This NYT op-ed about online extremism in the wake of the Christchurch massacre is on point:
Before entering a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, the site of one of the deadliest mass murders in the country’s history, the accused gunman paused to endorse a YouTube star in a video that appeared to capture the shooting.
“Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” he said.
To an untrained eye, this would have seemed like a bizarre detour.
But the people watching the video stream recognized it as something entirely different: a meme.
Like many of the things the suspect appears to have done in preparation for the shooting on Friday — like posting a 74-page manifesto that named specific internet figures who had influenced his views, or writing that the video game Fortnite “trained me to be a killer” — the PewDiePie endorsement served two purposes. For his online followers, it was a kind of satirical Easter egg. (“Subscribe to PewDiePie,” which began as a grass-roots online attempt to keep the popular YouTube entertainer from being dethroned as the site’s most-followed account, has morphed into a kind of all-purpose cultural bat signal for the young and internet-absorbed.)
For everyone else, it was a booby trap, a joke designed to ensnare unsuspecting people and members of the media into taking it too literally. The goal, if there was one, may have been to pull a popular internet figure into a fractious blame game and inflame political tensions everywhere. (In a tweet early Friday morning, PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, said, “I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.”)
The details that have emerged about the Christchurch shooting — at least 49 were killed at two mosques — are horrifying. But a surprising thing about it is how unmistakably online the violence was, and how aware the suspected gunman appears to have been about how his act would be viewed and interpreted by distinct internet subcultures.
In some ways, it felt like a first — an internet-native mass shooting, conceived and produced entirely within the irony-soaked discourse of modern extremism.
The suspected gunman teased his act on Twitter, announced it on the online messsage board 8chan, and broadcast it live on Facebook. The footage was then replayed endlessly on YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, as the platforms scrambled to take down the clips nearly as fast as new copies popped up to replace them. In a statement on Twitter, Facebook said it had “quickly removed both the shooter’s Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video,” and was taking down instances of praise or support for the shooting. YouTube said it was “working vigilantly to remove any violent footage” of the attack. Reddit said in a statement that it was taking down “content containing links to the video stream or manifesto.”
Even the language the suspect used to describe his attack before the fact framed it as an act of internet activism. In his post on 8chan, he referred to the shooting as a “real life effort post.” He titled an image “screw your optics,” a reference to a line posted by the man accused in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that later became a kind of catchphrase among neo-Nazis. And his manifesto — a wordy mixture of white nationalist boilerplate, fascist declarations and references to obscure internet jokes — seems to have been written from the bottom of an algorithmic rabbit hole.
It would be unfair to blame the internet for this. Motives are complex, lives are complicated, and we don’t yet know all the details about the shooting. The authorities in New Zealand have charged a man but have not identified him. Anti-Muslim violence is not an online phenomenon, and white nationalist hatred long predates 4Chan and Reddit.
But we do know that the design of internet platforms can create and reinforce extremist beliefs. Their recommendation algorithms often steer users toward edgier content, a loop that results in more time spent on the app, and more advertising revenue for the company. Their hate speech policies are weakly enforced. And their practices for removing graphic videos — like the ones that circulated on social media for hours after the Christchurch shooting, despite the companies’ attempts to remove it — are inconsistent at best.
We also know that many recent acts of offline violence bear the internet’s imprint. Robert Bowers, the man charged with killing 11 people and wounding six others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, was a frequent user of Gab, a social media platform beloved by extremists. Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with sending explosives to prominent critics of President Trump last year, was immersed in a cesspool of right-wing Facebook and Twitter memes.
People used to conceive of “online extremism” as distinct from the extremism that took form in the physical world. If anything, the racism and bigotry on internet message boards felt a little less dangerous than the prospect of Ku Klux Klan marches or skinhead rallies.
He goes on to call internet extremism "extremism on steroids" and then explains that the real problem is translating it to real life. Here's someone who is actively doing that:
“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. --- Donald Trump, yesterday
They call themselves The Night Wolves, “a new kind of motorcycle club,” or, sometimes, “Putin’s Angels.” And just as much as the Orthodox Church or the military, the Wolves have become a symbol of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the idea that they might be used as his extra-legal enforcers in times of trouble is usually implicit—embedded in their flag-waving Putinized patriotism—never really spelled out.
[...]
Trump, you will recall, learned his special brand of politics from the promoters and crowds at pro wrestling events, where violence in the ring is staged, but that’s not always true in the stands. So he’s not likely to give up on the tough-guy iconography offered by bikers, or the way it can be used to incite others. And Russia remains a great example for him.
Here, the Night Wolves are familiar figures, and have been since the 1990s. Their tall, burly, bearded leader Alexander Zaldastanov, nicknamed Khirurg (surgeon), often hugs Putin on camera, usually being careful not to make him look too short. (On bikes they look the same height.)
The Wolves originally copied their tattoos, leather pants and vests covered in pins from world famous American biker movements like Hell’s Angels, who have been rolling around for most of a century. But if the oldest U.S. biker empires were full of revolutionary outlaws, Putin tamed the men in leather, who act according to the programs approved by the Kremlin’s administration and say things appropriate for the state-controlled television channels.
One day you can see them posing with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Orthodox priests, next day they zoom with flapping Russian flags through European countries or open a base in an abandoned military town in Slovakia, a NATO country.
The pro-Putin bikers have been spreading their wings all over the European Union and also finding friends in the mostly Trumpist Russian community of Miami Florida millionaires. The team of Transparency International researched the connection between a group called the “Alfa Anticriminal” organization made up of Russian special service officers, the group’s founder Svyatoslav Mangushev, and a biker club he founded in Miami, called after Russian special forces, Spetsnaz LE [for Law Enforcement] Spetsnaz.
On Saturday the Wolves are planning to bring a 1,423 meter-long flag to Crimea, to celebrate “Russian Spring” —the beginning of the pro-Kremlin unrest in Ukraine—and mark five years since Russia annexed the peninsula with the help of “little green men,” forces of masked soldiers in unmarked green army uniforms.
In Ukraine the Night Wolves play a genuinely sinister role, in fact. They are under U.S. sanctions for recruiting rebels to fight against Ukraine in Donbas. In 2015, Zoldastanov confirmed that his movement had received $856,242 from the state, “openly and transparently.” A report by Bild, a German newspaper, said that the Night Wolves receive their finance from Russian ministry of Defense.
On Friday, the bikers’ leader Zaldastanov spoke on Russia-24 TV about a Russian soldier allegedly killed by a Ukrainian sniper. With a tragic expression on his face, the biker described the accident but did not mention the death toll of 13,000 killed in the Ukrainian war. The biker did not speak on TV about nearly two million people who the war has turned into refugees, or 70 prisoners of war held in Russian prisons. These topics are not on the agenda of Putin’s Angels.
According to Levada Center opinion polls 68 percent of Russians say the United States is their country’s main enemy. Yet the Night Wolves enjoy American-made bikes; even their ideological leader Vladimir Putin rode with them on a Harley Davidson.
And the Night Wolves love Trump, too.
That's a video of Zalstantanov the Surgeon's big birthday bash. A costumed Trump character come in at about 1:30 and gives a little speech in which he says to The Surgeon, "you are the president and I am the president, I like that you support Vladimir Vladimirovich. We are both against hostility and hate.”
