RANEY ARONSON-RATH: For more than a year, FRONTLINE and ProPublica have been investigating a dark corner of the internet and social media…
A.C. THOMPSON [from film]: This is a very militant, aggressive,dangerous community.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:…one that has given rise to a series of deadly terror attacks around the world.
NEWS ARCHIVE 1: Breaking news after reports of a shooting…
NEWS ARCHIVE 2: An anti-Muslim terror attack in New Zealand…
NEWS ARCHIVE 3: A shooting at a synagogue in Poway…
NEWS ARCHIVE 4: Moments before the mass murder in El Paso, the suspect detailed his plans and ideology…
NEWS ARCHIVE 5: Twenty people dead, more than two dozen injured…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram examines a white supremacist network that flourished online - and its violent consequences.
JAMES BANDLER [from film]: These people on the messaging and social media app Telegram were trying to stir other people to commit acts of incredible violence and to spark a race war…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Reporters A.C. Thompson and James Bandler join me to talk about their investigation. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: A.C. and James, thanks so much for joining me on the Dispatch.
JAMES BANDLER: Great to be here, Raney.
A.C. THOMPSON: Thanks for having us.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah, so together with director Tom Jennings and Annie Wong, you guys have been working on this project for over a year. You've been scouring online posts and traveling and talking to sources all over the world. Can you share how you got started on this?
A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah, so for me, I was really interested in what online tools extremists were using today and where they were congregating, where they were proselytizing, where they were recruiting. And over the last 10 years, I've seen them bouncing from one platform to the next. So for a while it was Facebook and Twitter. Then it was more alternative platforms like Gab, uh, private sort of private platforms like Discord and Matrix servers. And as I started looking, what I really found is that all of these people were congregating on Telegram and they had created these vast communities of right-wing and racist extremists on Telegram, and so that's really what we wanted to drill down on.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah. And James, how did you get involved?
JAMES BANDLER: Yeah, my interest was actually really personal because I have always wanted to work with A.C. and have watched him
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Ah.
JAMES BANDLER: I've watched him doing these really cool, but dangerous and unpleasant stories…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right.
JAMES BANDLER: …and when my editor said it, would you like to work with A.C.? I was like, yes. And it was for me, it was a bit of a return. When I was in college I wrote my thesis about Holocaust revisionists and Holocaust denial, and then I covered militia groups when I was at a local paper years ago in Vermont. So it was great to come back to the subject.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So the film centers, you know, on an ideology known as militant accelerationism. Can you give us a sense of what that means?
JAMES BANDLER: Militant accelerationists want to speed the collapse of society through terrorist attacks or mass killings, and they've frequently targeted perceived enemies, which includes, you know, people of color, Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians. And it's an ideology that's been popular with neo-Nazis, really over the last decade.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah. And I would love to know, A.C., from your perspective, 'cause you've been working and reporting on this for so long, when you started to look at militant accelerationism, what was different for you and, and how did you start to see it? Just talk to me a bit about your own journey with this idea.
A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah. You know, I mean, so really when we were doing our earlier films, looking at neo-Nazi groups like the Atomwaffen division, what we were seeing then, years ago, was that the Atomwaffen division was popularizing this concept of militant accelerationism, and it had sort of been around for a while, but they gave it new life and new energy and they gave it branding and a look. These were people who would come out with their skull masks on and these really aggressive, um, black and white graphics, and they helped bring it into the place it is now where it's sort of a touchstone within the extremist scene. That was a few years ago. When you come into today, it has taken on a whole new energy and a whole new life. They'd been talking about it on 4chan, which is a message board. Uh, they'd been talking about it on 8chan, which is another sort of message board or image board that's basically like, uh, low tech Reddit and low moderation Reddit. And then they brought it over to Telegram and it had really taken on a life there where there were thousands of people talking about ‘Let's go destroy society, let's go kill people, uh, to achieve our racist neo-Nazi political ends.’
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Having been a reporter on this issue from Charlottesville all the way until this moment, one of the things you said to me very early on that really got my attention was how a lot of these folks went from the streets to online. Right? And how, in a lot of ways, you know, the events in Charlottesville in 2017 were just a precursor for events that you reveal in the film. Can you talk about that more?
A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah, after Charlottesville what we saw was we saw the white supremacist movement kind of splinter and go in a couple different directions, and one direction was in this militant accelerationist, um, tear down the system, do terrorism direction. The other direction was like, hey, let's be public. Let's try to mainstream this movement. Let's try to refine our message so it'll be picked up by the masses. When we're looking at the, the, the terrorist wing of it, since Charlottesville, a few really interesting things happen and really disturbing things— is the movement said, hey, we're gonna do terrorism. We don't believe there's a political solution for our problems. We're going to kill people and we're going to try to bring down the government. And at first they did that in terms of like uh, forming small real world groups and they would have names and they would have propaganda and they would have all this sort of stuff and they would meet up in real life. And over time what they started seeing is like, oh, when we do that, the FBI infiltrates and arrests us, so let's come up with a different way to do things. And that different model was we are going to not start groups anymore. We are not going to start a big movement. What we're going to do is we're going to say, here are the tools you need to commit, acts of terrorism. Here are the targets you should be looking at. And now we're gonna encourage you to go out as a solo actor, as an individual, and go do that. And that's harder for the government to stop. And that's what we've seen happening from 2019 to today.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Okay, so back in 2019, a lot of people will remember the horrific terror attack against Muslims in New Zealand, and when you and Tom Jennings and, and James and everybody started to talk to me about this, you know, I put the two and two together, but I really think the people listening in need to understand how that event and the reporting you did on Terrorgram after and Telegram after are connected.
A.C. THOMPSON: Right. So in 2019, there were a string of really horrific white supremacist mass shootings. The first one was in Christchurch, New Zealand. More than 50 Muslims were killed at two different mosques there. The next one happened in San Diego County, California at a synagogue. Uh, a worshiper there was killed by someone who shot multiple people, and the third one happened in El Paso where more than 20 people were killed at a Walmart. What this did for the white supremacist movement is it said, look, that's our model — do these terrorist actions, circulate our manifestos and our propaganda and our videos online, spread our message that way and inspire more people to do what we've done. And this will help bring down society. This will help bring down the government. And what we found was that early on, people who were watching this scene focused on the chans, on 4chan and 8chan, these sort of rudimentary, uh, message board platforms. And they said, hey, why are these mass shooters being allowed to post their, uh, manifestos and their hate material on these platforms? Because that's what they used during that time period, 2019. But what we saw was it quickly moved to Telegram. And that there were actually some moderation efforts going on on 4Chan and 8chan, and there was a conscious effort, a deliberate effort by the neo-Nazis and white supremacists to say, hey, let's move to Telegram. It seems like a platform that has more privacy, more security, and we'll be able to post what we want.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. And James just, can you add to that, like what did they find so appealing about Telegram?
JAMES BANDLER: I mean, Telegram was a perfect app if you're a dissident, an activist, or a terrorist. It's got a bunch of very appealing features. It's easy to use. It lets you read news even in times of internet restrictions. It's a platform where you can send huge files, huge video files and keep them there, stored on Telegram servers and it has a bunch of different features. It's part sort-of WhatsApp and also parts sort-of Facebook. So it's messaging and social media combined.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, those groups are meeting over there. They kind of moved from 4chan to 8chan right over to Telegram because of some moderation that was happening or started to happen rather on 8chan. Right? So when you're in this environment, can you guys just sort of dive into a little bit more of what you were seeing happen in those environments?
A.C. THOMPSON: The thing that we were seeing on Telegram is the stuff you couldn't find anywhere else on the open web. For example, there would be channels and accounts just celebrating these mass shooters and named after them. There was one that was named after the Christchurch mass shooter that called him Saint. The manifestos, the sort of ideas that went into the planning of these attacks were being circulated, the big takeaways from the attacks, this is how the person did it. This is who they targeted, this is what worked and didn't work. All of that was circulating on Telegram and this whole community that started with just a handful of accounts sprang up to celebrate these terrorists and to encourage more people to be like them.
JAMES BANDLER: I was, I was blown away, A.C., when you first showed me Terrorgram, and like you go into these chats and it's like a potpourri of horrible video grizzly videos that you can't unsee and then concrete explanations of how to, you know, get away with an assassination, sabotage a water system, or an electrical transmission line. It was like just a bonanza of badness. And it blew me away the first time.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah, I mean, we've done a lot of reporting in this, but the extent to it was really profound. I remember the other really powerful moment to me is that, you know, when the Prime Minister of New Zealand in 2019 says that she basically is gonna stem and stop information about the mass killer. That then it just goes wild on the platforms, is something that is just really important for us to understand.
A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah, and I should say Raney, like the thing that we kept coming back to as James and I were discussing this, is you can find hate speech on most internet spaces, right? Like there are people who are gonna be awful to one another all over the web. What was different about Telegram and this Terrorgram community that colonized Telegram for about five years is it wasn't just about speech, it was about actionable material. So it was bomb making materials, it was poison recipes. It was 3D files for 3D printing machine guns. It was, um instructions, as James said, on sabotaging a water system or a power station. It was very operational.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Very tactical.
A.C. THOMPSON: Yes, exactly.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I know that you guys reached out to Telegram. What did they say to you about the sort of wild west of what was happening there during those years?
JAMES BANDLER: So, so Telegram, what they have said is they've always prohibited illegal activity. They've always policed for that. But they've, they admitted that in the, with the size of their platform with nearly a billion users, it's very hard to find everything.
A.C. THOMPSON: Telegram is one of these companies that'll say, hey look, we ban people from calling for violence. We don't allow people to engage in criminal activity on our platform. But the truth is, they had a very small staff, they had a massive number of users and a very small staff, and frankly, not a ton of revenue to pay a lot of people. And so what we could see is over five years, the bad actors who wanted to hijack the platform to encourage acts of terrorism were able to function there day after day, year after year, with only very minor changes. You know, they would start an account that would be called, uh, one thing, it would eventually get banned, and then they would start the same, a new account with the same name and just add a number to it. Oh, this is, uh, you know, for example…Ban This Channel was an account that we followed. There was a Ban This Channel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 —at least 15 of them. That person started, we believe, about a hundred different accounts and was able to just manipulate the system very easily for years. Now, Telegram has stepped up its moderation on the platform. They have hired, they tell us, more than 700 contractors to help them moderate the platform and keep off more criminal activity on the platform. But over the year we were reporting, we would see just astounding things.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Your reporting takes you guys to Bratislava, Slovakia, and actually this is where our film opens. Can you both talk to me about why you were there and what you were investigating?
A.C. THOMPSON: So, in 2022, there was an attack at an LGBTQ bar in that city. A young man who was clearly affiliated with Terrorgram shot three people. He killed two of them, but no one that we knew, knew his username, had followed him, um, in the Terrorgram Community, knew what he had posted, and there were a lot of theories going around. There were some theories that he, uh, had had help writing his manifesto by somebody in the US – all kinds of questions about what sort of, what was behind that attack. So we wanted to know the real story. Who was this young man who did this crime? Who was he in this community? What was his username and what happened leading up to the attack?
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Tell me how you were able to unspool that, because that's the film, right? And understanding that is the essence of understanding how these networks have grown over the years.
A.C. THOMPSON: You know, one of the reasons that we wanted to go to Bratislava is there were so many questions about that attack. We didn't know very much about the attacker. We didn't know how he figured into this Terrorgram community. We just knew that he did because he'd given the group and the community a shout-out in his manifesto. When we were there, what became clear as we were, we finally were able to identify his username in these chats and worked with Slovakian reporters to conclusively prove yes, this is the young man that did the terror attack. We saw that he'd been interacting with these other older Terrorgram leaders, influencers, basically like social media influencers. For years and that he'd entered into this scene at the age of 16. He was already a racist and an antisemite, but being in this community, his views were sharpened and focused. And when he said, hey, what about having a rally? People would say, no, no, no, we don't do that. We kill people. That's what we do here. We're not about rallies, we're not about peaceful protest. We're about killing people. And what we could see is that for years, for at least three years before the attack, he had been thinking about the bar that he would eventually attack, focusing on it, and the people around him, the influencers, the older individuals in this community egged him on. They said, hey, uh, what, you know, nail bombing that place would be great. Uh, hitting it with chemical weapons, getting skinheads and rounding up gays and lesbians and beating them up would be great. He was encouraged over and over and over again over the span of three years to go out and kill. When we were meeting with Slovakia and law enforcement they didn't really realize the whole transnational scope of it, and they didn't realize that this was an attack foretold. The young man who did the crime, whose name was Juraj Krajčík, he'd been talking to people about doing it.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Wow.
JAMES BANDLER: And to see him talking about that very bar in chats three years earlier, it was really chilling.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, in September when so much of your reporting was well underway we learned — and it was just incredible, right— that two Americans were charged with a slew of felonies related to Terrorgram. And I remember that when that news landed, and you heard their names, Dallas Erin Humber and Matthew Allison, we were all texting. But tell me your initial thoughts when that happened.
JAMES BANDLER: We already knew about Dallas Humber. She had been outed by left wing researchers, and so we knew, we knew that she was a Terrorgram content producer, propagandist, but her counterpart had the handle BTC on Telegram which was short for Ban This Channel and used many, many variations of that ban this channel name. And we had no idea who BTC was and were very curious about him because he was producing some of the most noxious and toxic content on Terrorgram, mainly in the form of videos which were extolling, mass murderers posting very violent images from riots, all with the underlying message you know, go out, take action, become a terrorist, become a mass shooter. So, researchers who identified Dallas were zeroing in on BTC and who, who this figure was. They had an idea, um, that this person lived in Idaho. They had an idea that his name was Matt. There had been various operational failures on Tel Telegram by BTC. So they had clues but they didn't know who the guy was. And shortly after the arrest of Matthew Allison, last September, these researchers pieced together that he was in fact BTC and he was a part-time DJ, so we quickly went to, uh, Boise to try to reconstruct his life.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And what, what did you guys find? I mean, it's just incredible. The story — just, you couldn't really make everything up, but tell me, tell me more about it.
JAMES BANDLER: He was a guy who was hiding in plain sight. He was in the very progressive EDM electronic dance music community scene, a very well-liked, likable, goofy DJ, who made a living ostensibly doing sort of low wage service jobs and he was also a gay man and had a long-term relationship, who spent his time online encouraging murders of gay people in a group that encouraged slaughter of gays and lesbians and trans people. So it was a very, uh, strange, discordant thing and, and it really shocked his friends, many of whom were gay. The community is still really rattled that this guy was in their midst.
A.C. THOMPSON: Because they didn't know.
JAMES BANDLER: They had no idea.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: They didn’t know.
JAMES BANDLER: They had no idea that this was a hunted alleged terrorist.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. So, the title of the film is The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram. How did the Terrorgram collective eventually catch the attention of authorities in different parts of the world? And what is the status of Terrorgram now?
JAMES BANDLER: If you start posting lists of federal officials marked for assassination that gets the attention of the FBI. And when you target a judge or prosecutor, they take notice.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And of course that's what they did. That was the turning point for them.
JAMES BANDLER: So they, yeah. One by one members of this group have been, have been arrested and are facing charges and they've pleaded not guilty.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, separately from the Terrorgram story, the founder and CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov also faces charges in France for allegedly failing to stop illegal activity on, on his platform, on the platform that he founded. So, what does he say in his response and what happened there?
A.C. THOMPSON: He's maintained that he's innocent. You know, he's maintained that he's, you know, being wrongly prosecuted for things that he, frankly, didn't really have control over. He says, you know, as the CEO of this company, he's not responsible for the bad acts that people engage in using the platform, but the company has clearly made an effort to step up its moderation and has said it is stepping up its moderation. So, we've seen a lot of these channels and accounts that we've been following go away. Most of the Terrorgram ecosystem, which was hundreds of accounts, has gone away and there seems to be, uh, a different atmosphere on the platform now. The company has hired about 750 contractors to help them with moderation, and they do seem to be taking it more seriously. The question is gonna be when you have a billion users on your platform, um, how, how do you really effectively keep that place safe?
JAMES BANDLER: They also, they also say they're using AI to identify troublesome content as well.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Okay, so, you saw it go from 4chan to 8chan to Telegram. Now what is next?
JAMES BANDLER: I mean, I think these ideas are like water. They will flow downhill to the most accessible, amenable place. And while there hasn't been a platform that has offered as many features to terrorists as Telegram, they'll find another place for this content. I mean, we're already seeing extremists gathering on X, you know, where Elon Musk has loosened content restrictions. We haven't seen the bomb making materials, terrorism instruction manuals on X, but it's become a much more welcoming place for folks who are sharing some of the similar messages.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And A.C. since you've been, you know, the most longitudinal look at this, like, what do you think is next? I mean, what do you, where do you see this going?
A.C. THOMPSON: My concern is that we're gonna see these kind of actors moving into a couple different spaces and, and one place we're gonna see them moving is to sort of more private, highly encrypted, sort of boutique services. And we know that they're moving to those services. The other place we're seeing them move is to sort of more mainstream platforms with the idea of we can't circulate full-on terrorist material here, but we can put out a signal and direct people into these smaller, more confidential spaces where we can be more, uh, direct about our aims and supply people with operational material, you know, guides to terrorism. But the other thing that's interesting to me is that there's now this whole mystique around Terrorgram and these ideas. And so I think what we're starting to see is, the ideas of engaging in mass casualty terrorism spreading to people that don't necessarily have the same ideology but are online a lot, are emotionally unstable or have, you know, serious issues going on in their lives and are looking for some sort of meaning.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: That's something that you've said throughout all of the years that you've been reporting on this. That's been a through line in your work. And James and A.C., I really appreciate it. This is an opus film. I know this isn't the end of your reporting on this. And also, you know, really encourage our listeners to read the really important work that you guys wrote about this, too. Thank you guys for being on the Dispatch.
JAMES BANDLER: Raney, thanks so much.
A.C. THOMPSON: Thank you, Raney.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: You can read more stories from FRONTLINE and ProPublica on our website, frontline.org. You can also stream the film on our site as well as on YouTube and the PBS app.
This podcast is produced by Emily Pisacreta. Jim Sullivan is our audio engineer. Editorial support on this episode comes from Dan Edge. Katherine Griwert is our story editor and coordinating producer. Lauren Ezell is our senior editor of investigations. Andrew Metz is our managing editor. I'm Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and Executive Producer of Frontline. Music in this episode is by Stellwagen Symphonette. The Frontline Dispatch is produced at GBH and powered by PRX. Thank you for listening.
