Online, you can be anyone.
I can be a far-right neo-Nazi,
but I can also be a jihadist,
and I can even be a man who is part of the incels movement.
Most of the world was introduced to incels
when Elliot Rodger killed six people at UC Santa Barbara in 2014.
Police didn't have to search long to learn what motivated
a 22-year-old gunman to kill six people and injure seven others.
Incel stands for involuntary celibate,
and it was originally a forum on Reddit
that was basically set up for people
who couldn’t find a romantic or sexual partner.
The Toronto van attacker posted a reference to Elliot Rodger online.
He wasn’t part of a terrorist group,
but it may not be as simple as suggesting he was a lone wolf.
I think it’s extremely scary
that literally anyone could get caught up in an extremist movement,
could get radicalized and exploited by extremist recruiters.
[INVESTIGATORS]
I’m Julia Ebner, and I’m a researcher looking at
far-right radicalization and terrorism.
Part of my research is undercover within those groups.
And I do these investigations partly because
I want to understand better how they operate
because that's how you inform prevention and intervention programs,
but also partly because I then work with security services
to intercept their communication
or to prevent terrorist attacks from happening
if I do see something being plotted.
I actually initially started looking into jihadist terrorism
when ISIS was at the height of its power,
but then I saw that there was a strong backlash
from the far-right side of the spectrum.
So I looked deeper into the far-right’s online subcultures
and saw that they were really gaining traction,
especially among young people.
And I wanted to get insights, really firsthand insights,
and understand what was driving them.
When I was younger, I always wanted to become an actress,
and I did a few acting trainings.
So I guess that was helpful for being just a very,
really just an amateur in pretending to be someone I’m not.
But it helped me to, for example,
to fool neo-Nazi groups or also jihadist groups
into thinking that I could be one of them.
For my research, I went undercover,
on the one hand with ISIS hacker groups,
but also with American neo-Nazis,
with German far-right extremists,
identitarians, and white nationalists.
Also with misogynist groups
and with conspiracy theory groups, such as QAnon.
A lot of people wouldn’t really make the connection
that actually neo-Nazis and far-right extremists
are very similar to jihadists—
in the ways they operate, also in the ways they think,
but especially in the ways they use new technologies.
I’ve been interested in the rise of anti-feminism for quite some time,
especially when it manifests itself in targeted hatred against women,
especially against feminists.
The manosphere is a loose network of different online subcultures
that are all misogynist and united in your anti-feminism.
Incels is one of the most radical
and potentially violent groups or networks
within the bigger manosphere.
Incels was originally a forum on Reddit
that was basically set up for people
who couldn’t find a romantic or sexual partner
and who were lonely.
There was a positive goal behind incels in the beginning,
but it has been hijacked over the years by deeply misogynist
and anti-feminist activists, who’ve turned it into
one of the most hateful places you can find on the internet.
When you’re blackpilled, you don’t believe anymore
in being able to find a romantic or sexual partner.
You don’t believe that it’s possible to
change your behavior in order to find a girl.
They believe that actually it’s only the really good-looking guys,
they call them Chads,
were able to find women.
So attractive men are called Chads,
and attractive women are called Stacys in the incels vocabulary.
In 2014, Elliot Rodger was, I would say,
the first big case of an incels sympathizer
who went on to commit an act of terror.
The nearly ten-minute rampage
ended with a final gun battle with sheriff’s deputies.
In the end, Rodger and six others were killed.
He became the hero for the whole incels subculture,
so he’s still cited, his manifesto is still quoted
by new perpetrators of the incels movement.
He posted a 141-page manifesto,
mostly blaming women for not having sex with him.
He also published a video in which he said that he hates all women,
that he wants to take revenge on women for not having sex with him.
One example of such an inspirational attack
is the Toronto van attacker,
who in 2018 went on to commit a van attack against pedestrians.
And he also posted a reference to Elliot Rodger online
in a Facebook post.
And most recently, we’ve, of course, had the Plymouth shooting in the UK,
where the perpetrator was also inspired by the incels movement.
My job is to do research into various different extremist movements
on different sides of the ideological spectrum.
But as part of this, I often go undercover
to expose some of their communication tactics
or their recruitment tactics,
and to then also inform the wider public,
but also the security services or international organizations
on how to approach these topics.
For my undercover investigations,
I usually have different steps that I follow.
Step one is to understand what my goal is,
what do I want to get out of this.
Step two is to develop a profile,
a credible profile across different social media outlets.
That means often spending months to really develop that profile
to make it credible.
I sometimes think about my own character
or that fake character
almost like I would think about a character in a novel.
But it also means that you have to invest
a lot of time into actually running these different accounts,
turning them into something that could be an actual person's account.
They want to have several proofs
that your Twitter profile isn’t just a fake profile,
that you have profiles on all of their alternative media
social media outlets,
like there is an alt-right equivalent for Twitter,
for YouTube, for Facebook
that I would have to have accounts on all of these simultaneously
and run them for several months in order to be credible.
And then some of the groups have very rigorous vetting procedures.
So, for example, when I joined a neo-Nazi group in the US,
I had to actually submit the test results of a genetic test
to prove that I’m white,
or to prove that I have no foreign background.
Step three is to learn the language of the community,
and it’s important to almost learn that language
before reaching out to the recruiters or to other members
because otherwise they would already be suspicious
because they can immediately identify you as an outcomer.
An example would be the incels movement,
where you have a whole list of terms that they use
that you wouldn’t know as an outsider,
you wouldn’t know what a Chad or a Stacy is
or what the derogatory terms are that they use to describe women,
or that you have to be blackpilled
in order to be part of that community.
And step four is to reach out to other members.
And step five is to really get deeper insights
and to gather information from the inside.
One of the key findings from my time within incels
was that they’re all deeply vulnerable individuals,
and they’ve all had a past of either traumatizing experiences
or of just really a lot of sad experiences
that happened during their youth or during their childhood even.
All of the incels that I spoke to or that I had conversations with
had an extremely low self-esteem.
So they also talk a lot about how to maximize their looks.
That’s called looksmaxxing.
There is a whole forum on that
where you can do different types of surgeries.
They have this ideal picture of what a man should look like
in order to be successful.
And some of them also no longer believe in
any of these looksmaxxing strategies,
so they’ve given up all hope
and, what you in incels language would call, they lay down and rot.
They’ve basically decided that their life is no longer of any value,
and then they resort to either committing suicide
or they resort to planning acts of violence against women,
to take revenge on the people they blame
for their lack of sexual experiences
or for their inability to find a romantic partner.
I do think it’s possible to de-radicalize them,
but in order to inform good de-radicalization strategies
or intervention strategies,
we need to have really good knowledge of how these communities operate
and what’s driving the members.
So I think there is value in going undercover with them.
The other part of the story is, of course,
intercepting their communication
if there is an attack that’s being plotted
or if there is an announcement of violence
and then forwarding it to the security services
or forwarding it to the tech platforms
that shut down their accounts.
And I do think that’s really important,
and that’s also what keeps me motivated in this job,
that I think you can have an impact, however small it is,
especially in doing investigative research in this area.