The diffuse and chaotic nature of online conversation has created a climate of fear. Prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, the FBI would have alerted law enforcement agencies across the country to be on high alert for potentially violent protests in all 50 states in the coming weeks, and gathered intelligence about an armed group who plans to travel to DC to stage an uprising on opening day. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has authorized up to 15,000 national guards from across the country to move to DC to support local police before and on January 20.
Representative Conor Lamb (D-PA) said Tuesday morning that he and other lawmakers were informed about potential plots surrounding the inauguration. “They were talking about 4,000 armed ‘patriots’ to surround the Capitol and prevent any Democrats from entering,” he said. “They published rules of engagement, that is, when you shoot and when you don’t. So this is an organized group that has a plan. They are committed to doing what they are doing because I think in their minds, you know, they are patriots and are talking about 1776 and therefore this is now a contest of wills. “
Complicating efforts to contain extremism is the decentralized and chaotic nature in which it is spreading. Numerous posters – few of which are directly linked to publicly known extremist groups – proliferated through extremist channels and social networks, listing specific dates, times and locations for people to gather in violent protest against the so-called “stolen” election, especially in state capitals and federal landmarks.
TikTok videos of influencers displaying the Three Percenters logo as an avatar, referring to the anti-government militia movement, are promoting future protests – even publishing videos of them collecting ammunition and weapons, while playing tampered audio, suggesting that Trump wants them to target his vice president, Mike Pence.
In Gab and Telegram, two marginal networks frequented by white nationalist groups and other extremist groups, mysteriously originated Videos of military personnel walking through American cities have also gone viral, with social media users questioning whether such activity was part of support for Donald Trump’s presidency or government efforts to restrict people’s constitutional rights.
In this environment, several different movements emerged: the Millennium March, with a flag sanctifying the QAnon supporter who died while attacking the Capitol last week; Patriot Action for America, which summoned tens of thousands of “patriots” to prevent Democratic lawmakers from entering the Capitol on the 16th and 17th; or simply a generic march to retake America, with participants free to fill in the blanks as they wish. The concern among monitors of extremism is that, like the Stop the Steal rally, it has become a magnet for militia members and groups of conspiracy theorists – even without the explicit encouragement of the event organizers in the class of professional activists MAGA – so will these events be.
The promotion of the events drew the attention of leading conservative pro-Trump vehicles and figures, who offered a range of responses, including skepticism that they may be false flag operations organized by antifa and other left-wing groups.
Much of the online confusion was driven by major social networks that crack down on the most extreme material that appears on their websites. Along with Donald Trump’s ban, Facebook and Twitter stopped the trend of far-right hashtags and removed dozens of posts that promoted potential violence before the January 20 inauguration.
Without the biggest social media networks to count on, far-right activists initially turned to Parler, the conservative app, to vent their anger and frustration and potentially plan for future action. The digital platform was used to organize part of the violence associated with Capitol riots on January 6 and became a central meeting point for Trump supporters who still believed in the unmasked electoral fraud allegations stemming from the November election, based on an online review of POLITICO posts.
But in the wake of last week’s violence, Google and Apple quickly banned Parler from appearing in their app stores, and Amazon – whose cloud computing business supports how many digital services work – kicked the company off its servers. Parler subsequently filed an antitrust suit against Amazon.
In this void, many marginal groups have turned to TikTok.
Since the January 6 Capitol riots, pro-militia groups have flooded the Chinese-owned video sharing service, promoting conspiracy theories of electoral fraud and accusing Pence of betraying Trump by overseeing the Electoral College’s vote certification, according to Ciaran O ‘Connor, a disinformation researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based study center that tracks hate speech online.
Several TikTok users posted audio clips of Trump saying they were tampered with to make it look like he was criticizing the current vice president. Often, posts were labeled: “Mike Pence is the traitor”. Viral footage of the recent Capitol riots, including incendiary claims that more violence was to come, quickly generated large numbers of online views on the site.
Other TikTok users went even further in saying that the president was about to institute martial law. The hashtag InsurrectionAct, in reference to false claims that Trump had previously called for military service, currently has more than 4.4 million views, collectively, on the social media platform.
“TikTok is acting as an echochamber for people’s complaints,” said O’Connor. “Much of this material is being created to promote the Three Percentages or pro-militia activity”.
In response, TikTok said it was reviewing the posts that POLITICO flagged, adding that the content or accounts that incited or promoted the violence would be removed.
But the app is far from the only place where these groups and individuals are meeting and posting. Many, fearing scrutiny of law enforcement, went black. As early as November, radical extremist groups withdrew to invitation-only message boards and encrypted messaging apps like Telegram when they started organizing events to protest the loss of Trump. The growth of CB apps – named after CB radio, the informal frequencies that truck drivers use to communicate – has made it easier for them to coordinate activities in real time.
While fewer people outside of these networks may be radicalized as a result of using invite-only panels, extremism researchers have found it more difficult to track these groups. They expressed hope that law enforcement – with its ability to execute warrants and superior technology – was focusing on these entities nonetheless.
“Most of those who research this space are in favor of removal because we don’t want to inaugurate the next generation of supremacists [simply] because we wanted to monitor it, ”said Joan Donovan, research director at the Harvard Shorenstein Center, who studies and monitors the spread of disinformation and extremist ideology online. “There are tradeoffs in all fields of research, but this is an issue that requires real action.”
It is possible that the sudden increase in the interest of the police authorities will frighten and prevent potential participants from attending state and national protests. After FBI officials and other federal agencies were able to break into and arrest participants at last week’s Capitol event – even putting potential suspects they found on social media on air exclusion lists leaving Washington – it became clear to the world wider range of MAGA supporters that they were risking serious consequences.
Some militia groups tried to distance themselves from their own events.
Boogaloo Bois, a far-right anti-government militia, tried to cancel an event they had organized for the 17th. But even when they warned that “conventional headlines” drew a lot of attention to their march, they noticed that anyone who wanted to protest that day he could bring weapons if he wanted to: “If you can carry it legally, you can carry it.”
In an ironic twist, the right-wing media, professional MAGA influencers and pro-Trump social media groups are now warning their members to avoid these events, albeit with their own conspiratorial turn: which are sharply false operations, created either by the government in an attempt to silence conservatives and withdraw their Second Amendment rights, or by left-wing antifa conspirators hoping to make the MAGA movement look bad, or even by the Chinese government in conjunction with the elites.
“Don’t go armed to the capitals, don’t be part of the demonstrations on the 20th of January. It is run by globalists, ”warned Alex Jones of Infowars on Tuesday. “There is no secret plan to bring things down for Trump to win. All you’re doing is cementing things like domestic terrorists, so that Biden can cement a new Patriot Act and come after you. ”
Natasha Bertrand contributed to this report.