A small team of researchers at the University of Auckland has found years of posts from the terrorist behind the March 15, 2019 attack on two Christchurch mosques, disproving the notion that he had not been active on extremist forums.
Senior lecturer Chris Wilson, who is also the director of the Hate and Extremism in Aotearoa (HEIA) group, led the review of thousands of archived posts from the online, anonymous forum 4chan. He was motivated to look for the terrorist’s online history when the Royal Commission into the attacks concluded, based partly on the attacker’s testimony, that he had not spent time in far-right online spaces.
“I’m a little bit frustrated that they took his word for it that he didn’t use far-right websites, for example,” Wilson said.
“[From] what we know about far-right radicalisation, it’s pretty much the first [place] you’d look. You know that he has no meaningful, personal relationships, do you really expect that he wasn’t engaging with other people with like minds online?”
Believing the terrorist when he said he was mostly radicalised by YouTube rather than more extreme sites was a mistake, Wilson argues.
“It is a real clear reminder that we need to stop relying on manifestos and other statements, because that is as much his propaganda as the actual violence was itself. We often, and I’m talking about me as well, and all of us, rely on the manifestos, but all we’re doing is replicating and re-disseminating his propaganda.”
Judith Collins, the minister responsible for coordinating the Government’s response to the Royal Commission’s report, told Newsroom she still backs the report’s conclusions.
“The Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCOI) was a thorough, independent inquiry into the terrible attacks on Christchurch mosques in 2019,” she said in a statement.
“The RCOI found that there was no plausible way the terrorist could have been detected except by chance. The report speaks for itself, and is available on the Royal Commission’s website.”
Wilson and his team combed through thousands of anonymous posts dating back to 2014 on the 4chan site’s politics forum, which is well-known for hosting and promoting violent extremist and terrorist content. Because posts show users’ locations (unless they use a VPN), they could be matched up against the terrorist’s known travel history to dozens of different countries over a two-year period.
The terrorist also made specific, unique grammatical errors in public, identifiable posts from 2011 as well as his 2019 manifesto. These errors showed up in some of the posts, as did other details around his personal life which identified him.
The researchers set a high bar for attributing a post to the terrorist. Only if an individual comment had more than two indicators of being linked to the terrorist were they included, which meant some posts which were almost certainly written by him were excluded.
Even the posts that were included still show how he was radicalised and that he was publicly posting about his plans to attack Muslims in New Zealand.
“Nothing is completely beyond doubt, but it’s him,” Wilson said.
In one thread, the terrorist claimed he would sell a rental property (which in real life he had just purchased with his sister) in order to fund an armed group of 4chan users to conduct ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. He said he was Australian four times in that thread and boasted that the Australian government couldn’t stop him.
The same week, he emailed a Dunedin gun club about plans to move to New Zealand and donated to international far-right leaders.
“We are trying to find a needle in the haystack. But that doesn’t mean that we should just say it’s too difficult.”
Chris Wilson
While living in New Zealand, he posted about immigrants in New Zealand and the presence of mosques in small towns. He made specific comments about a Muslim school in Dunedin, which he said was near his gym – almost identical to comments he posted in a far-right group on Facebook which had been identified by the Royal Commission.
Chillingly, when other 4chan users called on him to act on his anger about mosques in Dunedin, Christchurch and Ashburton, he replied: “I have a plan to stop it. Just hold on.”
Wilson says the discussion of attack plans should have raised red flags, if they had been seen. The Royal Commission concluded “there was no other information provided or otherwise available to any relevant public sector agency that could or should have alerted them to the terrorist attack”.
“There were occasions where, if you triangulated a bunch of different things that happened, it’s as close to a red flag or sign of impending violence as you can get,” Wilson said.
“His language stood out even on [the violent politics forum]. It’s abusive, it’s hard to think of the right words to use, but it shows a real danger of violence. Having said that, everything that we are looking at now was with hindsight, so we knew what things we were looking for, once we started finding him, then we were able to find [more about him] more easily. It’s much easier for us now.
“There were opportunities, particularly when he was posting in New Zealand, but also the ethnic cleansing thread, when he’s talking about being an Australian.”
The bigger concern, in Wilson’s view, is that the posts weren’t identified after the attack by the commission, by the intelligence agencies’ own internal review of the attack or by anyone else.
“Those posts have been there for five years. I don’t understand why an unfunded, small university research team was required to find these.”
While Wilson says the Royal Commission did the best it could do, he thinks it was limited by the fact no extremism researchers were appointed to take part in it.
“I’m just, once again, asking for the agencies to work with people who actually know about this area, who can do this stuff properly. Five years has gone by and it needs to start now, because it hasn’t really started yet,” he said.
“We’ve learned so much from this study. I probably shouldn’t, in an academic sense, have released what we released today, but it’s in the public interest and there’s a coronial inquest going on. The Muslim community, in particular, and other vulnerable minorities need this information.”
The posts will be an important contributor going forward to experts’ understanding of warning signs of terror attacks, Wilson believes.
“There just does seem to be a little bit of apathy and I’m worried about something else happening. We just need a little bit more sophisticated understanding of, and using what we know about, the way that [terrorists] are radicalised, plus where they are radicalised,” he said.
“I’ve founded Hate and Extremism Insights Aotearoa on the basis that we are trying to find a needle in the haystack. But that doesn’t mean that we should just say it’s too difficult. If we work on it in a reasonably sophisticated and clever way, we can actually do it.”
Great work! Sad the Commission, with it’s resources, didn’t identify this. Hopefully, those keeping us safe, will learn from the work of Chris and his small unfunded university research team. In my book, that team joins the many heroes who have come out of this tragedy: victims who died trying to save others, the two country cops who stopped the killer minutes after the call, the lawyer who convinced the killer to plead guilty, the prison staff ensuring the killer serves his sentence, the judge who refused to deny reporters attending the hearing of the killer’s recent appeal, the lawyer who withdrew that appeal, the PM who led us in our response to that tragedy and those who had her back then, and now.
Thank you for the excellent work. What action would you suggest when we come across an online hate forum when neither Netsafe nor the police take it seriously, or it doesn’t overtly break any rules?
Excellent article Marc, an important one too. I’ve always felt the intelligence agencies got off lightly post-Christchurch. For some time the agencies had been fixated on the Islamist threat and appeared to have little understanding of the right-wing extremist threat in NZ. The royal comm seemed to fall under the thrall of the agencies, and their conclusion – that the fact the individual wasn’t detected was not in itself an intelligence failure – felt a bit flimsy. Note Chris Wilson’s point about the commission’s work being limited by the fact no extremism researchers were appointed to take part in it – in other words the commission didn’t dig deep enough.
It’s time to trust the public with the content of the shooter’s so-called ‘manifesto.’ Attention to possible threats, coming from the manifesto being made public, hopefully will be robust now so the initial reason for not releasing the manifesto is much less compelling. Why has it been held so long? What are they really afraid of now? It would be very interesting in our political climate to see how much of the manifesto has become a part of the political conversation here in A/NZ.