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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how the internet is radicalizing young men and producing mass murderers.
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Basu, Narrating: Like a typical 90s child, "NBC" reporter Ben Collins grew up with the internet, which is why when he was told early in his career that he'd be covering the internet, he thought: Okay, this is gonna be a pretty fun and chill job.
Ben Collins: One of my favorite stories from early on was there was this group of people in Dayton, Ohio, who had created a Facebook event saying that Limp Bizkit was going to play a concert at the Shell station on 4/20. And I called them on the phone, and they only spoke back to me in Limp Bizkit lyrics. It was like a wild ride. That was the kind of thing I was covering, right?
Basu, Narrating: But the internet was changing. Ben first started to notice it in August of 2015, when something shocking happened on live TV.
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Reporter: Continuing to follow breaking news out of Roanoke, Virginia, where a reporter and photographer were shot live to death on the air. Alison Parker is the reporter on your screen… [FADES OUT]
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Basu, Narrating: Ben knew Alison Parker's boyfriend, Chris, and in the days after the shooting, he started to see a lot of lies circulating on the internet. People saying Chris was a "crisis actor." Or a conspiracy theory video on YouTube that had been viewed nearly a million times, saying that Alison was in on it all along. So, Ben did something kind of radical. He called up the people posting the lies.
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Collins: And I would let them talk for half an hour. At the end, I'd be like, just letting you know, I know Chris. He's been a real person this entire time. And I know you think he's a character, an actor, or something. So, what do you think? And the person on the other end of the line would always say like, this is just what I believe. This is what I've learned from the internet.
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Basu, Narrating: Lies and conspiracy theories have always existed on the internet. But what was starting to change around this time was how much more amplified they were getting. Algorithms on social media allowed clicky posts with unvetted information to show up more prominently in more people's feeds. And politicians and other political actors were making things worse, pushing people towards disinformation, instead of away from it. Ben says after Alison's death, he knew his days of covering Fred Durst online fandom were long over. Now, he covers…
Collins: What I would call "the dystopia beat," which is, I would say, how the internet broke down a lot of society and how it's being built back up.
Basu, Narrating: Today, Ben says the internet is regularly mass-producing hate, and at its worst, it's mass-producing mass murderers. The man who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 published his screed on 8chan. The shooter in Buffalo earlier this year was radicalized online. And this past Independence Day, the man accused of shooting into a crowd of people attending a parade, there was a common theme in his online activity: He was obsessed with the idea of mass murder.
To understand how someone goes from fairly innocuously searching the internet to plotting a mass shooting event, you need to know a little bit about all the different platforms because there are a lot of them, and they're a lot more popular and influential than you might realize.
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Collins: There's obviously TikTok, which every kid I know is on and they think Facebook is like, the printing press.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] Sure.
Collins: And that is a very formative part of the civilian internet now. It's where people get the news, especially if you're young. And it's a black box. Nobody really knows what's going on there at all. Nobody knows how they get filtered into algorithms. It is based on time spent on a video and it's not a lot of conscious choices. Then there are places like 4chan, which are just radicalization devices, anonymous spaces on the internet. And because of that, it invites the worst stuff on the internet. It is a place where everything is allowed. It is completely without guard rails and kids who want to experience what they think, something to be edgy or interesting, or, you know, they wanna see the worst of the world, they go there. They might just be curious at the start, but people can very quickly be radicalized by the hive mind on places like 4chan.
Basu: And what about Discord? I think a lot of people probably came to know more about it recently.
Collins: Yeah. If you have Slack at work, it's Slack, except a lot more people use the voice chat function, and it's easier to get cross channel. So, people can invite you to different message boards from other message boards. That's how you can get radicalized on Discord much easier than Slack. It's because, for example, you could start out on a video game forum, like a Minecraft forum or something like that, and somebody can say: Hey, come over to this forum for teenagers, whatever, to hang out. And then from there, they can bring you to a white nationalist forum, and then they can radicalize you from there. So, you get deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole, and these are private spaces, largely. And there is no real way for people to track them, other than just bootstrapping it. Really doing shoe-leather style investigative work.
Basu: So, we're gonna come back and talk about, you know, the organizations behind these platforms and what their responsibility is, but first I want to stop on something. It's my understanding that a lot of the people engaging with these platforms are mostly white young men and boys. Can you explain why this is the demographic that's being attracted to these spaces?
Collins: In these spaces, specifically places like 4chan, they are used as recruitment vehicles from white supremacist spaces, frankly. They realize that there is a large amount of disaffection in this country, and they are preying on, I would say, white-fragility, anger, among young white men. For example, like the incel community. Incels are people who are… it's short for involuntarily celibate. It's a misogynist group of people who hate women. Those forums have been used as recruiting spaces for white nationalists 'cause they give you hope, which sounds completely counterintuitive, right? How could a white nationalist group give somebody hope? If you're an incel, and you believe that you are fundamentally unattractive, cannot exist in society, white supremacist groups say, you can exist in our society. You know, we can use your anger. And they use that anger to, you know, say like, you can join our group, you can talk about whatever you want. We don't like women either. And we can tell you that the reason society is like this is because of the Jews or because of Black people. To them, people who are often the distance that they will never meet that they need to destroy. So, that's how these spaces end up this way, is because they provide hope in this really sinister way to people who otherwise don't have it. There are much larger societal failures that lead people to this point, where the only place they have to get community is white supremacist spaces.
Basu: What do we know about who is orchestrating these efforts to pull more people into these online spaces?
Collins: So, there are many different reasons to do this. Some of it is money. For example, there's this website called 8chan where Q from QAnon posts still, even to this day. 8chan is a place that exists because 4chan wasn't extreme enough. 4chan started banning anime depictions of child pornography. So, a guy went and created 8chan to have a website where even that was allowed. And the guy who runs that now, he and his son, they run a series of like, ludicrous, over-the-top, other websites where ad servers for pornography are allowed and much worse things than that. And you can make money that way. And also, you get this notoriety as this like, free speech absolutist, like nothing will ever get taken down in this space, but those people are making a bunch of money by not doing much. They are just protecting a server where, you know, white nationalists can post manifestos.
Basu: Mm. So, is it just a bunch of lone actors deciding to do this? Or is there an organized effort that connects them all?
Collins: There is an organized effort among the people who run those sites to keep each other going, keep each other up. There is no way to stop them. I just wanna make this clear. Like, if you took down 4chan tomorrow, something else would be up in its place because that's how the internet works. These people are networked in a way where you cannot stop this overnight. It's just not gonna happen. However, the issue over the last few years is that recommendations algorithms pushed people to these spaces, political actors pushed people to these spaces. And when that happens, you get regular people pushed from Facebook to Telegram, Telegram to 4chan. And that's how you have now 65-year-old retirees hanging out on 4chan or 8chan and waiting for Q drops, and then going to the Capitol on January 6th. That's how that happens. Those people don't magically end up on extremist forums. It's that they get led down this path by either politicians pushing this constantly, or, I would say, completely unconsciously from Facebook recommendation algorithms that push them from group to group.
Basu: So, it sounds like 4chan or really, 8chan, are some of the least moderated spaces out there. What about the other platforms, the places like, I mean, just to start with a really big one, right, Facebook or even a Discord? What are they saying about their responsibility as a platform?
Collins: So, Facebook has taken a lot of steps over the last few years. Very easy to yell at Facebook because it is the biggest one. And everybody can see the radicalization in real time. Everybody has a friend that went down that path and it was 'cause of Facebook. I mean, I literally do not know a person now who doesn't have a friend who wasn't like, completely normal and now thinks that the world is run by a cabal. Everybody has that person.
Collins: So, they're very visible about that. They have taken steps to try to limit QAnon radicalization, anti-vax radicalization, you know, the basic stuff that you see that's visible. The issue with Facebook is that they can't think forward about this stuff. They don't, and they are always responding to the last catastrophe. It is a difficult thing to do, but there are places that do take it seriously. Places like Pinterest are right on the ball with this stuff because they realize their user base is a) more susceptible to harm on the internet. It's mostly women. And in b) they don't have to do this. They're a private company. They don't have to be the place where people go from angry, disaffected people to terrorists. They don't have to be this place. So..
Basu: Yeah.
Basu: Right. What exactly does that look like? When you say Pinterest is doing things, like, what does that mean?
Collins: Yeah. They realize they're running a community; they're running a website. They're not running, you know, a public park. And even if they were running a public park, you can still kick people outta the public park if they don't have their pants on or whatever. You can do that. [LAUGHS] So, they realize they're running a company. So, when things get outta hand, they just shut things down very quickly. They recognize things. They look at stuff that's trending that maybe shouldn't be, and they just try to look at bad actors and see if they're repeat offenders. Reddit has gotten considerably better at this. They were the worst at this. They've gotten better at this. They realized that because their user base is very… it's young, white men, is very prone to this sort of radicalization. They take it more seriously now because they had this problem to begin with and they recognize the patterns, and they react quickly to their user base who's trying to kick the stuff off. Facebook has made some efforts, but not a lot. Discord, however, they view themselves as a private messaging service. They think they're like text messages or the telephone, and that intercepting it is like intercepting a wiretap or something. I don't agree with that, but you can see what they're saying. You know, people should be able to talk in private. The issue is that's a company, they're not private. They're like Best Buy. You don't go to Best Buy to stage a coup.
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Basu, Narrating: I have been wanting to talk to Ben Collins for a long time now about his reporting. And it's been feeling more urgent with the recent string of mass shootings, and the connections we've been seeing between the shooters and their online activity. In particular, the Highland Park shooting on the Fourth of July. The shooter posted a lot of things online depicting violence in pictures, memes, songs. Now, some people were quick to point out that he had previously attended a Donald Trump rally, and therefore, were quick to blame Trump for what happened. But Ben says that's just too simplistic of an answer.
Collins: We are way past this being about one guy. This is about a much larger political movement among young people where violence and death is the answer. And they will latch onto the politician they think best serves that, but they are not tied to any one guy. They are tied to their own ideology, which is that white men are being persecuted, they're being replaced, that women are out to get them, that feminism has neutered white men. It is a combination of all of these horrific internet subcultures that have popped up over the last few years. When you combine them all into one thing, this is doomer-ism, this is nihilism. This is the idea that can't be fixed, and violence is the only answer. And the only way to get one over on them is to blow yourself up.
Basu, Narrating: What makes all this even more urgent is that these subcultures are popping up in very real ways in our politics and so far, at least, it doesn't seem like our political system is prepared or willing to root it out.
Collins: I don't know how to fix that without people realizing it's a problem. There are people politically who are like, trying to take advantage of this or, at least, allude to the less violent versions of these people are online as part of their base. And that has to stop. And it's almost exclusively on the right. If we have that as part of our political subculture, we are in such deep trouble, I do not know how to get out of it.
Basu, Narrating: Maybe one of the best examples of this is what happened on January 6th of 2021, when militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers led the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Congressional committee investigating the attack spoke with Jason Van Tatenhove, the former spokesman for the Oath Keepers:
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Jason Van Tatenhove: What it was gonna be was an armed revolution. I mean people died that day. Law enforcement officers died that day. There was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol. This could have been the spark that started a new Civil War.
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Basu, Narrating: I asked Ben what people should understand about these militia groups that goes beyond what happened on that one day.
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Collins: I hope that people are learning that this was a very deliberate act by a certain set of actors who have been around for a very long time. It's the same people who were around since 2015, pushing the same conspiracy theories and lies about elections, and about Democrats, and about cabals, and about PizzaGate, and all this stuff. Those are the same people that were around on the days before the 6th, but they were angrier than ever, and they thought that they were losing their diplomatic community, which they were, by the way. You know, the militias who believed that they had diplomatic immunity from Donald Trump. So, I hope people realize that this is a very organized group of people. And they haven't disbanded. Some of them have regrouped. Some of them are quieter. Some of them are louder, somehow. The Proud Boys seem to be less centrally organized, but louder in general since the 6th. But they are a formative group of anti-democratic people who want to take over the country, and they are revanchists. They want things to be like they were in the fifties or the sixties and they wanna strip people's rights. And I hope people understand now that this is not hypothetical, that this isn't a coincidence that all these people met in the same place on the same day. They had a plan, and the question still remains, how high up did that plan go?
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Basu, Narrating: One of the biggest challenges to combating this type of extremism is figuring out how to regulate these spaces online. Earlier this year, the Biden administration launched a Disinformation Governance Board. Its mission was to recommend best practices to counter disinformation and to address how young people are being radicalized online and inspired to commit acts of violence. But very quickly, the Board and its head, Nina Jankowicz, became targets of disinformation themselves. Jankowicz was personally attacked on social media, posts harassing and threatening her. Here is she on "NPR's" "Fresh Air."
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Nina Jankowicz: There were a lot of allegations that I'm a transgender person. There were conjectures about my fertility status, men saying that I should, you know, get out of national security and go make babies. There was, broadly, sexual abuse, which I really can't repeat in any way on air, but you can imagine the sorts of things that men were saying about me. There were threats of doxing, so releasing my personal information and my family's personal information, and then actual doxing. Frankly, allegations from sitting U.S. senators and congresspeople saying that I'm mentally unstable or bizarre.
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Basu, Narrating: Jankowicz ultimately resigned. She told "Fresh Air" that the board and its mission were very misunderstood and mischaracterized by the media and the public. But that example points to what makes this so hard. On the one hand, it's not politically popular to shut things down, to crack down on what a lot of people view as free speech, especially if that effort is coming from the government. But even if you wanted to, it's not that easy. The internet is like the most massive game of whack-a-mole that ever existed. You can shut down one platform, but another will just emerge in its place. And it could even make things worse. Take some of the lessons we learned after the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
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Collins: There's a very good case study with ISIS. If you ban their biggest accounts throughout the internet, they go into smaller holes and they become more radicalized. They become angrier and they become harder to track if you're law enforcement. But their recruitment tools are completely cut off. They cannot recruit more people. It is a catch-22. You have more radical people in a smaller space, more committed to violence, or you have an ever-expanding group of people who may self-moderate over time. It is the big moderation question of our time. How do you find a way to do both? How do you find a way to get people to stop recruiting from extremist forums, while at the same time, not push them further and further into their own little rabbit holes, basically, where they become more radicalized.
Basu: Mm. You know, as we're talking, I'm just thinking about how much the conversation around terrorism has changed in the past two decades in America. I mean, the 9/11-era was all about transnational terrorism. Today, our FBI says that the biggest terrorist threat that we face is domestic. It's coming from violent extremists in our country. Do you think that the FBI was late to recognize that? Do you think the American people are late to recognize that?
Collins: Yes, to law enforcement. Definitely. They were definitely late to recognize this.
Basu: And what are the consequences of being late? I guess that's what I really wanna know.
Collins: Oh, mass death is the consequence of being this late because if a forum existed, like 4chan, where every weekend somebody was posting a manifesto and shooting something up and it wasn't white people. Really seriously consider this for a second. The idea that this would just continue unabated, and everyone would be like, I don't know, free speech. It would not happen. Like, let's be a hundred percent clear about this. This is a race-based issue when it comes to that sort of thing. Now, I do think it's changing slowly but surely, but the issue is there are people in law enforcement who agree with the message. Not all of them, but there are people at the highest level, even of law enforcement, who think that white people are being replaced by immigrants at the Southern border and that it may have something to do with a cabal run by like, the Jews. And I know that because the Proud Boys and groups like that actively talk about trying to recruit local law enforcement so they can… when they go to protests, they have a little bit of immunity at those places to do a little bit more, to be a little bit more aggressive each time. That is part of their strategy, and they talk about it openly.
Basu: What's being done now at the federal level, what's being done by law enforcement to monitor these online spaces and really try and understand what might be coming and try to prevent violence?
Collins: So, they are doing a better job of getting into, I would say, costumed militia groups. Groups like Patriot Front, which, you know, they meet in a specific place. They have basically open Discord chats. They rent U-Hauls under their own names, and they go to places, and they all wear the same uniforms. It's comical how easy it would be to infiltrate a group like that if you're federal law enforcement. But that's not really where the big threat is. Individualized terror cells, where they go online and they egg each other on to commit mass terror attacks, effectively suicide bombing themselves at places like malls and synagogues. It's a really dynamic threat that is very hard to identify who's trolling and who's not. 'Cause they're always gonna say they're trolling. You know, the Buffalo shooter was checked in on by federal law enforcement. He said he was just joking around. There was a shooter a couple years ago in New Mexico that I covered who… his name was Future Mass Shooter on the internet, on a couple of forums. And the FBI checked in on him. He said, ah, I'm just joking around. And then he killed two people at a school.
Basu: Wow. Now, I don't wanna suggest that this comes down to any kind of individual responsibility, but I just wanna acknowledge because this feels like it's part of the conversation that we've been hearing around mass shootings, especially young people carrying out mass shootings, parents, really wondering, you know, what was my responsibility here? If I saw something, should I have said something? I'm curious if there's good guidance for what people should do, parents or just other adults noticing things among other adults who wanna make sure that someone doesn't carry out violence, that it seems like they might.
Collins: Yeah. Check in on your kids and take it seriously. That's a big thing among this 4chan style terror. You know, the last few shooters had a lot of red flags. And you could tell, in the days after the attack, it took a lot of willful blindness by some of these people around the Highland Park shooter's life to think that he wasn't going to do something like this. He made YouTube videos about shooting up schools. This is not complicated stuff. You gotta stop that. But it takes people taking it seriously. We have to stop saying it's a political affiliation. It's not. This is a mass terror cell. That's the number one thing. The internet is real life. We are becoming one with the thing. Your social life exists on the internet. It exists in text messages. It exists in email. Everyone, if you're 80 or if you're eight, your social life exists digitally now. Creating hard markers and saying people are just joking around on the internet and in real life they're gonna do something else. For a lot of people, there is no real life. That's what this is. Their community is in these spaces. So, take them just as seriously as if somebody were to go down to their friend's house and plot the same thing.
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Basu: Mm. Ben, thank you so much for your time and for this conversation.
Collins: Thank you.
Basu, Narrating: You can find Ben Collins' reporting for "NBC" on the Apple News app. We'll link to that for you on our show notes page.
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