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Ryan Broderick
@broderick
, 8 tweets, 5 min read Read on Twitter
Anywhere can be 8chan:

10,000 Rounds Of Ammo And 25 Guns Were Seized From A Teenager Posting Far-Right Memes On iFunny
buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
I've never come across this complete of a radicalization trail before.

Olsen was using his small following of around 5,000 subscribers on iFunny to advertise a Discord channel.
Olsen's Discord server has about 40-50 users in it at the moment.

I've reached out to Discord for comment.
The Discord is full of every chan-adjacent trope you can guess. Hate speech, gun talk, white nationalist memes.

They're even making fun of Olsen for being arrested.
As for Olsen's iFunny account, it's as nihilistic and violent as you can imagine. He's obsessed with "Trad values" and fantasizes about a white Christian ethnostate.

It looks like ifunny took his account down after I emailed them about why it was still up.
When I wrote last week that any website can turn into 8chan, that’s what I meant. It’s bigger than one site now. It’s in every community, every group of young men. It’s too late to think that knocking down one website can destabilize this movement.
buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
UPDATE: The 40-person ArmyOfChrist server Olsen started appears to be down.

Keep in mind, though, that it was active for at least 10 days after his arrest.

Interestingly, the FBI affidavit includes screenshots from Discord but doesn't specifically mention Discord by name.
I dug a bit deeper:

The Meme App iFunny Is A Huge Hub For White Nationalists And Neo-Nazis buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
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Ryan Broderick
@broderick
The Dayton Shooter being the lead singer of a midwest grindcore band is too 2019 to really process buzzfeednews.com/article/elliev… via @ellievhall
@ellievhall Anyways, this tumblr post from five years ago nailed exactly what's happening right now and why the violent actions of radicalized men, regardless of the space they're communicating in, aren't lining up with a traditional left and right political spectrum.
This chart has haunted me for a while now. The user, cryinwilson, was able to see something happening with the way young men were using the internet and, for the most part, got it right.
Read 4 tweets
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Ryan Broderick
@broderick
New from me:

I confirmed with Utica law enforcement that a low-level influencer allegedly killed his "e-girl" girlfriend over the weekend and posted photos of her body to his Instagram story buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
A Utica PD spokesperson said that as the suspect was being held by gunpoint, he was allegedly uploading photos of the 17-year-old victim's body to Instagram and Discord.
In a Discord channel, the suspect allegedly wrote that he carried out the attack to get back at "orbiters" that liked the victim.

"Anyways remember to subscribe to Pewdiepie," he wrote as he allegedly posted photos of her body.
Read 9 tweets
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Ryan Broderick
@broderick
New from me:

Young female users feel like TikTok is doing nothing to stop older men from preying on them. So they've built a network to police the app themselves. buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
In perhaps the perfect encapsulation of how messy TikTok's culture of sexual exploitation, one of my sources for this piece was then accused himself of predatory behavior while I was reporting this story.
buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
One of the most unsettling things about TikTok is how easily its central personalized "For You page" can be manipulated by predators and turned into an endless stream of underage users.
buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanha…
Read 3 tweets

Related threads

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Joe Bernstein
@Bernstein
Remember Soph? The 14-year-old hate vlogger who built a nearly million-strong YouTube following with 8chan-approved rants about racial and religious minorities and LGBTQ people? YouTube finally removed her channel Friday.

Why? (Thread)
She uploaded a video called “Pride and Prejudice,” which is a twelve-minute rant against gay Americans that is basically a much nastier version of 90s-style, Focus on the Family, “Gay Agenda” toxic waste.
buzzfeednews.com/article/joseph…
During the video, Soph asks her followers to cite her in their manifestos — the kind the Dayton shooter left behind after murdering twenty people the following day. At the end of the video, an unseen speaker addresses an imaginary gay man: “Fuck you. Die. Die. Fuck you and die."
Read 7 tweets
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Casey Michel 🇰🇿
@cjcmichel
The World Congress of Families is mentioned in this write-up of the new recording linking Italian far-right to Russia: nytimes.com/2019/07/10/wor…
We've written extensively about the World Congress of Family's ties in/to Russia over the past year—among the highlights:

1. Looking through the Americans who spoke at this year's WCF conference, including Clarence Thomas's former clerk: thinkprogress.org/here-are-the-a…
2. How the WCF's Russian representative schmoozed with Ben Carson: thinkprogress.org/why-was-ben-ca…

3. How the same WCF Russian representative grew close to the U.S.'s leading far-right homeschool organization: thinkprogress.org/americas-bigge…
Read 14 tweets
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BuzzFeed News
@BuzzFeedNews
Italy’s deputy PM Matteo Salvini is Europe’s most powerful far-right leader.

We have an explosive recording of Russian operatives and one of Salvini’s aides negotiating a deal to siphon money from a billion-dollar oil deal into Salvini’s far-right party.
buzzfeednews.com/article/albert…
To understand this story, you need to understand that Salvini is the face of resurgent far-right politics in Europe, and the symbol of anti-immigration in Italy.

He has also been a vocal supporter of Vladimir Putin, advocating for the European Union to drop its Russia sanctions.
Six men — 3 Russians, 3 Italians — gathered in the iconic Metropol hotel, nominally to discuss an oil deal.

In the recording, they can be heard negotiating a deal to covertly channel tens of millions of dollars of Russian oil money to Salvini’s party.
buzzfeednews.com/article/albert…
Read 10 tweets
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Ford Fischer
@FordFischer
Within minutes of @YouTube's announcement of a new purge it appears they caught my outlet, which documents activism and extremism, in the crossfire.

I was just notified my entire channel has been demonetized. I am a journalist whose work there is used in dozens of documentaries.
Youtube says "our team of policy specialists carefully looked over the videos you’ve uploaded to your channel News2Share. We found that a significant portion of your channel is not in line with our YouTube Partner Program policies."

As you'll see in the next tweet, that's wrong.
Youtube sent me only two specific videos that they've taken down.

1st is a video of @JasonRCharter and other #Antifa activists confronting a Holocaust denier. While it's true that the Holocaust denier says Holocaust-denier-stuff, this is raw vid documenting him being shut down.
Read 68 tweets

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