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Pandemic has spurred engagement in online extremism, say experts

<span>Photograph: Alamy</span>
Photograph: Alamy

Eighteen months of global lockdowns have led to growing engagement in a toxic online cocktail of extremist material ranging from terrorist content to conspiracy theories and disinformation, experts warn.

Jacob Davey from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) said studies had already shown “there has been a proliferation of harmful and troubling activity online” during the pandemic, with an impact that is impossible to predict.

“What we’ve seen is evidence of spikes of online activity in a wide range of extremist issues during lockdown. It is not just terrorist material but a broad cocktail of online harms, as people spent more time indoors,” Davey said.

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Last year the UK’s Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) said over 7% more pieces of suspected terrorism content had been reported to them during 2020 compared with the year before, reflecting global trends.

A study by the ISD, which studies extremism worldwide, showed that content on rightwing extremist pages and groups in Canada increased by 33.7% on Facebook last year, while postings on the 4Chan bulletin board were up by 66.5%.

Terror content was just one of “a cocktail of harms” that people were engaged with, Davey said, arguing postings to rightwing extremist forums, for example, took in a wide range of harmful content. “It includes conspiracy theories, hate speech and disinformation, not just discussions about violent activity.”

The nature of the terror threat was already changing prior to the pandemic, said Paul Gill, a professor of security and crime science at University College London, since Islamic State (IS) lost the last of its territory in Syria in 2019. “That has meant there were already fewer directed plots and a rise in self-initiation.”

Lockdowns in countries such as the UK had made it harder for people to associate in person or to plan attacks in a more traditional style, Gill said, but it also amounted to “a perfect storm of other risk factors for radicalisation” because so many people were isolated at home.

The killing of David Amess has prompted a conversation about ending online anonymity. While police are investigating whether there are any links to Islamist extremism and have not connected the killing to the targeting of MPs online, allies of the MP said he had voiced growing concern about threats and toxicity within public discourse as they demanded a crackdown.

There is also growing evidence that lockdown contributed to wider mental health pressures in countries such as Britain, including an increase in cases of psychosis – “all of which has decreased people’s resilience”, Gill said. That could make a small minority of people more susceptible to extremist content, he added.

“If you have any grievance you can go online and find people who will validate your grievance, and make you feel like you are part of something,” Gill said, arguing an increasing number of terror – or closely related – cases were “hard to define”.

He cited the example of Jake Davison, who in August killed his mother and four others with a shotgun before turning the weapon on himself in Plymouth. “Ideology is so mixed up with personal grievance that it can be difficult in such cases to know what are the driving motives,” said Gill.

Some people called for Davison’s case to be designated as terrorism after he posted messages online describing himself as an involuntary celibate or “incel”, but senior officers said last month they did not believe incel ideology was itself terrorist and that the series of murders did not amount to terrorism.

Islamist extremism remains, according to MI5, the largest terror threat facing the UK, followed by rightwing extremism. But experts point also to a new, fast-growing category called mixed, unclear or uncertain (MUU), where it is easier to pin down the violence than the thinking that prompted it.

Of all referrals to the government’s Prevent counter-radicalisation programme in 2019-20, the latest period for which figures are available, 51% were in the MUU category, with the rest nearly split between Islamist (24%) and rightwing (22%) extremism.

In a speech in July, Jonathan Hall QC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, highlighted the case of Tobias Rathjen who killed nine in Hanau, Germany, last year as an example.

“He was openly racist but obsessed with conspiracy theories involving ritual child abuse. He called himself an incel. He was a loner, not connected to any group. It is impossible to say that he had a single programme,” Hall said.