Violent Nazi extremist social media pages radicalising young males in Qld
Children as young as 12 in regional Queensland are adopting violent, extremist ideologies as new research shows an increasing number of young people becoming radicalised by terrorist groups on alternative social media.
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Children as young as 12 in regional Queensland are adopting violent, extremist ideologies as new research shows an increasing number of young people becoming radicalised by terrorist groups on alternative social media.
An anti-extremist charity the Online Hate Prevention Institute analysed 5000 items of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim comments and posts across 11 different social media platforms across the past 12 months.
It comes as Rabbi Ari Rubin from the Chabad Centre for Jewish Life in North Queensland said he has seen an increase in anti-Semitism in North Queensland over recent months.
“I have had community members in North Queensland calling me up in tears over acts of anti-Semitism,” he said.
“I had one member tell me that his close friend just cut off all contact with him when he found out he was Jewish … social media is amplifying the wrong voices.”
Online Hate Prevention Institute chief executive Dr Andre Oboler said he had seen a number of young people who had gone onto alternative social media sites Gab and Telegram.
He said they had “transformed from far-right into radicalisation where they are seeking to incite violence” against Jews and Muslims with “a trend from generic hate to ideological hate” since the beginning of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
He said these young people were then going on Instagram post comment sections to spread the messages they had seen on Gab and Telegram.
Meanwhile, the Australian Federal Police has revealed an increasing number of young people “being identified as adopting violent extremist ideologies, with individuals as young as 12 years being subject to law enforcement attention”.
“Since July 2021, the AFP – alongside its Joint Counter Terrorism Teams partners – has commenced investigations and conducted operational activity against 27 individuals that were 17-years-old or younger, with the youngest being 12 years old,” an AFP spokeswoman revealed in a statement.
Before October 2023 (and the beginning of the Israel-Palestine conflict), Dr Oboler explained there was a lot of generic content with messages such as “kill the Jews”.
“What we see more (now) is either Islamist flavoured comments about killing the Jews or neo-Nazi flavoured comments calling for violence against Jews – talking about why Hitler was right and that people need to finish his work,” he said.
The investigations led The Online Hate Prevention Institute, which has staff who are based across Australia including in regional Queensland and regional Victoria, to make police reports on several young males for inciting violence through hate speech.
Dr Oboler said the reasons for the radicalisation – which also involved young people combining Nazism with Hamas ideology – was clear from material they were seeing online, often on the limited content moderation social network site Gab.
Gab, which coins itself as “the free speech network”, features swastika-clad, Hitler-praising social groups pages including “The Nazi Society”, “Nazi Crew”, as well as the Australian National Socialist Network (led by Thomas Sewell, recently convicted for violent offences), Australian neo-Nazi Blair Cottrell, and The Base – banned in Australia – which advocates a violent, armed “race war” to accelerate the collapse of western society and establish a “white ethno-state”.
Dr Oboler said the research showed young people from Australia are joining in and engaging with these groups on Gab.
Dr Lydia Khalil, research fellow at the Lowy Institute and an associate research fellow at Deakin University and author of the book Rise of the Extreme Right, said young people being radicalised online tend to be male and “searching for subversive action, community belonging and in-group identification”.
“What we find that is those young men tend to be online in general more than most other people before they start to identify with those ideologues,” she said.
Dr Khalil said some of the trend could be explained by rapidly shifting cultural norms.
“We don’t have offline communities like we used to,” she said.
“There is also changing expectations around masculinity, confusing young many men and leading them to find to solace in the straightforward image of masculinity of toughness and physical fitness these groups offer.”
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Originally published as Violent Nazi extremist social media pages radicalising young males in Qld
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