Introduction
There once was an ordinary white man from a working class, low income family, who lived in the small town of Grafton, Australia. His childhood was regular, with his parents divorcing early in his childhood. He didn’t have any interest in school, barely making passing grades, and he never went to University. He had no interest in anything offered there. Inspired by his father’s love of triathlon competitions and constant athleticism, he became a bodybuilder and a personal trainer at a local gym. In 2010, his father died.
And there once was an ordinary Muslim girl who lived in Hoover, Alabama. She was the daughter of immigrants who fled Yemen as the country became engulfed in a civil war. She had four other siblings and her childhood was strict, monitored heavily by her father. It wasn’t until 2013 that she was given a smartphone for her high school graduation.
After the ordinary white man’s father’s passing, he invested in cryptocurrency, quit his job at the local gym, and used the money earned through cryptocurrency to take a tour of the world. He went alone, physically, but he was never truly alone. While he traveled through North Korea, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, and France, he was also traveling deeper into white nationalist message boards. During his travels in Europe in Spring 2017, he was radicalized within just one month.
Even with this new freedom the Ordinary Muslim girl was given with her smartphone, her father made an effort to keep her monitored. He regularly checked her phone, only to find out it filled with Islamic apps such as habiths, Qur’ans, and suras. Nothing that made her father worried. He was proud that his daughter was deepening her faith. It was around 2012, she began to watch scholars lecture about Islam on YouTube and that sparked her religious awakening. In the fall of 2013, she started college at University of Alabama, majoring in business, and she secretly set up a Twitter account and it was there that she became a completely different person.
On April 17th of 2017, an Uzbek Asylum seeker drove into a crowd in Stockholm, Sweden killing five people in what authorities called an act of terrorism. A month later, on May 7th, the anti-immigrant French presidential candidate Marine le Pen, who was known for her stance on calling for deportation of only illegal immigrants was defeated by liberal President Emmanuel Macron. Out of blinding rage and fear, the ordinary white man started writing his manifesto and this is when that ordinary white man became something else.
While the ordinary Muslim girl gained a thousand followers on Twitter, in real life she didn’t have any friends. She spent most of her time socializing online, posting tweets that weren’t average Muslim women views. She couldn’t find anyone who shared the same views as her in her community in Alabama. So in November of 2013, she would plan to move to Syria and join the Islamic State for good.
This ordinary white man would be Brendan Tarrant and he would eventually go to Christchurch, New Zealand and murder 51 people in two mosques, livestreaming the shooting as it all happened. And this ordinary Muslim girl would be Hoda Muthana, who eventually moved to Syria and would help recruit other young women to move to the Islamic State, and is now trying to come back home to the United States. Although these two stories are vastly different, their stories of radicalization share patterns as to how they were so rapidly indoctrinated by extremist ideas. Even with one being a white supremacist a part of the Alt-Right/ White Nationalist movement and one being a jihadi bride with ISIL, they both started as ordinary people that were led down the path of extremism via the internet. Their stories share commonalities in how extreme they spiraled, but they are not the only examples out there. They are not unique cases. This is happening all over the world with different types of extreme and violent groups on the internet.
The internet is a fairly new domain that’s been developing and growing for the past thirty or so years. It has created massive digital highways that have the ability to connect people from across the world to communicate and virtually meet. This is not only a positive aspect of the internet, but a dangerous one as well. Just like in real life, groups of people cluster together due to similar interests or similar social needs. These groups can be positive and harmless just as any offline friend group or club can be, or extremely dangerous and influential to the point where they can brainwash and isolate the members within it to the point of producing real life violence. Extremist groups—whether it be Jihadists or White supremacists or the smaller Japanese nationalists—are metastasizing on the corners of major social media sites such as Youtube, Twitter, Reddit , and Facebook. But, also on smaller discussion board or forum type sites like 4chan and 2chan. The way we view the traditional terrorist as someone who has been radicalized by a larger organization has changed due to the internet. Online White supremacists and Japanese nationalists are not formal groups and can span across many different websites—White Supremacists can be literally in any country with any amount of a white population. And while the Islamic State is a formal organization, their online presence is wide spanning and influential enough to spark attacks from just their digital propaganda. Officials knew Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub shooter, was influenced by radical Islamic propaganda that he found online, but they could never pin it directly to a larger organization (Blinder). These movements are spreading their messages of violence and hate across the globe—targeting vulnerable minds as to keep their messages alive and fueled. But, how do these movements spread their rhetoric so easily and so virally across the web and subsequently the world?
The Anti-Defamation League defines extremism as “a concept used to describe religious, social, or political belief systems that exist substantially outside of belief systems more broadly accepted in society (i.e., “mainstream” beliefs). Extreme ideologies often seek radical changes in the nature of government, religion, or society. Extremism can also be used to refer to the radical wing of broader movements such as the anti-abortion movement or the environmental movement. Not every extremist movement is “bad”—the abolitionist movement is an example of a extreme movement that had admirable goals—but most extremist movements exist outside of the mainstream because many of their views or tactics are objectionable.” (ADL). In our case, we will be focusing on the extremism that revolves around radical groups surrounding around racial, political, and religious movements that focus around violent, discriminatory rhetoric against a certain group or those opposing to this rhetoric. To understand how these types of extremists work online, I have profiled three different groups: the global alt-right/white supremacy movement, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and the Japanese online right-wingers netto-uyoku. These three groups were chosen due to their global presences, their unique pattern of how they use the internet, and the connections they have to each other. These groups have different motives and different people populating them, but they all have almost eerily similar tactics and even underlying dogma that has likenesses to each other.
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