At the centre of the storm
Extremism researcher Julia Ebner was among those whose warnings about the potential gamification of violence went unheeded until the Christchurch mosque shootings revealed a sickening subculture to the world.
Extremism researcher Julia Ebner was among those whose warnings about the potential gamification of violence went unheeded until the Christchurch mosque shootings revealed a sickening subculture to the world.
My heart is racing and I feel sick as I leave the office,” terrorism and extremism researcher Julia Ebner writes in her new book about some very alarming people, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. She’s talking about what happened in Christchurch on March 15, 2019. What she has to say is confronting. “From the beginning to the end, [it] was orchestrated to entertain a specific audience: the 8chan shitposters,” she claims. She describes being unable to stop seeing the victims fall or to stop hearing the gunshots. “I should not have watched the livestream of the mosque attacks.”
It’s her job. “Of course, I’ve had to watch a lot of propaganda, monitoring Isis, looking at beheadings, executions, torture scenes and war scenes,” she says, calmly reeling off horrors. She’s in a noisy cafe when I call. She steps outside. It’s evening, February in London. Is she okay out there? “I like to walk while I talk on the phone.”
In her line of work, it pays to keep moving. Going Dark recounts her covert trips down ideological wormholes to sinister parallel universes. There are encounters online and face-to-face with extremist groups from jihadi brides and trad wives to the alt-right planning the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Nothing prepared her for what she saw from Christchurch.
“To be honest, it was probably one of the most challenging moments in the past few years for me, on a personal as well as a professional level.” In some ways it was familiar territory. “I’d seen so many posts similar to the ones the perpetrator used – similar ideologies, conspiracy theories, vocabulary, insider jokes. I wasn’t surprised that it would lead to such a violent and heinous act, but I was definitely shocked that something that we’ve warned about for years – the gamification [of violence] – would actually happen for real.”
Gamification: she’s talking about extremist strategies taken from the lawless digital frontiers and gaming
subcultures. Not everyone marches with flaming torches. “We’ve seen it before with Isis, in its recruitment and propaganda materials, using visuals that resemble the Call of Duty video game, mixing video-game language with jihadist language.”
Far-right extremists do it, too. “They’ve even hijacked some of the video-game platforms, chat apps such as Discord, and created their own modifications for popular games. They have created structures that resemble the hierarchies or military-like structures found in video games. They incentivise members to participate in hate campaigns by telling them you get promoted to the rank of general if you manage to run a campaign successfully on Twitter or Facebook.”
Christchurch represented an escalation of gamification, she believes, “the use of violence at the intersection of fun and fear”. It sounds like an episode of tech dystopia television series Black Mirror, but for real. “The perpetrator filmed from the perspective of a first-person shooter game. It was then turned into multiple versions by these online communities. They would circulate remixes of the attack where they put scores on top of it … [and] played music that referenced some of the most prominent memes in that gaming subculture. It’s terrifying to see that mix.”
FAR-RIGHT CONSPIRACY THEORY
Ebner, a research fellow at London-based think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, has investigated the seductive social side of extremism, the ingroup echo-chamber camaraderie that draws recruits to such trolling communities as the now-rebranded 8chan.
A lethal confusion between trolling and reality can result. “After the Christchurch attacks, some of the members on 8chan couldn’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s virtual, what’s a game and what’s an attack. The very first comment, quickly deleted in 8chan, was ‘Get the high score’. The second one said, ‘This is a LARP, isn’t it?’” A LARP is live-action role play.
In the aftermath, some members abandoned far-right online groups.
“They were too afraid of going
“I’ve had to watch a lot of propaganda, monitoring Isis, looking at beheadings, torture scenes.”
mad. Even for them it was such a shocking moment to see that online game all of a sudden turning into something that’s really killing people.”
She read the perpetrator’s so-called manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement”*, a hat tip to the far-right conspiracy theory that the white race and culture are being replaced through immigration, orchestrated by “globalist elites”, meaning Jews. She found links in the text to the themes and vocabulary used by the fast-growing pan-European far-right group Generation Identity. It has been reported by Austrian public broadcaster ORF that the Christchurch shooter donated to Generation Identity and had corresponded with “identitarian” movement leader Martin Sellner, a new breed of extremist who has been described as looking like a “Hoxton hipster”.
Ebner writes about her own undercover encounter with Sellner. “To my relief, Martin has lost his glasses. He might have recognised me otherwise, even with my blonde wig.” They had both appeared on a 2016 BBC Newsnight report. Global extremism can be a small world. At a meeting with Sellner and others, she passed muster as a “full fash” – a convincing fascist.
After Christchurch, such meetings haunted her. “My encounters with these people came back to me all of a sudden,” Ebner says. “I partly felt some form of responsibility, even guilt for not having done more to expose them or to counter these online echo chambers of hate and conspiracy theories.”
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
Concrete threats and calls for violence are always reported. “But there is so much violence-inciting content on the internet that it’s literally impossible to report everything.” Security forces are, she says, underfunded.
* It is an offence in New Zealand to possess this document unless an exemption has been obtained.
Ebner was a consultant in the royal commission inquiry into the attacks and at a briefing for Commonwealth security divisions at the New Zealand High Commission in London. “I think it was the first time the topic of gamification played a bigger role in the conversations, the topic of trolling communities and of online subcultures. That’s something that has been hugely underestimated up until Christchurch.” Had there been too little focus on far-right extremism? “I think that’s the case, not just in the US and Europe but also, I assume, in Australia and New Zealand after the attack in the Lindt shop in Sydney by an Islamist extremist-inspired terrorist. There seemed to be a disproportionate focus on jihadist extremism, whereas the far right and the violent far right were gaining ground across the world.”
She was heartened by the leadership from New Zealand. “Your Prime Minister took a really good approach, emphasising the victims’ names rather than the perpetrator’s.” New Zealand’s example of media coverage, she says, should be adopted as a strategy for policymakers who have to deal with a similar situation. “Because what has been a big fear is that it can inspire future attacks.”
It already has. The shooter in the synagogue attack in Poway, California, last April cited the Christchurch attacks. The imperative to not give publicity to terrorists has to be balanced with the need to inform. “There is an important role for the media, policymakers and civil society organisations to inform the general public about these links.” The groups are getting more sophisticated, marketing themselves as mainstream.
Knowledge is power when it comes to countering the propaganda of groups such as Generation Identity. “They publicly denounce violence and try to distance themselves but at the same time are spreading exactly the same conspiracy theories and ideologies. They can, as Christchurch showed, incite attacks against minority communities. It requires a concerted effort by multiple stakeholders, from researchers to policymakers to media outlets but also social-media influencers.” As she points out in a chapter called “It All Started So Well”, “Increasingly, tech giants like Facebook have begun to realise that their platforms have been systematically used to hack people’s minds. As is usually the case with dystopias, it all started with utopian thinking.”
“I partly felt some form of responsibility for not having done more to counter these online echo chambers of hate and conspiracy theories.”
FLOOD OF HATE
Ebner, 28, was born in Austria and speaks five languages – all the better to troll the trolls. But she must have nerves of steel. Her book recounts, with discreet humour, some fixes she’s found herself in. At a neoNazi music festival in Germany she becomes anxiously aware that her Adidas skate shoes fall short of extremist chic. She should be wearing New Balance trainers, which, after a company executive praised Donald Trump’s trade policies, were burnt by some customers but declared “the official shoes of white people” by nipsters – neo-Nazi hipsters.
At a traditional Viennese cafe, trying to establish her far-right credentials with a member of Generation Identity, she almost blows it by ordering an ideologically suspect soy-milk cappuccino. Who knew extremists can be so obsessive about aesthetics and detail?
She has had to deal with hate. Two years into her first job with London-based antiextremism think tank Quilliam, its offices were stormed by British far-right activist Tommy Robinson and his crew. He was upset about a Guardian article Ebner had written. He said she called him a white supremacist. She said she didn’t. He livestreamed the confrontation to his 300,000 followers. “I think that was something that overwhelmed [Quilliam]. They tried to force me to retract my article and when I refused I was dismissed. Giving in to extremists wasn’t something that I would have expected of a counter-extremist organisation. It showed me how much of an impact a single extremist influencer can have.”
Afterwards came a flood of hate. “I would be lying if I said it doesn’t impact me to get death threats or sexual threats. After the Tommy Robinson confrontation, I had no idea whether I would ever be able to look at my Twitter again without being scared to death.”
Then there’s the material she sees. “To be honest, I’ve seen psychologists to deal with the long-term trauma such content can create. It’s also journalists, even people in tech firms who have to look at these things. The long-term effects aren’t necessarily understood or taken seriously yet.”
TRAD WIFE TEMPTATION
In Going Dark, Ebner reveals her own vulnerability to radicalisation. In her case, it was the anti-feminist trad wives, the sort of group where she was advised that getting a man required knowing when to STFU – shut the f--- up.
Trad wives believe the heterosexual community is a marketplace, “Women are the sellers, men the buyers of sex.” Yikes. How did she fall, even a little, for that malarkey? “You are in a moment of weakness, which I was at the time, and the right topics are addressed,” she says. “Topics relating to my identity as a woman and to relationships.” She’d had a painful break-up.
The group offered sisterly solidarity. Did it seem like a safe haven from the wilderness of modern dating culture? “Exactly. They seem to provide some form of mutual advice and support to deal with those difficult topics.” She considers herself a feminist. “But at some point there seemed to be a gate through which I decided not to walk. But I could have. That’s a scary thought, but it also says something about profiles, which I don’t think exist for radicalisation any more.”
In other words, there’s no longer always a clear line between us and them. And no room for complacency at a time when, in the UK, anti-Semitism in the Labour Party became an election issue. “Anti-Semitism has definitely been on the rise again in the entire Western world.” In the UK, there has been a problem in the far left, she says. “Whereas in places such as Germany, most other European places and the US, it’s more far-right extremists.
Some extremists like to frame their activity as being about freedom of speech. “It’s often seen as an outlet to express their grievances but also rebellion against what they would see as the social-justice warriors or hyper-woke millennials or liberalism as a whole,” she says. “That’s dangerous because racist, anti-minority or violent content is sold with the label that you are fighting for human rights.”
It’s a great strength of Going Dark that readers are forced to be aware of our tribal impulses and the effect on our sense of reality of occupying online echo chambers. Extremist games and trolling exist on a continuum.
Mainstream politicians can help amplify extremist messages. The day of the Christchurch attack, Ebner notes, Donald Trump equated migrants with “invaders” as the perpetrator had done. “Should Twitter take down hateful or conspiratorial propaganda,” she asks, “even if it comes from
democratically elected politicians?”
THE ADDITIONAL THREAT OF NEW MEDIA
Ebner offers ideas to counter extremism: education, hacking the hackers and embarrassing extremists, and organisations such as HateAid that offer connection and support to targets of hate. She cites the Christchurch Call. “Jacinda Ardern’s summit in Paris with [French President Emmanuel] Macron to really tackle online hatred and foster international co-operation – that’s a very important approach. It’s that combination of not playing into [perpetrators’] hands by giving them more attention and thereby multiplying the effects of the attack and also tackling some of the online radicalisation hotbeds.”
Optimistic would be too strong a word. “I’m quite pessimistic in the short run, to be honest, but very optimistic in the medium and long term. We’re still trying to deal with very new phenomena and challenges we’re just starting to grasp.” It won’t happen tomorrow. “But hopefully in the next few years, we’ll find solutions to dealing with the additional threat of new media, of tech innovations and how they’ve impacted us as individuals, our identities and our processes.”
Ebner will be at the Auckland Writers Festival in May to discuss such urgent matters. She doesn’t talk about her private life, for obvious reasons. But it seems she has always been attracted to trouble. “A storm chaser!” was her answer as a first-grader when adults asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. From the movie Twister she learnt that to be able to warn against crazy weather, you have to go to the centre of a storm.
It’s late in London and she’s off to continue doing that gruelling, essential work. I tell her I hope she’s okay out there at the moment. “At the moment I’m okay,” she says. “Fingers crossed.”
The day of the Christchurch attack, Donald Trump equated migrants with “invaders” as the perpetrator had done.