Inside Radical Neo-Nazi Group on Alternative Social Media
For most people around the world, Neo Nazis, white supremacists, and nationalists are members of marginal movements that lives on the fringes of society. Some only associate them with the 1940s and the occasional KKK or the NPD (National Democratic Party of Germany) marches. Yet while these groups that often fall under the umbrella of the National Socialist movement have been restricted and even banned in many countries, mainstream media and social media, they continue to be widely active and organized on alternative social media platforms.
While crawling extremist and inciting content on these platforms, our Webz.io cyber analyst team are able to track various white supremacist organizations and communities that maintain active groups and pages to spread their radical agenda and activities.
Who are these groups and what risks do they pose? Who are their top members and what can we learn about them?
In this post we are taking a closer look at a specific white nationalist group and try to answer all these questions.
The White Nations
The group we chose to focus on is the White Nations, which at first glance would seem like the typical racist group you could find on alternative social media platforms – small and relatively unknown. But once we looked closer, we uncovered the dangerous secrets this group holds.
Profile: White Nations
Established: A year ago (2021)
Members: Thousands of members
Location: U.S. (its members are spread nationwide)
Founder: His nickname is kept in our system but he’s from Austin, Texas
Community agenda: Creating a community that promotes white supremacy
The majority of the discussions in the group revolve around protecting the “white race”, starting a race war, targeting Jewish people, and promoting a fascist country, among others.
In the following image, you can see one of the many racist manifestoes taken from the group, where a member presents his racist beliefs and agenda:
Like other groups, the White Nations is very active. We have witnessed daily activity, in which users share their thoughts and opinions – including inciting discussions and hate speech. This type of content is very common in many closed hate groups.
But there are 3 reasons for our decision to classify this group as a higher risk to ethnic groups:
- Skilled management
- Out of the box activism
- Their level of organized activity
Let’s find out how these make this group stand out.
Skilled Management
Unlike other groups, the management of this group not only believes in spreading their racist ideology as much as possible, they take effective measures to ensure the group is active and works together to grow and operate online and offline as much as possible:
This post was written by one of the group’s managers, where he elaborates on their vision on how the National Socialist movement should operate to grow into a “mass organization.”
Out-of-the-Box Activism
Another way that makes this group more dangerous than other extremist groups is their level of proactive activism. Take for example the next post (see below), which was published by the same manager from the previous example. He urges members of the group to take an active approach – to be creative and use unconventional methods to “get louder and remain unseen”:
The members that are joining the group are highly engaged. Many of them share their actions to raise awareness of their goal. For example, the next post was published by a member of the group who hid from the police and hung inciting stickers:
Organized Activities
The third and last indication that shows that this group poses a high risk is the fact that its managers organize in person meetups and activities. Here’s an example of a poll they ran to survey the level of willingness of members to attend such sessions:
Following this poll, the manager organized a meetup, which we can see in the post below, in a screenshot from Webz.io’s Cyber API (because the original post was deleted from the site).
In this post, we can see a clear location and time of the meetup. Next to it, there are a lot of rules and safety measures. The author stresses the danger and anonymity needed in this meetup – which shows clearly they are engaging in illegal, probably violent activity.
The group has 3 managers, one of them, we’ll name him “B.D.”, is also the founder of the group. He is a very active influencer with thousands of followers and 200K posts. B.D., who is based in Austin, Texas, posts several times a day and spreads his radical beliefs, including long posts and manifestos. His grand vision is to expand his community across the world to trigger a race war.
This is just one of many groups and organizations that are active on the margins of the web – where they can freely communicate and organize their radical activities. Most organizations, like The White Nations, plan to expand their activity in the physical world, but they usually start exactly in these hidden places – on alternative social media.
The examples we have shown here are just the tip of the iceberg. The amount of illicit, terrorist, and life threatening content found on these sites is endless and keeps expanding every day. Webz.io works with law enforcements from across the globe to help them keep track of these and other emerging threats and gain key and real time intelligence needed to protect against these radical activities.
