Forty-four million reactions on Facebook. Nine million retweets. More than 600,000 YouTube comments. Sixteen million views on Telegram.
During the pandemic, rightwing extremist activity online flourished in Canada, says a new study, with participants capitalizing on people’s COVID-19 anxieties and flooding social media platforms with pandemic-related conspiracy theories while stoking hate against government and minorities, particularly Asians.
As lockdown restrictions ease, authorities should anticipate “potential surges in extremist activity” in Canada, warns the study released this week by the U.K.-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“We know these groups use social media and messaging platforms to radicalize new people to spread their toxic and hateful ideology,” study co-author Jacob Davey, head of farright research at the institute, told the Star. “This represents a significant threat both to public security but also to the overall environment in which Canadians live.”
The findings dovetail with a December 2020 analytical brief by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that raised the concern that violent extremists were exploiting the pandemic online, “amplifying the perceived failures of government response measures” and adopting conspiracy theories about the pandemic that “rationalize and justify violence.”
“Adherents of (ideologically motivated violent extremism) and others are using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to promote disinformation and alternative narratives regarding both the cause of the pandemic and potential societal outcomes,” said the CSIS report, which was obtained by the Star through an access-toinformation request.
“Blame for the pandemic focuses primarily on specific communities, global corporations, China, the government and societal elites. Individuals and groups adopt or promote those conspiracies that best suit their personalized world views and range of grievances. In particular, they include antigovernment and ethnonationalist views.”
The latest study was carried out by researchers with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue along with analysts at Ontario Tech University, the University of New Brunswick and Michigan State University.
The team tracked the online habits of Canadian right-wing extremists in 2020, drawing from more than three million messages sent by 2,400 groups, channels and accounts on a variety of platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, 4chan and Telegram.
Because of pandemic-related lockdowns, more people spent time online, Davey said, in search of explanations or scapegoats.
“This created the perfect void for right-wing extremists to step into,” he said. “They can quite cynically exploit the pandemic to find willing scapegoats and ultimately inject their toxic ideology into discourse.”
The pandemic was the most widely discussed topic, accounting for almost 40 per cent of all messages, “with output often focusing on conspiracy theories and manifesting in anger against the government,” the researchers found.
One bizarre conspiracy theory suggested Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was behind the pandemic and that he wanted to use vaccines to implant microchips in people to track their movements.
Canadian politics was the second-most talked about subject with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being the most mentioned politician. Discussion around him was overwhelmingly negative, the researchers found.
Not far behind was U.S. politics. The data showed Canadian right-wing extremists were very much influenced by events happening in the U.S. and Donald Trump came up in a lot of posts.
A small but troubling subset of discussion threads analyzed by the researchers targeted minority communities with overt hatred.
“This included a number of white supremacist channels on Telegram promoting the … ideology that helped inspire the 2019 Christchurch attack, and sharing guides on how to prepare for violence,” the researchers wrote.
Davey cited last month’s attack in London, Ont., in which a young man mowed down a Muslim family of four with a vehicle allegedly because of their faith, as another manifestation of violent extremism in Canada.
“The spread of this ideology which seeks to denigrate minorities and seeks to polarize individuals doesn’t exist in a vacuum. What people type on a Facebook group or on Twitter isn’t just a case of people shouting into a void online — they’re reaching other individuals, they’re convincing other people into adopting this mode of thinking.”
Davey praised the government for adding Proud Boys, Atomwaffen Division, the Base and the Russian Imperial Movement to the government’s list of terrorist organizations earlier this year.
Madeleine Gomery, press secretary for Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, said Wednesday that beyond listing a number of violent extremist organizations as terrorist entities, Canada has quadrupled funding available for communities at risk of hatebased violence to enhance their security.
On Wednesday, Blair announced the government was allocating $6 million to help religious and cultural organizations improve their security infrastructure and provide training for staff to respond to hatemotivated crime. Another $2 million has been proposed the upcoming fiscal year to focus on anti-Asian hate-motivated crime.