Online bans fail to silence extremists drawn to protests
SILVER SPRING, Md. — After Wisconsin protests over Jacob Blake’s shooting by police turned deadly last week, a member of an antigovernment extremist group started posting updates from the scene for comrades in an encrypted chat room.
The group member named “Jake” said “two of my guys” rushed in to help after a gunman later identified as 17-yearold Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two people Aug. 25 on a street in Kenosha.
“Jake” was posting on the Keybase messaging platform, where the group migrated after Discord banned it from its instant messaging service in early July.
For months, the nationwide protests against racial injustice and COVID-19 lockdown orders have attracted all manner of extremists using online platforms to plan, coordinate and drum up support for their activities.
Facebook, Discord and other mainstream internet services have banned accounts linked to anti-government extremists, but the recent protests in Kenosha and elsewhere illustrate how easy it can be for them to work around these digital roadblocks.
“The whole landscape is too big and each individual player is very big,” said Elon University Professor Megan Squire, a computer scientist who studies online extremism. “The number of people you would need to truly police this on the platforms is inadequate right now. The resources just aren’t there.”
Squire has been monitoring the messaging site to which “Jake” and hundreds of other users belong, collecting and reviewing their messages.
One of the posts about the Kenosha shooting said one of Jake’s “guys” provided unspecified medical care while the other was “escorting the kid to safety,” presumably referring to Rittenhouse.
Later, other members of the self-described “private intelligence agency” discussed whether the violence in Kenosha would be the catalyst for a civil war, according to a screenshot taken by Squire.
“Doubt it,” the group’s anonymous founder wrote. “Things like that take time, which is what is happening now.”
“Ah. Gotcha,” a user named “warhammer—actual” replied. “This is just one part of that escalation. Makes sense.”
On June 30, Facebook announced that it had removed hundreds of Facebook and Instagram accounts, pages and groups linked to the anti-government “boogaloo” movement.
Boogaloo supporters, who use the loose movement’s name as a slang term for a second civil war or collapse of civilization, frequently show up at protests armed with rifles and wearing Hawaiian shirts under body armor.
To avoid the ban, some boogaloo groups relaunched pages under innocuous sounding names. A day before the Kenosha protest shooting, a post on a private Facebook group with more than 2,000 members called “CNN Journalist Support Group” said “bois of the movement” would be “making their presence felt” in the city.