Name: Countering Extremism from the Inside with Julia Ebner
Uploaded: 2020-10-08T21:05:03.000Z
Duration: 6 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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I spent two years undercover in a range of different movements from jihadist groups, isis hacking groups, for example, on jihadist bride groups to conspiracy theory networks to misogynist groups and also white nationalists and neo Nazi groups where I could really see a pattern across all of these movements when joining them both online and offline.

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Waas that they used very strategically formulated script almost of radicalizing new members.

So usually it follows kind of six stages across, uh, radicalization process.

So it started with, obviously, with recruiting new members, Then a huge part of that radicalization process was not really the ideological indoctrination, but really the socialization, the creation off counter cultures off almost off England, references in inside of jokes.

They almost create their own language in each of those groups that I join networking.

We, of course, see an increasingly global community of people from fringe communities on a local level.

Joining forces on a global scale, too, have an influence on politics or plan, uh, intimidation campaigns.

They run very sophisticated kind of slick communication campaigns across Thea entire spectrum, off online platforms that we're seeing from the bigger platforms to the more fringe.

They also often then mobilized to real world protests or to bigger campaigns that they run online.

Unfortunately, we've seen a range of also violent protests happening in the last few years from Charlottesville Rally, which led to the death of a counter protest of and then in the end, there is, unfortunately, also often the last stage, which is a tax that can come either in the form off hacking attacks again using online tools.

Andi exploiting the vulnerabilities, uh, the new technology have given rise to or actually inspiring real world attacks.

And one of the first groups that I joined and what the recruiting process was actually quite interesting is the white nationalist pan European group generation identity that spreads, especially the conspiracy theory off the great replacement.

They are very young movement, so they are also very selective with the recruitment.

It was interesting that they had very standardized procedures for everything.

Of course, with all of these kind of online identities that I built up, there was a big question around.

How do I create a credible profile that also allows me to then potentially join these movements and for for this particular movement.

I knew that they were setting up their U.

K and Ireland branch in London, and I wanted to know what their next steps would be, what kind of campaigns they were planning to do.

So I reached out to them after already having joined various online groups, having had conversations with members purely online to then also meet them offline.

And I went through several interviews with their recruiters, and they're they're leading members from Austria and also the UK branch.

And then they invited me to the strategy meeting and what I found really quite shocking Waas the degree off kind of standardized branding that they had adopted to all of their outlets across Europe and how strategic they were about tapping into into local grievances with this universal branding strategy, highly professional, sometimes even using marketing studies or even academic studies on how to best communicate their extreme ideologies to bigger audiences but then also tapping into different subcultures and tailor their communication campaigns to really reach out to new audiences on this was something they talked about in the strategy meeting, where one of their most influential figures in Europe Martin Selena was also present.

He even gave us a breathing on how to essentially how to respond, for example, to tricky questions from journalists.

For example, are you anti Semitic or are you racist?

And also how to run the slick online offline campaigns?

Another example of a group that is very skilful in also running really slick online campaigns and influencing even the political discourse is the no not too trolling Army.

It's a German neo Nazi group on the gaming application discord, and it's only one out of many there.

They're pretty much trolling armies and sometimes ideologically influenced, far right or off other ideological backgrounds.

Groups that try Thio either launch big harassment campaign, take campaigns against their political enemies or launch political influence or disinformation campaigns.

They had a certain stage, had 10,000 of members who were coordinating in this closed gaming chat application to then attack political accounts on Twitter or to run bigger campaigns toe hijack hashtags, for example, the whole the whole process off, setting up a kind of structure that would be appealing Thio new members who might not even have an interest in the political side of it, but really by, for example, giving them incentive structures.

They almost had a military like system where you could be promoted to a higher rank.

If you did a good job in carrying out, for example, a campaign against against the politician or against the journalist that reported critically about the far right party in Germany about the A f D.

And the whole goal was to influence the political discourse, which they managed to do in the run up to the last German elections there.

Hashtag Swor in the top 10 Twitter trends in Germany for two weeks, that was quite telling of how much influence they have.

Another case off quite an organized kind of communication campaign again with the goal of intimidating journalists.

One that I faced myself when Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defense League, came to my previous office.

I was working at Quilliam back then and had published an article in The Guardian that explicitly mentioned Tommy Robinson, and he then stormed the office and live streamed everything to his back.

Then 300,000 followers on Twitter which kicked off big hate campaign against me and the organization and eventually also led to me being dismissed by the organization.

 So you could see what kind of power, um, individuals can have over an entire organization on that was, quite yeah, quite shocking as an experience to see how much leverage they have. 