Flowers laid down in remembrance of the victims of the terrorist attack 22. july
Social echo chamber that exist in the physical world are described in chapter 2. In addition to social echo chambers there are also social media echo chambers that mainly exist on the internet. These have shown to be important in radicalisation and the making of terrorists.
When conspiracy theories are believed in, a web radicalization of rootless young people can lay the ideological foundations for terrorism. On 22 July 2011, the extreme right-wing terrorist Fjotolf Hansen, who earlier was named Anders Behring Breivik, murdered 77 people in Oslo. 8 in the city and 69 on Utøya island. The 69 were members of the Labour Party’s youth organisation, 32 of them being under 18, and were isolated on the island with no means of escape.
Fjotolf Hansen later explained in a court case in 2022 that he was radicalise online. His defence lawyer, Geir Lippestad, who knows Hansen very well, told Aftenposten that it was information that Hansen found on the internet, that radicalised him. He built his whole world view, all his rage, on internet information and on no physical experiences. If you for instance look at the “Gates of Vienna” website, it is pure violence. The point is that it often is hard to see through. “Even for me as a 48-year-old, it is hard to identify extremism. It is easy to imagine how it is for a 15-year-old,” said Lippestad.
Øyvind Strømmen has written a book about right-wing and “counter-jihadist” terror in Europe. He refers to Fjotolf Hansen’s Manifesto, which contained 38 articles by the Norwegian right-wing conspiracy theorist blogger Peder Nøstvold Jensen, who had the pseudonym “Fjordman”. The essence of these articles was the “Eurabia” conspiracy theory which claims that Europe is becoming Arabised or Islamised as a result of immigration from Muslim countries.
Strømmen writes that “The most important thing is the idea that this Arabization is the result of a deliberate plan, a plan that certainly includes Muslim groups and countries, but whose main actors are far and away our own authorities and politicians, academics, journalists, banking and religious leaders.”
Strømmen states the important role virtual echo chambers plays in radicalization. “The Internet creates new social environments where views and behaviour that are otherwise socially unacceptable are normalised. Here, extremists can surround themselves with others with equally extreme views. The result is that virtual “echo chambers” arise where the most extreme ideas and proposals receive support and encouragement. This echo-chamber feature is naturally most obvious on sites such as “Gates of Vienna” or “Stormfront”, but it has also emerged elsewhere. Norwegian media houses have, to a not inconsiderable extent, allowed extreme voices to dominate their own online debates. Some of the debates have become so extreme that serious participants have simply shadowed the course.”
On 10 August 2019, the Norwegian terrorist Philip Manshaus, killed his 17-year-old adopted sister Johanne Zhangjia Ihle-Hansen. He then made an armed attack on the Al-Noor Islamic Centre in Bærum outside Oslo butwas overpowered by members of the congregation before he could do more damage.
Manshaus said it is obvious that it was through the Internet that he acquired the attitudes that made him move from words to action. On the Internet, he read posts, watched YouTube videos and participated in discussions. The police’s mapping of his online activity confirms many searches for neo-Nazi propaganda. “I only spent a year almost, a year and a half, to arrive at the opinions that I did. That really only represents the power that the web really has,” he declared. “The web is a kind of superhighway for ideas, a place where ideas and opinions come into contact with a speed that has simply never been seen before in history,” Manshaus told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).
An important feature of conspiracy theories is the notion that the broad public is unsuspecting of the conspiracy and therefore easily fooled by the conspirators. Ingvild Nilsen claims in her Master’s degree thesis about right-wing terrorism on the net that Manshaus has referred to well-known memes from the racist “alt-right” online culture in his notes, among other things the “red pill”, which is a meme for online right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists believing in “The New World Order” conspiracy theory (NWO). See also chapter 2 and chapter 9. The term is taken from the film Matrix, and assumes that those who have taken the red pill have had an awakening about truths that the rest of society denies or hides.
Who are the conspiracy theories talking to ? The belief in conspiracy theories allows one to embellish reality. Creating a different perception of reality can do something with ones self-concept. Research on the followers of neo nazism in the German Democratic Republic 1989 and 1990 suggests that the ones recruited had an individualistic world view and a belief in winning on a personal level. The ones recruited were at the same time negatively influenced by major political and economical changes. The world view presented by the conspiracy theories might offer them a self perception as being heroes, defending a race, nation or religion against an alleged threat.
Uniformed echo chambers and radicalisation
Mohammad Atari and group of researchers at the University of Southern California has studied nearly 25 million posts on the extreme media platform GAB. Atari writes: “A close look at the history of hate crimes and radical groups, and our research, point to a common ground between them: they all have a shared moral vision, that is, adherence to a set of guiding principles that are perceived to be held by all group members. This vision then motivates individuals to use radical or violent strategies to achieve that shared moral vision. In other words, people who are embedded in morally homogeneous environments might develop dichotomous thinking (a “friend or foe” mindset) and demonstrate tunnel vision, focusing all their efforts exclusively on the destruction of the opponents for a sacred purpose.”
Atari proposes that:
- Morality is unique in motivating extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice. Non-moral views (those about mere preference rather than principles about right and wrong) may not have the power to drive people to the edges. Therefore, diversity of moral worldviews within social networks can be considered a good next step to avoid formation of moral echo chambers.
- Social media networks have rewired our social life, and they can give us a false image of our social world. Too much similarity in the views in our feed could give us a picture that “everyone thinks like me” and that “everyone who does not think like me is evil,” which could worsen political polarization and erode our ability to tell truth from falsehood.
“The great replacement conspiracy theory”, terrorism and Accelerationism
The narrative in accelerationist conspiracy theories is the «great replacement» of the «white race» by a political elite, and that a “race war” is already existing. The far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory falsely claims that in the United States and certain other Western countries whose populations are mostly white, left-leaning domestic or international elites, on their own initiative or under the direction of Jewish co-conspirators, are attempting to replace white citizens with nonwhite (i.e., Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Arab) immigrants.
Fjotolf Hansen (earlier named Behring Breivik) and Manshaus promotes accelerationism. In this perspective, a race war is already existing. The believers in this narrative want to hasten the collapse of society, while the white majority still has the upper hannd.
The Anti-defamation league describes how Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the mosque massacres in New Zealand where 51 people were murdered, subscribed to accelerationism. In his manifesto, posted moments before his shootings, Tarrant dedicated an entire section of his manifesto to this, under the heading «Destabilization and Accelerationism: Tactics for victory.»