Before killing 50 people during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and injuring 40 more, the gunman apparently decided to fully exploit social media by releasing a manifesto, posting a Twitter thread showing off his weapons, and going live on Facebook as he launched the attack.
The gunman’s coordinated social media strategy wasn’t unique, though. The way he manipulated social media for maximum impact is almost identical to how ISIS, at its peak, was using those very same platforms.
While most mainstream social networks have become aggressive about removing pro-ISIS content from the average user’s feed, far-right extremism and white nationalism continue to thrive. Only the most egregious nodes in the radicalization network have been removed from every platform. The question now is: Will Christchurch change anything?
A 2016 study by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism shows that white nationalists and neo-Nazi supporters had a much larger impact on Twitter than ISIS members and supporters at the time. When looking at about 4,000 accounts of each category, white nationalists and neo-Nazis outperformed ISIS in number of tweets and followers, with an average follower count that was 22 times greater than ISIS-affiliated Twitter accounts. The study concluded that by 2016, ISIS had become a target of “large-scale efforts” by Twitter to drive supporters off the platform, like using AI-based technology to automatically flag militant Muslim extremist content, while white nationalists and neo-Nazi supporters were given much more leeway, in large part because their networks were far less cohesive.
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Source: Facebook, Google, And Twitter Stopped ISIS On Their Platforms. What About White Nationalists?