Far right recruiting children on YouTube
by Fiona Hamilton
Extremist far-right groups are using livestreaming events on YouTube to recruit children as young as 12 to spread their message.
Counterterrorism experts say that a growing number of “extremely young” British teenagers are being drawn towards neo-Nazi and fascist ideologies by groups targeting them online.
Tactics include live interviews on YouTube with teenagers who are considered rising stars of the far right, livestreamed chats aimed at the “Gen Z” age group born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, and the exploitation of computer-gaming platforms.
Groups using such tactics include the Patriotic Alternative, a fascist organisation founded last year by Mark Collett, 40, the British National Party’s former director of publicity. The group calls for anyone who is not white to be ejected from the UK. It has encouraged a 16-year-old, whom The Times is not naming, to run “Zoomer Night”, a regular livestreamed event as part of its “Patriotic Talk” series.
In one recent “Zoomer Night”, hosted on YouTube, four males in their teens and early twenties discussed the threat of “complete erasure of white Europeans” and “white genocide”. They talked of “white people being written out of their own history”, and expressed their concerns that BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) people are becoming the “new masters”.
“They want us wiped out, they want our complete erasure,” one says on the livestreamed chat, on which hundreds of people commented, sending messages of support in an accompanying forum. “The [British] government is preparing for a future without white people and that should be obvious to everybody,” he adds. A third talks about hosting the livestreamed event to ensure “our numbers grow stronger”.
Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at the antifascist charity Hope Not Hate, said that such live events showed “a worrying willingness to make children active advocates and members of fascist organisations”. He added: “The fact that those best suited to bring in young people to the far right are young people themselves has not been lost on them.”
Jacob Davey, of ISD Global, a think tank researching extremism, said: “I think for a lot of people when you say far-right, they think tattooed 40-year-old blokes with beer bellies and no hair. But what we've actually seen is a deliberate attempt by these groups to recruit younger people, and we are starting to see that come to fruition.”
Another far-right YouTuber, Chris Dangerfield, 48, a British former stand-up comedian who lives in Cambodia, recently hosted a livestream series on the platform called “Talking with Teens”. He asked one teenager how it feels to be “one of the youngest nationalists in the country”, causing the boy to smile. Later a 21-year-old man in his final year of university discussed his fears that his views may get him expelled. “Just keep your head down for now, say the right thing, talk to your friends in private,” Mr Dangerfield replies. “The liberal machine wants the likes of you out of it . . . We have to be cunning.”
Mr Hermansson said: “Children as young as 12 and 13 years old are being drawn into extreme far-right circles where they find a warm welcome.” Once inside they are urged to ask their friends to join, he added.
Police believe that the far right constitutes the fastest-growing terrorist threat to Britain and have foiled a spate of attacks in recent months.
Last week a 17-year-old was found guilty of planning a terrorist attack after he became obsessed with Nazis and white supremacists and began researching converted firearms so that he could emulate the Christchurch massacre.
Last month, Harry Vaughan, 18, a pupil at Tiffin School, a grammar in Kingston, southwest London, admitted sharing bomb-making manuals online after police found neo-Nazi material on his computer.
The leader of a neo-Nazi group called The British Hand that threatened to carry out an atrocity in the UK to eclipse the Christchurch mosque shootings is also believed to be a 15-year-old British boy.
“We are seeing people as young as 13 starting to talk about committing terrorist attacks,” Neil Basu, the Met Police’s assistant commissioner, told MPs in a select committee meeting this month.
William Baldet, a practitioner in countering violent extremism, said that many youngsters were being groomed by the far right on mainstream platforms such as YouTube. He said the content was put together so it did not break the law, but it often contained “dog whistles” on issues such as multiculturalism. In the comments, far-right activists may direct others to less regulated social media platforms such as 4chan or Telegram.
Mr Dangerfield said that claims he was recruiting teenagers into the far right were “insane” and that his online chat had “nothing political about it”.
Laura Towler, deputy leader of Patriotic Alternative, said: “It is not our intention to ‘recruit’ anybody because our way of thinking is already widespread. It is simply our intention to provide a voice for the millions of people who already agree with us.”
YouTube said: “We have strict policies that prohibit hate speech. We terminate channels that repeatedly or egregiously violate our policies. After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a fivefold spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels .”
Case study
When I was 15 I was a Facebook “shitposter” [deliberately posting offensive or false contributions to provoke other participants] with a few thousand followers purely for making crude jokes, misogynistic stuff or jokes about race (writes a woman recruited to a far-right group online, who left after police became involved).
That’s when I was introduced to National Action by friends on Facebook and was talked into joining. I first thought the group was simply people who shared the same type of jokes as me, but soon found out it was a group of online neo-Nazis. To keep up the following I had — and I guess in a way to impress people — I followed along with it all.
I was convinced by a friend to message the group’s organisers directly to introduce myself, and one of the leaders asked to meet a couple of weeks later. He was incredibly friendly straight away, asking a lot about myself and offering advice regarding personal issues. He called me his mentee and said he would look after me.
Through him I got more involved. I would post basic traditionalism posts [a woman should stay in the home etc], but was pushed into posting edgier pictures of me with swastikas in the background, edgy camo clothing and face coverings.
The group’s organisers also asked us to use the apps Telegram and Wire to make sure all our messages were fully encrypted. That was where they would usually discuss any plans or activities, and also link to websites like “fascist forge” and books regarding Nazism.
The women of the group had traditional accounts, posting about lifestyle, nature, children and all that. I, and a couple of others, were told to post graffiti and edgy pictures of ourselves. I think as we were the youngest in the group we were used as bait to get other younger people involved.
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