want to kill more people than the last person killed, and that's that's scary, and that's actually pretty new. You know, if I was talking about school shooters three years ago, I wouldn't consider those terrorist events - I call them horribly tragic events with troubled kids. But now I think we have to start looking at, are they more influenced by ideological ideas, by neo-Nazism, by praise of racist killers. This is a different dynamic. It's a very scary thing, and a very fast evolving thing. Do you think there's a certain point where an interest in true crime starts to really cross over into something more extreme? Well, I mean, clearly people are crossing some sort of threshold. Where that exists is hard to know. Even people who work on de-radicalization, who try to figure out first radicalization paths and then how to undo them, which is not one of my areas of expertise, find it hard to figure out where that moment is that somebody tips over the edge, just as an example, the guy Jason Bowers, who shot up the Jewish temple in Pittsburgh in 2018 the Tree of Life Synagogue, he was on Gab, he actually announced at the end of, like, right before he went to the shooting, that he was going to do something, right, he lived on Gab. Gab is a site that has very little moderation, is filled with a lot of hate content. Okay, so Jason Bowers, at some point, was so upset that he felt like he had to, his what he was doing, basically, is he wanted to shoot the people in the synagogue who helped with refugees, he was anti-immigrant, and he thought Jews, because anti-Semite Jews were bringing in all these non-white people to kind of destroy white America, but he's on a site that's got 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of other people consuming the exact same content, and they don't commit a crime like this, and we don't know what, like, what is the difference, is it personal circumstances, is it psychological, is it mental health issues, did they lose a job, like, we don't know what a trigger is between Jason Dowers, who does something, and the many, many other people who are just as involved in this content online. Mind, and that's what makes this all very tricky. The numbers from the FBI looks like there's been a massive increase in these cases of nihilistic violent extremism, NVE, of which the true crime community is a part. Would you agree with that assessment that it seems like this true crime community is starting to contribute to real world violence more and more? Well, I don't think there's any question. I don't know that I fully agree with the FBI description of nihilistic violent extremism, but they are getting at something. This is a different kind of thing. This, these are people who live in the true crime community, so TCC is part of this, right, who are sometimes exposed to hate material and sometimes not. It's a little unclear if you praise Dylann Roof, does that necessarily make you a white supremacist or not a white supremacist? What I disagree with the FBI on is they kind of avoid those ideological issues when they talk about this, but the nihilism is without a doubt there, I mean, how much more nihilistic can you be than I just want to go kill a bunch of people more than the last guy killed a bunch of people. There's also groups like No Lives Matter, which is lives in these communities, which hates all people, right? This is clear nihilism, and I understand why the FBI is trying to figure out where do we put these kinds of killers, because there have been more and more of them, and they're not like Jason Bowers, who says, you know, I hate the Jews, there's clearly an anti-Semite, he's influenced by white supremacy and neo-Nazism, and I hate immigrants, these are people who are like, I love Dylann Roof, I love Elliot Rodger. Maybe in my diary I write some swastikas, but then I also write a whole bunch of stuff about how there's no purpose to life. Why should we live? Killing doesn't matter, people don't matter, you know. So it's got these complicated strains of ideological thinking and just pure nihilism, and so the bucket that the FBI used to kind of put people like this in was racially motivated violent extremism. This is a little different, right? It's like racially influenced violent extremism mixed with nihilism, and there are cases, according to the FBI, into 764 which I would lump into this world of nihilism in every FBI field office in the United States. That tells you how serious it is. I was actually teaching law enforcement about terrorism in LA about a week and a half ago, and I was surprised how many of them weren't aware that there had been major arrests just in the LA area, like three or four of them in the last year, of people wanting to commit acts of violence or who had engaged in child sex abuse, and those kinds of things. They weren't really aware of it, but I think it's happening more, more than we know. It is really terrifying, these like new decentralized networks, it's this new development of terrorism that I think unfortunately it poses like a really big threat to public health right now. Moving on to what emergency medicine physicians can do, are there any early signs that someone could be moving from like a casual interest into something more concerning? Well, I would imagine in conversations with people in emergency situations, you might get some clues if someone is moving into this world. I would pay, you know, if you have children who are engaged, have been engaged in self-harm or something like that. I know they're, you know, I'm not an expert, I'm not an emergency person, other than watching the pit, but you know, you may ask some questions about this, like if a parent brings a child in and is like, "I don't know what's going on, she's done this or he's done that. You know, you might ask the parents, what is what have they been seeing online, is there something going on online where you might not, in the past, have been inclined to ask those kinds of questions. I do think it matters, and depending on what someone may talk about, you know, I think emergency physicians need to know what the true crime community is. They need to know what the calm is. They need to know what gore content is, just like they need to know a little bit about everything connected to terrorism, in case they run across somebody talking about that materials related to that, that's something that you could see. So, I think you got to keep your eyes open, and you can't ignore this, and especially the fact that so much lately is involving kids. I mean, I could imagine scenarios where a parent finds a kid doing something, taking photos of themselves harming themselves, I don't know, and is completely perplexed about what is happening, and a person who's working in emergency services might be able to help them. Actually, absolutely. And the age of some of these kids, it's horrifying. There was a recent case I read about, it was a, I believe it was a 12 year old who unfortunately committed suicide after being involved. World within this true crime community, I think she was also 764 adjacent as well. It turned out that she had been involved in these online spaces since she was eight years old, which is horrifying, horrifying stuff. It is so malevolent it's hard to believe. Actually, it's one of those things. It's so cartoonishly evil. If I read about it in a book, I would not believe it. I'd be like, "Come on, no one would ever do anything this evil. But it's just evil for the sake of evil. It's genuinely horrifying. Yeah, yeah, it is. I mean, I suppose another way emergency professionals could be caught up in this is when you have these mass shootings and you're responding to them and having to deal with them in that horrible, horrible way, but I would suggest that people know at least a little bit, read some primers, just a little bit about these things. How do you feel about the way things are heading? Do you think with this increased FBI attention, it seems like the authorities are becoming more focused on 764 and the TCC. Do you think that there is hope for the future, or that we still have a long way to go? Well, I do think it's important that law enforcement has caught on to this and is taking this seriously. That's a big step. I wish more people in sort of the educational field and others knew more about this. I wish parents knew more about this, so they themselves could sort of do something about it. There's an organization at American University whose acronym is Peril, P E R I L. They have videos about this stuff that are short and informative and useful. They work on deradicalization, so I would point people to that if they want to learn, you know, real short videos that can sort of school school you up. Where I think we're having bigger problems is with the tech companies. So, there's two parts

of the tech world: 22:50

one are the unregulated places like Gab or Telegram, where we can't do anything at all, but it could be the case that places like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and stuff crack down on this more. I have had conversations with TikTok about this, and they are very interested in doing something, being more proactive on this front, because it's terrifying. Hopefully, that is something that will spread throughout the mainstream sites, so you can get those at least clean. If they were clean, it would make it easier for parents, because they would know that if the kid was on Facebook or on TikTok, they don't have to worry about that. Obviously, the gaming sector, you know, they just need to clean up their act, and they're rather obstinate and not good about this. So, we got to cut the supply end of things out, right? The supply of this material, but there's always going to be these fringe sites, and we can't do anything about them. But parents could take a role here if they knew more about this. School counselors, people in the education system, there could be more information about how dangerous these groups are. Why you want to stay away from them, all of that kind of raising public awareness could make a difference, and I know the FBI put out has put out some videos about this as well, because I showed some to law enforcement last week. So it's good to see them stepping up and taking it seriously and try to get the message out to other law enforcement. In fact, when I taught this class in November, I teach about 20 cops at a shot, different points in their career. Only one person last November in that room knew what 764 was. This time everybody knew, so that means that law enforcement, yeah, that law enforcement is getting schooled up. Good, good. I'm glad to hear that. Just to wrap up, where can people go to learn more about your work on the protecting themselves? I mentioned the Perillab, that's not our work, but they're great people, and it's something to be on top of. Our website is Global extremism.org We have quite a few stories about the true crime community, the Calm Gore material, and mass shooters connected to all of this. If you're interested, that's there. I am given a warning that you know it's some pretty horrible stuff to have to expose yourself to, but it's something that's happening, and we're documenting it for the public. We're also on Blue Sky, it's all at Global Extremism, so you can check us out. We have a weekly newsletter. If you go to our website, sign up, and you'll get everything that we write going forward from the time you signed up. And if people feel like it, we can always use some donations. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time, ma'am. I really appreciate it. This is a subject that's very important to me, and I really appreciate you taking the time to help inform us all about it. Oh, happy to be here, Matt. Thanks for having me.