He describes himself as a white nationalist and says he likes traditional values and dislikes degeneracy. “White identity is very important to me. I guess I would hope to find someone who shares those morals and views.” Ideally,he wants to be in a marriage based on Christian values,although he admits to being agnostic.
“I love Christian values and would always look to apply them to my life and marriage,regardless of whether or not I have faith. Maybe one day I will find faith.”
“How did you end up on WASP Love?” I ask. He tells me that he simply Googled “dating site for whites”,as he was looking for a place to find like-minded potential partners,something the “mainstream” dating apps don’t necessarily offer. “I’m sure it’s gonna get much bigger,” he tells me. “As more people start to realise that we’re doomed,they will come to places like this.”
“Have you met anyone else yet over WASP Love?” I ask.
He looks down,a little embarrassed. “Not in person,no. But it’s good to connect with people from across the world there.”
We agree that Cambridge is a lovely place. “Even with the rain,even with all the liberal students,” he says. He suggests we go for a walk after the tea but I tell him that I’m too cold and have to go back to the hotel. He puts on his Hollister jacket and we walk together towards his car.
“So when will you be back?” Never,at least not as Claire.
Others had more successful dates. “I want to announce that I met my wonderful husband here on WASP.LOVE!” one user writes. “I am thrilled and so very happy. Do not give up hope[…] Your other half is looking for you. God bless you all!”
WASP Love is only one of many alt-dating sites:for example,there are also White Date for European Singles and Trump Singles or Farmers Only for Americans. The motto of Trump Singles is “Making Dating Great Again”,while the promotion of White Date says,“We follow classic roles where strong men take the lead and graceful women play the game.”
White Date even asks you for your IQ and your personality type when you sign up. It lets you filter partners according to your hair-colour preferences,from Rapunzel to Venetian blonde – what a spectrum! You can also choose preferred ancestry markers:from Afrikaner to Welsh and Cornish. Having said that,there are only a total of eight Welsh and Cornish men between the ages of 18 and 80 on the app.
Far-right Identitarian movement Generation Identity developed its own encrypted application that has been dubbed “Tinder for Nazis”. But the app,called Patriot Peer,is about more than dating. It is about connecting white nationalists in romantic and non-romantic ways.
“No one knows what the person sitting next to you on the bus,in a café or at university is like,” writes an Identitarian promoting the app. “In a faceless crowd,patriots don’t stick out.”
Harsher anti-hate-speech measures imposed by mainstream social media companies have provoked extremists to move to other platforms.
The goal of the Identitarian tool is “to motivate users to network and work together for a patriotic turning point”. Taking part in patriotic events and connecting with fellow Identitarian sympathisers is rewarded with social credits;you can become the perfect patriot.
“This App will disrupt the firewall of fear. It features a radar for Patriots,and a gamification for activism.” The altright.com website of American white nationalist Richard Spencer features a special profile of Patriot Peer to promote the app internationally.
Alt-dating is just one dimension of an emerging alternative online universe created by and for extremists. Harsher anti-hate-speech measures imposed by mainstream social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have provoked extremists to move to other platforms and establish substitute
channels to network,coordinate and crowdsource their activities.
Many controversial activists – on the right,the left and the religious extremist fringes – have moved to alternative platforms:“I’d rather have Putin have my data than one of those SJW[Social Justice Warriors] in Silicon Valley,” wrote Generation Identity leader Martin Sellner in 2018.
Extremists who were kicked off popular social media due to their violent language have replaced Twitter with Gab,Facebook with VK or Minds,and crowdfunding platform Patreon with Hatreon. Gab,the alt-right’s Twitter equivalent,gained more than 400,000 users in just 18 months.
While on Metapedia the Holocaust only took place according to “politically correct history”,BitChute,DTube and PewTube offer “censorship-free alternatives” to YouTube,attracting in particular conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers. “I came to BitChute to escape JewTube,” one of the users writes after telling me that he believes “YouTube is run by the Jews”.
There are three types of alt-tech platforms:those,such as WASP Love and Hatreon,created for extremists and used by extremists;ultra-libertarian platforms,platforms created by libertarians or commercially driven developers,which tend to operate in the name of free speech and tolerate extremist content such as Gab,Minds and 8chan;and third,hijacked platforms,platforms such as Discord,Telegram and JustPasteIt created for entirely different purposes that have been hijacked by extremists but proactively work with the authorities to ban these from using their services.
In the wake of theneo-Nazi rally held in the American city of Charlottesville,Virginia in the US summer of 2017,Twitter shut down hundreds of white supremacist accounts,the gaming app Discord closed several related channels,and the world’s most prominent neo-Nazi web page,Daily Stormer,received 24 hours’ notice before losing its domain.
A #dailystormerneverdies campaign was sparked on Twitter and a mass exodus started. Permanently banned users and libertarian developers have formed alliances and started a coordinated attempt to build a parallel social media ecosystem to put an end to Silicon Valley’s hegemony.
“This is war[…] The Free Speech Tech revolution has begun,” announced the Alt-Tech Alliance in August 2017. The movement self-identifies as “a passionate group of brave engineers,product managers,investors and others who are tired of the status quo in the technology industry”. Its members frame themselves as the sole defenders of “free speech,individual liberty and truth”.
Their unique selling proposition is that – unlike Facebook and Twitter – they condone racist,inflammatory and even violence-inciting posts:an offer that has made them an appealing place of refuge for extremists whose accounts were removed from mainstream platforms,but also for freedom-of-speech warriors who are upset with the take-down measures of the big Silicon Valley companies.
In the weeks leading up to the creation of the Alt-Tech Alliance,it was not only Charlottesville’s neo-Nazis who faced a crackdown by the social media companies. Figures with more appeal to mainstream audiences,such as the prominent British anti-feminist YouTuber Sargon of Akkad,were temporarily suspended from Twitter,causing outrage among libertarians and some conservative sympathisers.
The libertarians of the Alt-Tech Alliance wrote:“If August 2017 has proven anything,it is that we are in a war to speak freely on the internet.”
Tensions came to a head when Google engineer James Damore was fired after he drafted a memo entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”,which argued that the firm’s diversity policies led to discrimination against white male conservatives.
The libertarians of the Alt-Tech Alliance seized the moment to write:“If August 2017 has proven anything,it is that we are in a war to speak freely on the internet. The Free Speech Tech revolution has begun. There is no more dancing around this subject anymore. Silicon Valley companies are being propped up with billions of dollars from foreign interests. They are extraordinarily hostile to any form of conservatism,populism and nationalism among other ideologies. Their employees,executives and their users are all afraid to express themselves for fear of being fired or shamed by a dishonest and disgusting establishment media oligarchy.”
They have picked a strong opponent. Facebook counts two billion monthly users,has purchased more than 50 companies and holds more than 70 per cent of the market share. Sounds like a monopoly?
“It certainly doesn’t feel like that,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Lindsey Graham during his 2018 US Senate hearing into the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. His response raised much laughter,although it wasn’t entirely wrong:there is indeed a growing niche audience that is exploring alternative solutions.
As the big tech firms come increasingly under fire – whether in the United States Senate,the European Union,the British Home Office or the German Ministry for Justice – non-state actors ranging from radical libertarians to extremist users spot a unique chance to woo away unhappy clients.
In 2018,the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was revealed to have harvested the personal Facebook data of millions of people without their consent for political campaigns. The leaks about the data breach sent the tech giant’s shares tumbling and caused thousands of users to
participate in a #deletefacebook campaign,which was strongly encouraged on competing platforms that welcomed dissatisfied users with open arms.
Even the most extreme users found ways of keeping their online presence. The account of the British terrorist organisation National Action is blocked on Twitter in the UK but can be accessed via a virtual private network (VPN). Whitesingles.com redirects to the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. And the Daily Stormer is still live,even after being banned from literally every country’s domain including the Chinese “.wang” and the Icelandic “.is”.
It is unsurprising that US white nationalist Richard Spencer labelled bitcoin the “currency of the alt-right” long before the bitcoin craze started.
No doubt extremists have been skilful in using tech to circumvent laws:from VPNs and redirect mechanisms to Tor services on the Dark Net and
private domains such as “.name”.
If you engage in extremist activities,keeping your information transfers independent and secure is worth nothing if your money transfers aren’t. “Fintech is the solution!” one user on Stormfront euphorically explains to me. He believes that cryptocurrencies “are secure,instant and anonymous”.
Using the decentralised,unregulated currency to evade traditional financial services is more than a pragmatic solution to extremists. “It’s also a political statement,” says American cyber-security expert John Bambenek,who built a tool that tracks neo-Nazi bitcoin transactions. “If you believe the banks are part of the Jewish world conspiracy nonsense,well,then there are only two ways to make financial transactions:it’s either cash or it’s bitcoin.”
Against this background,it is unsurprising that American white nationalist Richard Spencer labelled bitcoin the “currency of the alt-right” long before the bitcoin craze started.
After prominent alt-right figures were banned from mainstream crowdsourcing platforms such as Patreon and GoFundMe,and blocked by online payment providers such as PayPal,Apple Pay and Google Pay,some switched toHatreon.
The alternative crowdsourcing platform was used to fund anti-democratic projects such as the maintenance of the world’s biggest neo-Nazi platforms Daily Stormer and Stormfront and hacking activities of the neo-Nazi white supremacist Weev.
For example,Weev received $US1.8 million in cryptocurrency donations to his visible wallet address,which was tracked by Bambenek. He may have accumulated additional sums in his non-public wallets.
Likewise,jihadists have attracted large sums through cryptocurrency donations. A pro-Islamic State group was even able to generate enough money to reward its “cyberjihadists”. “We have exchanged parts of our bitcoins to equip the brothers who helped in our last missions with computers,” one of the group’s members wrote in their private chat group in December 2017.
The danger for these far-right echo chambers to act as worldwide radicalisation accelerators and incite violence against minorities is real.
On Telegram and the Dark Net,terrorists have increasingly called on their sympathisers to donate in cryptocurrencies. For example,the al-Qaeda-linked organisation al-Sadaqa campaigned for bitcoin donations in November 2017,while Indonesian Islamic State leader Bahrun Naim used the cryptocurrency to transfer money to his followers.
Bitcoin transactions,however,can be tracked,and wallets are easily traced back to their owners due to the highly transparent blockchain technology this cryptocurrency is built on. As a result,many extremists have resorted to anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero,“which best maintains our privacy”,as neo-Nazi hacker Weev put it.
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From alternative social media and news channels to extremist messaging apps and cryptocurrencies,the changes that new media ecosystems are undergoing resemble those that are underway in the political landscape. The loss of trust in the mainstream benefits the radical fringes:an increasing number of users turn their backs on established social media outlets.
On the one hand,there are those who quit social media altogether to express their discontent or disillusionment with the platforms. On the other hand,there are those who migrate to other platforms in protest.
Due to the network effect,every new user significantly enhances the value of a network,and every lost user exponentially decreases its value. This means that platform migration dynamics set in motion by takedown policies could significantly change the social media landscape in years to come.
At this point,it may be worth asking whether we will see a decline of the big tech platforms to the benefit of their ultra-libertarian rivals. Have we perhaps reached peak Silicon Valley?
The creation of this parallel alt-tech universe is a dynamic that might challenge the hegemony of the big social media firms. In the long run,it may also change existing power relations on the internet and revolutionise the way our societies connect and network. One of the risks the emerging safe havens entail is the carte blanche they offer to those seeking to promote counterfactual,anti-science and conspiratorial narratives.
Too much is at stake to ignore the spread and rising influence of far-right ideologies online. Ending up with a white supremacist date might seem scary enough. But,as the recent wave ofdeadly far-right terrorist attacks in New Zealand,the US and Germany demonstrated,the danger for these far-right echo chambers to act as worldwide radicalisation accelerators and incite violence against minorities is real.
Edited extract from Going Dark:The Secret Social Lives of Extremists (Bloomsbury,$30),by Julia Ebner,out March 3. Ebner is a research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London,where she leads projects on online extremism,disinformation and hate speech. Her book is a result of two years spent undercover in the alt-right online world.
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