The proscription of Terrorgram in the UK: Implications for New Zealand

The United Kingdom proscribed the Terrorgram collective on 22 April 2024. It's the first country in the world to do so. As the official announcement noted,

The UK is to become the first country in the world to proscribe the Terrorgram collective after a draft proscription order has been laid against the group in Parliament today (22 April), the Home Secretary has confirmed. The Terrorgram collective is an online network of neo-fascist terrorists who produce and disseminate violent propaganda to encourage those who consume its content to engage in terrorist activity. If agreed by Parliament, the order will come into effect on 26 April. This means that it will be a criminal offence to belong to, invite support for, or in certain circumstances, display articles associated with the network. Certain proscription offences can be punishable by up to 14 years in prison and/or an unlimited fine.??

The announcement went on to note that Terrorgram,

...subscribes to militant accelerationist and neo-fascist ideologies, notably pursuing the collapse of the Western world and a ‘Race War’ through violent acts of terrorism, and often seeks to target young individuals to adopt their ideology. They have previously published propaganda material designed to incite violence against ethnic and religious communities, with calls for antisemitic violence. Their propaganda also contains violent narratives that glorified the perpetrator of the 2022 Slovakia attack at a LGBTQ+ nightclub shooting, which resulted in the death of 2 people, who credited Terrorgram and its publications in his manifesto.

The proscription by the UK should be of significant consequence to New Zealand. I say should, because I am unconvinced New Zealand policymakers have a good handle on Terrorgram's imbrication, seamless accessibility, daily representation, ideological adoption, and narrative adaptation within the country's disinformation information environments.

Since 2021, I have led the study of New Zealand's truth decay through The Disinformation Project . My subject/domain expertise lies with disinformation, influence operations, truth decay, and information integrity. The Disinformation Project does not study the far-right, and neo-Nazi networks qua far-right or counter-terrorism research, for which there are other, more focussed scholars, and institutions like He Whenua Taurikura for example.

However - and this is key - what grew sharply as the country's anti-vaccine, anti-mandate, anti-government, and anti-establishment networks, communities, and collectives, especially on social media were inexorably inosculated, and imbricated with far-right, neo-Nazi content, and commentary. This remains an under-appreciated phenomenon, resulting in the significant expansion of public, social media surfaces explicitly far-right content is presented on, accessed through, and engaged with by communities who are not card-carrying nazis, and have little to no prior exposure to violent extremist ideologies. The is a dynamic which continues in New Zealand to date.

There were key inflection points late-2021 onwards including, but not limited to Covid-19 variants entering country, related changes in public health mandates, consequential developments abroad including, for example, Canada's truck convoy just before New Zealand's own, unprecedented protest in front of parliament (leading to what I called splintered realities), and in early 2023, the extremely disruptive visit of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull - also known as Posie Parker - to the country. At each of these times, what were in mid-2021 comparatively more clearly defined or demarcated online networks anchored to single-issue agitation (e.g., against mRNA vaccines or public health mandates) were suffused, at pace, with far-right discourse.

Some of the underlying network, and discourse dynamics were captured in The Disinformation Project's 2023 report 'Transgressive Transitions: Transphobia, community building, bridging, and bonding within Aotearoa New Zealand’s disinformation ecologies March-April 2023'.

Terrorgram related content dynamics studied go as far back as July 2022, when Terrorgram's 'The Hard Reset' was available through, and featured in New Zealand's domestic disinformation, and anti-vaxx/government/mandate/establishment Telegram ecologies in under a day after release. I wrote at the time,

...[Telegram] presents a platform surface entirely independent of all GIFCT and Christchurch Call protocols around TVEC. The resulting vector imports, spread, produces, propagates, entrenches and expands violence within New Zealand – with TDP’s appreciation of this term now going beyond structural or systemic violence arising from the infodemic’s scaffolding and architectures, to outright terrorism, and kinetic, weaponised attacks against specific targets.?

After the further study of accelerationist material in New Zealand's disinformation ecologies, I wrote in August 2022 that,

...the overlapping of TVEC, CSAM, gore, and all manner of violent extremist ideological material with anti-vaxx communities have led to new global and domestic economies of harm, and hate serviced by an unprecedented expansion of producers who speak to audiences beyond contiguous sovereign territory.?

Material studied in New Zealand's domestic, seamlessly linked to transnational Telegram ecologies since then have included repeated instances of Christchurch killer’s livestream video, and his screed, fascist material from Oswald Mosley, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, material from neo-Nazi James Mason, an ideologue for the Atomwaffen Division, the “father” of American Nazis - Julius Evola - who inspires the American far-right, George Lincoln Rockwell’s material, writings by Benito Mussolini, Henry Ford’s ‘The International Jew’, and Ted Kaczynski’s screed. Content re-published from foreign Telegram channels, and chat groups in domestic Telegram accounts have included posts presenting often very violent written, multimedia, animated GIF, Telegram sticker, and memetic presentations of climate change denialism, anti-trans, anti-GLBTIQA+ content, anti-vaxx, anti-government, anti-immigrant, pro-Putin/pro-Russia, misogynist, anti-NATO, anti-UN, anti-Biden, conspiratorial (i.e., NWO, ‘globalist’, cloud seeding), racist, white supremacist, far-right, and antisemitic content. In sum, domestic Telegram ecologies feature a violent cornucopia of accelerationist, and Terrogram material frequently shared, and fervently engaged with by large communities within the country.

On 28 June 2023, my analysis studying, as I do daily, hundreds of domestic Telegram channels noted,

Each channel has, on average, hundreds of photos, and videos. Some channels have thousands, cumulatively. The photos include memes, cartoons, manipulated media (i.e., Photoshopped), and synthetic media (i.e., generative AI based). The videos include edited clips from mainstream news coverage, in-house productions, and manipulated content taken from pro-trans, pro-GLBTIQA+ sources, and re-presented in a way that’s harmful to these identities, and communities. All of the content is from the UK, and US. There’s a clear shift from early 2023 to focus harms on the transgender, and GLBTIQA+ communities. All of the US channels are pro-MAGA, and pro-Trump. All of the channels feature antisemitic, racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant visual, and video claims, and frames. There’s significant misogyny in these channels, and prominent politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are enduringly targeted. All of this violent extremism is a daily deluge coming into, and spread within Aotearoa New Zealand.

In just the past 48hrs, in writing today's analysis in the context of the UK's announcement, I studied the significant imprint of accelerationist, and Terrogram material in New Zealand's Telegram ecologies. Aspects reflected in the content, and commentary based on research by Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey titled 'Militant Accelerationism Coalitions: A Case Study in Neo-Fascist Accelerationist Coalition Building Online' included aesthetic and ideological influences from neo-Nazi accelerationist groups, the endorsement of "siege culture", the use of Telegram as a "beacon platform" to announce group formations, recruit members, share propaganda, and direct followers to other sites, attempts to form coalitions and partnerships between different neo-fascist accelerationist channels and groups on Telegram, the promotion of affiliated websites, social media accounts, and encrypted email addresses and the persistent resurfacing of banned channels and groups under new names to evade moderation.

Radicalisation is a highly complex and individualised process, and exposure to violent, extremist narratives alone does not necessarily lead to radicalisation, and kinetic consequences. But the fact remains that all this material is freely accessible through, featured on, and engaged with by networks (on Telegram) originally pegged to anti-vaccine, anti-mandate, and anti-government discourse. These strong, inter-connected networks, and communities reflect, and refract what in New Zealand are now more worrying, significant, and growing anxieties, and anger that TDP's research has consistently noted would be inevitable path dependencies of the truth decay, and information disorders studied online.

Therein lies the rub.

Our sustained analysis since 2022 paints a very troubling picture of how Terrorgram content, narratives, and ideologies have steadily permeated various Telegram channels and groups in Aotearoa New Zealand. TDP’s analysis reveals a persistent pattern of Terrorgram material being imported, adapted, and disseminated within domestic far-right, conspiracist, and anti-government online communities. This is happening without any platform, legal, regulatory, policy, or policing friction whatsoever, on a daily basis, and shows no signs of decreasing in pace.

By exploiting both universal human vulnerabilities (need for belonging, resentment of out-groups) and culturally-specific anxieties (demographic change, distrust in government, disenchantment with institutions, apathy, and anger towards politicians), the presentations, and performative outrage in the content, and commentary studied daily (just linked to Terrorgram, and accelerationist material) can nudge some at-risk individuals (especially in a context, and country where there's no fit for purpose counter-speech initiatives) towards adopting increasingly extreme anti-social beliefs and attitudes that could, in some edge-cases, set the stage for violence offline.

Crucially, TDP’s analysis suggests that exposure to this extreme content, even if not directly leading to stochastic violence or terrorism in most cases, is contributing to a broader process of online radicalisation by mainstreaming extremist ideas, exploiting personal and cultural anxieties, and potentially serving as a gateway to even more hardcore violent content. The fluid movement of Terrorgram material across various adjacent online communities on Telegram ecologies alone (which is presented in more detail in TDP's report on Posie Parker's visit to New Zealand linked above) makes it a potent radicalising force.

The UK's action against Terrorgram should provide New Zealand with both an impetus, and a model for more robustly confronting the threat to liberal democracy posed by accelerationist networks. The research by TDP – which is sui generis in the country - demonstrates the urgency of this challenge, given Terrorgram's already significant imprint in New Zealand's online ecosystems linked to communities who originally, and enduringly connected through shared grievances related to perceived government overreach, and their strident rejection of vaccines. This is also why any potential designation of Terrorgram on the lines of what the UK’s done would only be one step in a wider effort to counter its radicalising influence and attractiveness. Criminalising a large swathe of vulnerable users will not be a useful way to address what's a very complex challenge.

To wit, TDP's research on truth decay is guided by Prof Susan Benesch's dangerous speech framework, combined with a humanities based approach to aspects of, and an interest in human security, social cohesion, and the study of sociotechnological dynamics often ignored, rejected or marginalised in traditional far-right studies, and national security discourse(s).

It is from this perspective, and a specific focus on information disorders that the UK's proscription of the Terrogram collective is welcomed, and I hope the significance of which is fully appreciated by policymakers, scholars, and the media in New Zealand.