#christchurch massacre

[andromedasummer]

boss has mike hosking playing on the radio and he started bitching about the christchurch call, calling it a failure and useless and something that needs to be cut in lieu of costs i had to get up and walk across the toom to get a cup of coffee to stop myself from hitting something i feel completely fucking wracked with rage

[bandcampsnoop]

12/8/23.

After a long break, Ian Henderson (Dunedin, Fishrider Records) is posting again. His "Pop Lib" has been a go-to site for albums from Australia and New Zealand. His label has been a go-to label for years. And his brother, George Henderson (The Puddle) has been a go-to musician for years.

He posted about Senica the other day. Senica is a band that checks a lot of boxes for me. Christchurch, New Zealand - check. Melted Ice Cream (label), check. The aforementioned Pop Lib stamp of approval - check. The sweet guitar sounds that recall The Jean-Paul Sarte Experience - check.

This is a short EP on cassette made by friends who have been playing together since high school. The music certainly sounds more mature than their years might otherwise suggest. The band itself cite references like Straitjacket Fits, Wilco, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Radiohead.

[radicalgraff]

Memorial mural in Sydney, for the victims of the Christchurch massacre, when an Australian white supremacist murdered 51 worshipers in two mosques on 15 March 2019.

[mariacallous]

Last weekend, former President Donald Trump posted another anti-immigrant screed to Truth Social. It would have been unremarkable ― at least, graded on the Trumpian curve of extreme xenophobia ― except for one word.

“[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” he wrote. “I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.”

Many people might have glossed over his use of “remigration.” White nationalists did not.

“#Remigration has had a massive conceptual career,” Martin Sellner — leader of the Austrian chapter of Generation Identity, a pan-European white supremacist network — tweeted in his native German. “Born in France, popularized in German-speaking countries and now the term of the hour from Sweden to the USA!”

It was a succinct and accurate history from Sellner, a 35-year-old who typically trafficks in vicious lies and conspiracy theories, particularly about Black and brown people. He has been at the vanguard of pushing “remigration” — a euphemism for ethnically cleansing non-white people from Western countries — into the popular political lexicon in Europe.

Now Sellner was seeing his favorite little word all grown up, moving overseas in service of the 45th president of the United States, who has promised to implement the largest mass deportation of immigrants in U.S. history if elected back to the White House in six weeks’ time.

Trump’s use of “remigration” is the latest instance of the GOP’s intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric in the run-up to November’s election, underscoring the degree to which one of America’s two major political parties is sourcing many of its talking points and policy ideas directly from neo-fascists.

“Trump’s rhetoric about ‘remigration’ has its origins in the international far-right,” Jakob Guhl, a senior manager of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, explained to HuffPost in an email. “The term remigration was popularized by groups adhering to Identitarianism, a pan-European ethno-nationalist movement, as their policy to reverse the so-called ‘great replacement.’”

“The great replacement theory is a conspiracy theory which claims that ‘native’ Europeans are being deliberately replaced through non-European migration while suppressing European birth-rates,” he continued. “This theory has inspired numerous terrorist attacks, including the Christchurch massacre, where 51 people were killed, as well as attacks in Poway, El Paso, Halle, Buffalo, and Bratislava.”

Pat Buchanan, the onetime presidential hopeful and former aide to President Richard Nixon, used the term “remigration” to whitewash his own call for ethnic cleansing as early as 2006, in his racist tract “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.” But the term’s journey into the Trump campaign’s vernacular more likely got its start in November 2014, when 500 far-right activists gathered in Paris.

The inaugural Assises de la Remigration, or Annual Meeting on Remigration, was organized by Generation Identity. Its featured speaker was Renaud Camus, the travel writer-turned-philosopher who coined the term “great replacement” in his 2012 book by the same name. Camus’ book built off the work of another French author, Jean Raspail, who wrote “The Camp of the Saints,” an extraordinarily racist French novel that depicts a flotilla of feces-eating brown people invading Europe.

“The Great Replacement is the most serious crisis that France has witnessed in 15 centuries,” Camus told the crowd, eliding many bloody episodes in the country’s history, including a pair of world wars that killed nearly 2 million French people. For Camus, “remigration” was the best solution to the imagined crisis of the “great replacement,” the two terms essentially joined at the hip.

Camus and his fellow subscribers to identitarianism “have always been quite clear that the objective of ‘remigration’ is to create greater ‘ethnocultural’ homogeneity,” Ruhl told HuffPost. “For them, culture and ethnicity are inseparable, and they view (white) European identity as being fundamentally threatened by the presence of migrants ― necessitating drastic, far-reaching responses.”

According to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the term “remigration” was “used over 540,000 times between April 2012 and April 2019” on Twitter, particularly from accounts in France and Germany. Usage of the term skyrocketed after the Annual Meeting on Remigration in Paris. Camus himself was one of the main promoters of the word online.

As “remigration” became an increasingly discussed term, militant far-right groups adapted it as their own. In 2017, police in France arrested 10 far-right activists over a suspected plot to kill politicians and migrants and to attack mosques. Officers found a shotgun and two revolvers in the home of the group’s ringleader, who’d sought to create a militia, according to a post on Facebook, to kill “arabs, blacks dealers, migrants, [and] jihadist scum.” Per French investigators, the group, known as OAS, was formed to “spark remigration.”

The term made an appearance in Canada, too, where a far-right fight club called Falange — named for the fascist group that served under the Spanish general Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War — put signs with the word “Remigration” across Quebec City.

And that same year in the U.S., the group Identity Evropa — modeled after Generation Identity in Europe — burst into the public consciousness for its participation in the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Identity Evropa’s proposed policies included “remigration,” and when its members marched in Charlottesville, they invoked the “great replacement” concept, chanting “You will not replace us.”

Back in Europe, in March 2019, Sellner started a channel on the chat app Telegram called the “European Compact for Remigration,” the beginning of a campaign, he announced, to influence far-right parties across Europe to support “de-Islamisation” and “remigration.”

That same month, a white supremacist in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed himself walking into two mosques and opening fire, killing 51 Muslim worshipers. He’d posted a genocidal screed online before the shooting. Its title was “The Great Replacement.” Nevertheless, one week after the shooting, Sellner’s Generation Identity group in Austria staged a protest against the “great replacement,” again calling for “de-Islamisation” and “remigration.”

A couple of months later, it emerged that the shooter in New Zealand had communicated with Sellner only a year prior, donating over $2,300 to Sellner’s white supremacist group. “Thank you that really gives me energy and motivation,” Sellner wrote to the shooter in an email.

“If you ever come to Vienna,” Sellner added, “we need to go for a café or a beer.”

Despite these revelations, Sellner’s efforts to get far-right political parties to support remigration started to see results in the following years. In 2019, Alternative for Deutschland — which recently became the first far-right party since the Nazis to win a state election in Germany — inserted “remigration” into its list of official policy proposals.

Four years later, an investigation from Correctiv found that AfD members held a secret meeting with neo-Nazis and wealthy businesspeople to discuss the “remigration” of asylum seekers, immigrants with legal status, and “unassimilated citizens” to a “model state” in North Africa. The plan — which bore an unnerving resemblance to the Nazis’ initial idea to mass-deport Jews to Madagascar, before they settled on a wholesale extermination campaign — was Sellner’s brainchild.

That same year, as noted recently by Mother Jones, a jury of linguists in Germany selected “remigration” as the “non-word” of the year. “The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the AfD and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror wrote.

Mother Jones also noted that earlier this year, “an AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned with the slogan ‘Rapid remigration creates living space,’ a nod to the concept of Lebensraum used by the Nazis to justify the genocidal expansion into Eastern Europe.”

And finally, this year in Austria, the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), founded after World War II by former Nazis, and which recently enjoyed success in national elections, called for the creation of a “remigration commissioner” in the country.

Still, very few, if any, U.S. politicians have uttered the word “remigration” in recent years. Trump’s use of the term stateside has coincided with his renewed embrace of dehumanizing language when talking about immigrants.

The former president’s promotion of a false story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio was classic fascist fare, depicting an entire category of people as savages. And earlier this year, the GOP nominee said immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the nation. Historians quickly noted that Trump’s language echoed the words of Adolf Hitler. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf.”

But who in Trump’s orbit might have introduced him to the term “remigration”? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. One possible culprit, though, might be Stephen Miller, who served in the Trump White House as an adviser and speechwriter. Miller’s ties to white supremacists are legion, and while working as an editor at Breitbart in 2015, according to leaked emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, he suggested the website publish articles about “The Camp of the Saints,”the racist French novel that inspired Renaud Camus.

Miller, like Sellner, was thrilled with Trump’s use of “remigration” last weekend.

“THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!” he tweeted.

[schraubd]

The Most Dangerous Threat To Jews Are The People Threatening To Kill the Jews

Yesterday, June 16, 2023, a federal jury officially convicted Robert Bowers, the White supremacist whose 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that was the deadliest antisemitic incident in American history.

Also yesterday, a man in Michigan was arrested on charges he plotted to conduct his own mass shooting at a synagogue in East Lansing. Like Bowers, Seann Patrick Pietila was also a far-right White supremacist, though it appears his immediate inspiration was the Christchurch Mosque massacre, on whose 5th anniversary he planned to launch his own killing spree.

There is a line one increasingly hears in conservative Jewish circles that insists that Jewish fears over right-wing antisemitism are naught but a ginned up panic. Just a few weeks ago, Jonathan Tobin had the gall to claim that "It isn’t going too far to assert that Soros is endangering far more American and Jewish lives than stray marginal extreme right-wingers." To say that at a moment when the Tree of Life survivors are forced to relive a massacre perpetrated by one of those "stray marginal extremists", one whose violent hate was inextricably bound up in the fever swamp of antisemitic conspiracies for whom George Soros is a central figure and which the likes of Tobin are now trying to render Kosher, is sickening.

The most dangerous threat to American Jews is not liberal Jews supporting policies supported by most other American Jews. The most dangerous threat to American Jews is, and continues to be, the people trying to murder Jews, right alongside the people ginning up, spreading, apologizing for, or horrifyingly endorsing the conspiracies that justify those murders. It's not that complicated. But apparently it still needs to be said.

June 16, 2023, in some ways represents the ongoing circle of antisemitic death, closed in on itself. One antisemitic mass murder reached "closure" (if such a thing is possible). Another was thankfully averted, due to the vigilance of law enforcement who fortunately did not take Tobin's unsolicited, misguided, politically opportunistic, and downright dangerous "advice" that right-wing antisemitism is non-threat.

They know it. We know it. The Tobins of the world, trying to deny it, are absolutely and utterly beneath contempt.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/OvkZ4PY

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Christopher Mathias at HuffPost:

Last weekend, former President Donald Trump posted another anti-immigrant screed to Truth Social. It would have been unremarkable ― at least, graded on the Trumpian curve of extreme xenophobia ― except for one word. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” he wrote. “I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.” Many people might have glossed over his use of “remigration.” White nationalists did not. “#Remigration has had a massive conceptual career,” Martin Sellner — leader of the Austrian chapter of Generation Identity, a pan-European white supremacist network — tweeted in his native German. “Born in France, popularized in German-speaking countries and now the term of the hour from Sweden to the USA!”

It was a succinct and accurate history from Sellner, a 35-year-old who typically trafficks in vicious lies and conspiracy theories, particularly about Black and brown people. He has been at the vanguard of pushing “remigration” — a euphemism for ethnically cleansing non-white people from Western countries — into the popular political lexicon in Europe. Now Sellner was seeing his favorite little word all grown up, moving overseas in service of the 45th president of the United States, who has promised to implement the largest mass deportation of immigrants in U.S. history if elected back to the White House in six weeks’ time. Trump’s use of “remigration” is the latest instance of the GOP’s intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric in the run-up to November’s election, underscoring the degree to which one of America’s two major political parties is sourcing many of its talking points and policy ideas directly from neo-fascists.

“Trump’s rhetoric about ‘remigration’ has its origins in the international far-right,” Jakob Guhl, a senior manager of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, explained to HuffPost in an email. “The term remigration was popularized by groups adhering to Identitarianism, a pan-European ethno-nationalist movement, as their policy to reverse the so-called ‘great replacement.’” “The great replacement theory is a conspiracy theory which claims that ‘native’ Europeans are being deliberately replaced through non-European migration while suppressing European birth-rates,” he continued. “This theory has inspired numerous terrorist attacks, including the Christchurch massacre, where 51 people were killed, as well as attacks in Poway, El Paso, Halle, Buffalo, and Bratislava.”

Donald Trump takes inspiration from far-right European anti-immigrant extremists by using the term “remigration” to call for the deportation of undocumented immigrants.

[ausetkmt]

On Feb. 15, 2023, a judge informed Payton Gendron – a white 19-year-old who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo Tops market in 2022 – that “You will never see the light of day as a free man ever again.”

The week before, Patrick Crusius – a white 24-year-old who gunned down 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 – received 90 consecutive life sentences.

The threat of domestic terrorism remains high in the United States – especially the danger posed by white power extremists, many of whom believe white people are being “replaced” by people of color.

I am a scholar of political violence and extremism and wrote about these beliefs in a 2021 book, “It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US.” I think it’s important to understand the lessons that can be learned from events like the Buffalo and El Paso mass shootings.

After decades of research on numerous attacks that have left scores dead, we have learned that extremists are almost always part of a pack, not lone wolves. But the myth of the lone wolf shooter remains tenacious, reappearing in media coverage after almost every mass shooting or act of far-right extremist violence. Because this myth misdirects people from the actual causes of extremist violence, it impedes society’s ability to prevent attacks. Buffalo mass shooter Payton Gendron was sentenced to life in prison in February 2023. Scott Olson/Getty Images

The lone wolf extremist myth is dangerous

FBI Director Christopher Wray said in August 2022 that the nation’s top threat comes from far-right extremist “lone actors” – who, he explained, work alone, instead of “as part of a large group.”

Wray is wrong, and the myth of the lone wolf extremist – the mistaken idea that violent extremists largely act alone – continues to directly inform research, law enforcement and the popular imagination.

I think that Wray’s focus on extremism is much needed and long overdue. However, his line of thinking is dangerous and misleading. By focusing on individuals or small groups, it overlooks broader networks and long-term dangers and so can impede efforts to combat far-right extremist violence – which Wray has singled out as the country’s most lethal domestic threat.

Not a new trend

Far-right extremists may physically carry out an attack alone or as part of a small group of people, but they are almost always networked and identify with larger groups and causes.

This was true long before the social media age. Take Timothy McVeigh. He is often depicted as the archetypal lone wolf madman who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.

In fact, McVeigh was part of a pack. He had accomplices and was connected across the far-right extremist landscape.

The same is true of Gendron and Crusius, who were also characterized in media coverage as lone wolves.

“He talked about how he didn’t like school because he didn’t have friends. He would say he was lonely,” a classmate of Gendron said shortly after Gendron carried out the mass shooting.

Both were active on far-right extremist social media platforms and posted manifestos before their attacks. Gendron’s manifesto discusses how he was radicalized on the dark web and inspired to attack after watching videos of Brenton Tarrant’s 2019 massacre of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Almost a quarter of Gendron’s manifesto is directly taken from Tarrant’s, which was titled “The Great Replacement.” This fear of white replacement, centered around perceived white demographic decline, was also a motive for Crusius. His manifesto pays homage to Tarrant, before explaining his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

The lone wolf myth also suggests that extremists are abnormal deviants with anti-social personalities.

After Gendron’s rampage, for example, New York Attorney General Letitia James called him a “sick, demented individual.” Crusius, in turn, was described by the White House and news articles as “evil,” “psychotic” and an “anti-social loner.”

The vast majority of far-right extremists are, in fact, otherwise ordinary men and women. They live in rural areas, suburbs and cities. They are students and working professionals. And they believe their extremist cause is justified. This point was illustrated by the spectrum of participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. People hug at a memorial outside the Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where a shooter killed 23 people in 2019. Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images

Tracing the lone wolf mythology

How did the lone-wolf metaphor come to misinform the public’s view of extremists, and why is it so tenacious?

Part of the answer is linked to white supremacist Louis Beam, who wrote the essay “Leaderless Resistance” in 1983. In it, he called for far-right extremists to act individually or in small groups that couldn’t be traced up a chain of command. According to his lawyer, McVeigh was one of those influenced by Beam’s call.

After Beam formulated this idea, both far-right extremists and law enforcement increasingly used the lone wolf term. In 1998, the FBI even mounted an “Operation Lone Wolf” to investigate a West Coast white supremacist cell.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks further turned U.S. attention to Islamic militant “lone wolves.” A decade later, the term became mainstream.

And so it was not a surprise when, after the Buffalo shooting, New York State Senator James Sanders said, “Although this is probably a lone-wolf incident, this is not the first mass shooting we have seen, and sadly it will not be the last.”

The tenacity of the lone wolf myth has several sources. It’s convenient – evocative and powerful enough to draw and keep people’s attention.

By using this term, which individualizes extremism, law enforcement officials may also depoliticize their work. Instead of focusing on movements like white nationalism that have sympathizers in the various levels of government, from sheriffs to senators, they focus on individuals.

The lone wolf extremist myth diverts from what should be the focus of deterrence efforts: understanding how far-right extremists network, organize and, as the Jan. 6 insurrection showed, build coalitions across diverse groups, especially through the use of social media.

Such understanding provides a basis for developing long-term strategies to prevent extremists like Gendron and Crusius from carrying out more violent attacks.

[brookston]

Holidays 4.13

Holidays

Aerosmith Day (Massachusetts)

American Elephant Day

American Sikh Day

Arugula o Rocket Day (French Republic)

Auslan Day (Australia)

Beauty Peace Day

Celebrate Teen Literature Day

Day of Patrons and Philanthropists (Russia)

Day of the Dead (Elder Scrolls)

Environmental Protection Day

Feast of Rotten Endings

413 Day (Arkansas)

Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) International Awareness Day

Homestuck Day

Huguenot Day (France)

Ides of April (Ancient Rome)

International Campus & Community Day

International Creativity & Innovation Day

International Day of the Kiss

International Functional Neurological Disorder Awareness Day

International Imposter Syndrome Awareness Day

International Jaat Day (India)

International Plant Appreciation Day

International Rock & Roll Day

International Special Librarian’s Day

International Turban Day

John Hanson Day (Maryland)

Katyn Memorial Day (Poland)

Military-Industrial Complex Employee Day (Ukraine)

National Boot Day

National Borinqueneers Day

National Hippy Day

National Hockey Card Day

National Japanese Spitz Day

National Kiss Your Homies Day

National Pathology Day (India)

National PhiliShui Day

National Silly Earring Day

National Sticker Day

National Theresa Day

Neil Banging Out the Tunes Day

Religious Freedom Day (England; France)

Scrabble Day

Silent Spring Day

Sinhala & Tamil New Year’s Eve (Sri Lanka)

Sterile Packaging Day

Swiftie Day

Teacher’s Day (Ecuador)

Thomas Jefferson Day

Unfairly Prosecuted Persons Day (Slovakia)

Western Mass Day (Massachusetts)

World Microscope Day

World Sarcoidosis Day

World’s Day of Remembrance for Victims of Katyn Massacre

Food & Drink Celebrations

Day to Give Thanks for Fish and Seafood

Hopocalypse Day (Drake’s Brewing)

National Make Lunch Count Day

National Peach Cobbler Day

2nd Saturday in April

Baby Massage Day [2nd Saturday]

Global Day to End Child Sexual Abuse [2nd Saturday]

National Catch & Release Day [2nd Saturday]

Slow Art Day [2nd Saturday]

World Circus Day [2nd Saturday]

Weekly Holidays beginning April 13 (2nd Week)

California Native Plant Week [thru 4.20]

Independence & Related Days

Adammia (Declared; 2013) [unrecognized]

Mensa Ann (Declared; 2019) [unrecognized]

Sicily (from Naples; 1848)

Varnland (Declared; 1991) [unrecognized]

Winterspell (Declared; 2017) [unrecognized]

New Year’s Days

Songkran (Thailand) (a.k.a. …

Bangla New Year

Bisket Jatra (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand)

Chiang Mai Songkran

Tamil New Year

Thai New Year

Festivals Beginning April 13, 2024

Armageddon Expo Christchurch, New Zealand) [thru 4.14]

Baldwin County Strawberry Festival (Loxley, Alabama) [thru 4.14]

Bar K Beer Fest (St. Louis, Missouri)

Cherry Blossom Festival of Greater Philadelphia (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) [thru 4.14]

CNY Maple Festival (Marathon, New York) [thru 4.14]

Crawfish & Zydeco Festival (Kemah, Texas) [thru 4.14]

Dairy State Cheese & Beer Festival (Kenosha, Wisconsin)

Dessert Wars (Baltimore, Maryland)

Georgia Renaissance Festival (Fairburn, Georgia) [thru 6.2]

Hall Cabernet Cookout (St. Helena, California)

Hudson Mac & Cheese Fest (Washingtonville, New York)

International Orange Blossom Carnival (Adana, Turkey) [thru 4.21]

Lost Colony Wine & Culinary Festival (Manteo, North Carolina)

Mobile Chocolate Festival (Mobile, Alabama)

National Grits Festival (Warwick, Georgia)

Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival (San Francisco, California) [thru 4.14 & 4.20-21]

Polish Festival (Phoenix, Arizona) [thru 4.14]

Spring Cheese and Chocolate Weekend (Stillwater, Minnesota) [thru 4.14]

Supernova Pop Culture Expo Gold Coast, Australia) [thru 4.14]

Taste of Hillcrest (San Diego, California)

Feast Days

Alfarbot: Alfheim Day (Pagan)

Believe in Fairies Day (Pastafarian)

Bill Hicks Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Caradoc (Christian; Saint)

Carpus, Papyrus, and Agathonic (Christian; Martyrs)

Elizablecccch Arden (Muppetism)

Eudora Welty (Writerism)

Festival of Jupiter Victor (Ancient Rome)

Festival of Libertas (Ancient Roman personification of freedom and political liberty)

Grounding Meditation Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Guinoch of Scotland (Christian; Saint)

Hermenegild (Christian; Martyr)

Ida of Louvain (Christian; Saint)

James Ensor (Artology)

Libertas (Old Roman Goddess of Liberty)

Martin I, Pope (Christian; Saint)

Martius (a.k.a. Mars; Christian; Saint)

Poshui Jie begins (Water Splashing Festival; China)

Ptolemy (Positivist; Saint)

Purification Festival (Thailand; Everyday Wicca)

Samuel Beckett (Writerism)

Seamus Heaney (Writerism)

Squashing of Moonhopper Day (Shamanism)

Thomas Lawrence (Artology)

Vaisakhi (Sikh spring grain harvest festival)

Vishnu (Pondicherry, India; Hindu)

Yayoi Matsuri (Nikko, Japan; 5-Day Spring Festival)

Islamic Moveable Calendar Holidays

Eid al-Fitr celebrations continue (Islam)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Prime Number Day: 103 [27 of 72]

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Premieres

Aladdin Sane, by David Bowie (Album; 1973)

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, by Clarice Lispector (Novel; 1969)

Bedeviled Rabbit (WB Cartoon; 1957)

The Big Bad Wolf (Disney Cartoon; 1934)

Black Rose, by Thin Lizzy (Album; 1979)

Bridget Jones’s Diary (Film; 2001)

Brown Sugar, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1971)

Bulldog Drummond (Radio Series; 1941)

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart (Novel; 1945)

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming (Novel; 1953) [James Bond #1]

Catch a Fire, by Bob Marley (Album; 1973)

Critic’s Choice (Film; 1963)

Dane, by Heinrich Schütz Opera; 1627)

Daltrey, by Roger Daltrey (Album; 1973)

Echo, by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (Album; 1999)

El Capitan, by John Philip Soul (Operetta; 1896)

Good Little Monkeys (Happy Harmonies; 1935)

The Greyhound and the Rabbit (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1940)

Hold the Lion Please (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1951)

The Kilkenny Cats (Mighty Mouse Cartoon; 1945)

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here Grammar Rock Cartoon; Schoolhouse Rock; 1974)

Messiah, by George Frederic Handel (Oratorio; 1742)

Mickey’s Kangaroo (Disney Cartoon; 1935)

Mouse Into Space (Tom & Jerry Cartoon; 1962)

The One Minute Manager, by Kennth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson (Book; 1983)

Rampage (Film; 2018)

Rising Sun, by Michael Crichton (Novel; 1992)

Safe at Home! (Film; 1962)

Swing Shift (Film; 1984)

Tango in the Night, by Fleetwood Mac (Album; 1987)

Tintin and the Picaros, by Hergé (Graphic Novel; 1976) [Tintin #23]

12 Angry Men (Film; 1957)

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand (Historic Novel; 2012)

Today’s Name Days

Hermenegild, Ida, Martin (Austria)

Ida, Martin (Croatia)

Aleš (Czech Republic)

Justinus (Denmark)

Tarvi, Tarvo (Estonia)

Tellervo (Finland)

Ida (France)

Hermenegil, Ida, Gilda, Martin (Germany)

Gerontios (Greece)

Ida (Hungary)

Ermenegildo, Martino (Italy)

Egils, Jagailis, Justins, Justs, Nauris (Latvia)

Algaudė, Ida, Mingaudas (Lithuania)

Asta, Astrid (Norway)

Hermenegild, Hermenegilda, Ida, Jan, Justyn, Małgorzata, Przemysł, Przemysław (Poland)

Artemon (Romania)

Aleš (Slovakia)

Hermenegildo, Martín (Spain)

Artur, Douglas (Sweden)

Slavka, Yaroslava (Ukraine)

Thom, Thomas, Thomasina, Thompson, Tom, Tomas, Tommie, Tommy, Twain (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 104 of 2024; 262 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 6 of week 15 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Fearn (Alder) [Day 28 of 28]

Chinese: Month 3 (Wu-Chen), Day 5 (Ding-Wei)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 5 Nisan 5784

Islamic: 34 Shawwal 1445

J Cal: 14 Cyan; Sevenday [14 of 30]

Julian: 31 March 2024

Moon: 28%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 20 Archimedes (4th Month) [Albategnius]

Runic Half Month: Man (Human Being) [Day 4 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 26 of 92)

Week: 2nd Week of April

Zodiac: Aries (Day 24 of 31)

[darnellclayton]

Oh wow! I am surprised that @eltonjohn has left Twitter. Maybe he will return to @Tumblr‽

Not surprisingly Elon Musk replied:

I do not think that Elon Musk realizes that he is the problem here.

In recent days, the platform’s new CEO has reactivated the accounts of known neo-Nazis; shared a picture of a white supremacist who said he’d like Trump to be more like Hitler; failed to prevent users from posting videos of the Christchurch massacre; tweeted a popular alt-right meme; used a known antisemitic trope; and, inadvertently or not, shared a dogwhistle that white supremacists interpreted as praise for Hitler. […]

“As soon as he took over Twitter, we saw extremists trying to exploit the platform, we’ve seen hate of all kinds increase, so these messages that he’s sending have to be understood in the context of what is happening to that platform,” Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told VICE News. “As it’s becoming a hellscape for antisemitism and racism and bigotry, it just so happens that he is putting out the type of language that is appreciated by those who are doing that.”

This is a major problem. I have noticed a massive increase of hate upon the platform of all kinds (not just white supremacy). Right now companies are fighting for the right to replace Twitter, but Tumblr & Mastodon are leading that fight.

For what it’s worth this whole Twitter debacle has reignited the geek passion within me which inspired me to:

Double down on Tumblr by investing resources here & Darnell.co

Upgrade my Vimeo account (which was expensive) to integrate with current & future sites

Upgrade my WordPress account: Darnell.tv

Launch a solo hosted Mastodon account: one.Darnell.one/@Darnell

Launch a solo hosted Pixelfed account: darnell.app/darnell (as I am having unrelated issues with Instagram)

Launch a solo hosted Matrix account: Darnell.ooo

Start a solo hosted WriteFreely account: Darnell.day (it’s a blog platform that is fully integrated with ActivityPub)

Restart my medium account: Darnell.Africa

I do not think Twitter will disappear completely from the Internet (pending governmental fines), but if the place becomes too toxic I desire avenues I can express myself upon without interference.

[hasellia]

9/11 reminds me of when the Christchurch massacre happened in Aotearoa. The next day, my family was at a neighbourhood backyard party. My dad and I talked to an old man who had moved from Serbia to Australia when the subject of the attack came. His eye lit up in fear, and he started talking about "there will be a retaliation! It will happen for sure! It's only a matter of time!" Somehow, despite knowing my dad for roughly a month now, he completely missed that he's muslim and that both me and him carry Islamic names. My dad went to a mosque that very morning praying with the immam and other followers for peace for the families as well as the victims. Even though I'm pale as dog shit my dad is visably a POC, we didn't say say anything back to him other than a soft "no I don't think that'll happen, it'll be alright." I think about the fear in his eyes and how scared that old man was every now and then but especially on this day.

[animeraider]

The Ramifications - how much trouble is one of the richest people in history actually in?

 I honestly don't think that Elon Musk has really thought all this through.

An awful lot of people at twitter have been let go. Programmers, Human Resources, Security, and especially content moderators. Advertisers have pulled back and he is currently feuding with Apple over the fact that Apple might remove twitter from their app store because it potentially exposes people who would use the app to harm.

It was discovered a few days ago that the Christchurch Massacre found it's way back into twitter in video form. This video was filmed by the killer himself, in the hopes of inspiring others to commit the same kind of violence. Twitter used to take this stuff down within seconds. This time the government of New Zealand had to contact twitter directly to alert them this had happened before the content was taken down.

And this is the part where Elon is in waaaaaaay over his tiny pointed head.

You see, the content moderators at twitter, while far from perfect, have been doing a ton of work. It's not just this massacre but other massacres. Hate Speech. Nazi propaganda. COVID and Election Disinformation. Stalking. Catfishing. Child Porn. All of this has to be searched out and removed. Some of it just in the name of decency, some of it to keep government regulators off their backs.

But that takes staff. Bots alone won't cut it, and that is already readily apparent.

While it isn't true, there is a perception in the Western World that child porn is worse in the Asian Nations than anywhere else. There is a child porn problem there and it's horrific, but the customers tend to be westerners. And as of the moment I'm writing this the staff for twitter that tries to keep this from reaching your feeds is down to one person. In a region of 4.5 Billion people.

What Elon Musk doesn't realize is that some of the countries where this is happening take this very seriously. I would not be surprised to find that he has been indicted on Child Porn charges before the end of the week, because the site he owns is hosting it. In some countries he could be beheaded for this.

I'm shocked that Germany isn't already blocking twitter. It's carrying Nazi propaganda fairly freely now and that's actually illegal in Germany. This is why Volkswagon has pulled their advertising. They could find themselves liable and they want no part of that.

Covid disinformation is now running rampant on twitter. This is something they actually chose to do. And the day they did so over 100,000 people in the US were infected with COVID-19. Nearly 1,000 died. That day.

And then there is the HR fiasco. Musk famously offered people a choice between 3 months severance and signing a contract to work harder. Most took the severance - but many haven't received it. That's because most of their HR department didn't take the deal and there's not enough people left to actually implement the severance. That's actually a violation of California law.

So to sum up only what I've noticed:

1 - Potentially thousands of HR violations 2 - Responsible for disinformation that will lead to people getting sick and dead 3 - Child porn charges 4 - Nazi speech/hate speech violations that are illegal in Germany 5 - Deplatforming by Apple (and I promise you that Google Play will follow if they do) 6 - Terrorism charges. That's what New Zealand has charged people with who have posted video of the Christchurch massacre.

I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that this is one whole lot of trouble to be in. I could be very wrong about all of this. It's also very very likely that this is only the tip of the iceberg. There's stuff out there that I never would have thought of - that seems evident. 

And I can't deny that Elon's rich, and rich gets away with a LOT.

Is it enough? I have no clue.

It shouldn't be.

[mim526]

Harry's William

Full disclosure, my interest in the British Royal Family is primarily because of William and Catherine and their family.  Naturally, if Harry’s book is apparently going to have much to say about William, I start examining some of its claims. (Bear with me, folks, I've been thinking about some of this stuff for a long time and now seems a good time to post it :-)

Does the William that Harry portrays in leaked excerpts exist?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Re: Harry saying William 'screamed', 'yelled', and 'hit' him

Most of Harry's account I'd need an authenticated untampered video to believe. However, I think William likely did raise his voice strenuously on the occasion of 1) Harry getting in deep with a woman he barely knew, 2) protecting palace staff reportedly bullied by Harry's wife, and 3) Harry leaving the protection and safety of the royal family and monarchy with said wife who by that time they'd all had first-hand experience of behind palace walls.

I'm not related to Harry and cannot say at this point that I have any liking for him, yet I'd love to tell him, "Who else loved you enough to try to yell some sense into your head when you were making the biggest mistakes of your life?" William knew Harry better than anyone, had been his life-long protector.

Re: Harry saying he killed 75 (25?) Taliban

Out of the numerous thoughts I have on this, here’s the most controversial:  Soldiers do not speak publicly of how many people they have killed, but murderers with sick minds do. Killing someone is hard on the psyche even when it’s done to defend or protect.  Harry needs to get himself serious mental help; someone who prescribes something other than pills and/or crossing arms, tapping shoulders, etc.

Why did he say it?  Given the ‘bash William’ theme running through many of the leaks, it’s a good guess to assume in his mind he wanted to one-up his brother who’d never been allowed to see active duty.  Harry made a point in the Netflix episodes of mentioning how his family couldn’t relate to his military experience. 

Let’s look at William’s career experience:  helicopter pilot for search and rescue, then air ambulance.  William has made a few brief personal remarks regarding being unable to save someone or of having to witness abject family grief when an ambulance call ends in being unable to save a suicide victim. He is arguably more familiar with death than his brother and his brother’s 25 Taliban.

One other thing about William’s job. Excerpts from a 2016 BBC article illustrate how much of a cop-out Harry’s self-pity about being the “spare” is.  I think more than any other single thing, it’s the choices William made on the really important things that yielded the difference in brothers, not his being in line for the throne:

It was William himself who insisted on finding a civilian job after he completed his tour of duty as an RAF Search and Rescue pilot in 2013.

Piloting an air ambulance was his way of finding a new role for himself.

It was a departure from tradition. No royal in direct line to the throne had done such a thing before.…

William feels that there is "the time and the space to explore other means of doing a worthwhile job" [service].

Using his real-world experience, William leads in a way that yields real-world results

He brought together for the first time the heads of UK emergency services to create a mental health support package for first responders.

Re: William ‘does not hug strangers’

Oh really?  I’d say it depends on who the stranger is, and how he reads the person.

November 2022

New Zealand Police Commissioner re: William visiting New Zealand following the Christchurch mosque massacre: 

"If I could use the words he used to our staff, 'a good friend doesn't pick up the phone when a person is in need. They travel to their place and put their arms around them’”…[or offer traditional greetings].

“His main piece of advice was to talk to each other, to not bottle things up – to support each other to talk about what they saw and what they do afterwards.

“There was a moment with all the first responders (where he was) just telling them how important their job was but also the importance of looking after themselves.

“When he said he was there to put his arms around us as a friend and offer support, that really had an impact on us.”

The ‘head-over-heart’ William that Harry is trying to portray does not exist.  Yes, there is a streak of ruthless in William:  he’s a protector, and some things he is not going to budge on.  He may stand apart from some strangers [or brothers seeking to destroy what William has pledged to protect], but when it comes to those he loves and trusts…let’s let a few pictures tell the tale:

Her last time...

Peter Phillips

Closing with William’s words to a friend:

"I've put my arm around my brother all our lives and I can't do that any more; we're separate entities," the Prince reportedly told a friend. All we can do, and all I can do, is try and support them and hope that the time comes when we're all singing from the same page."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In William we are observing genuine nobility from a bygone era in modern times. 

Well done, Your Royal Highness.  Keep the faith.

[radicalgraff]

"Destroy White Supremacy"

Memorial mural in Meanjin / Brisbane, for the victims of the Christchurch massacre, when an Australian white supremacist attacked two mosques in the New Zealand city on 15 March 2019.

[mariacallous]

Vice presidents from Meta, YouTube, Twitter, and Microsoft gathered over Zoom in March 2023 to discuss whether to allow TikTok, one of their companies’ most fearsome competitors, into their exclusive club.

The four executives comprised the board of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)—where companies share tips intended to prevent their platforms from becoming hotbeds for terrorists—and they knew that TikTok needed help keeping extremist propaganda off its platform. TikTok had passed a training program they required and had addressed their questions about its ties to China. But people briefed on the discussions say the board still worried about the possibility of TikTok abusing its membership in some way that benefited the Chinese government and undermined free expression. On top of that, at the time US lawmakers were considering a ban of the app, and more content moderation mishaps for TikTok likely would add to the heat. The board ultimately didn’t approve TikTok.

A WIRED investigation into GIFCT reveals that TikTok’s bid to join the consortium failed because two of the four executives on the board abstained from voting on its application. A week later, on the fourth anniversary of a deadly terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, researchers blasted TikTok for hosting footage celebrating the rampage. These were the very videos that would have been easily flagged and removed had TikTok’s rivals granted it access to their group’s threat-spotting technology.

Around the same time, the board members declined to admit the parent company of PornHub, citing concerns over whether its content policies met the bar for membership. By comparison, the board last year quickly approved the unproblematic French social app Yubo. GIFCT’s bespoke advice enabled the startup to identify 50 suspicious accounts that it reported to law enforcement, according to Marc-Antoine Durand, Yubo’s chief operating officer.

More recently, despite having the authority to do so, Meta, Microsoft, and YouTube declined to expel Twitter (now X) from the board even as the platform’s relaxed content moderation practices under Elon Musk threatened reputational harm to the GIFCT and other member companies more broadly. This month, X quietly left the board voluntarily.

These secretive membership decisions, revealed for the first time by WIRED, show how Microsoft, Meta, YouTube, and X are gatekeeping access to anti-terrorism guidance and influencing the content users encounter across the web. Our investigation also uncovers contentious fundraising choices by the four companies and the consequences of a lack of quality control checks in their heralded system for flagging violent extremism.

To understand the consortium’s inner workings, WIRED reviewed records of GIFCT’s internal deliberations and spoke with 26 people directly connected to the organization, including leadership, staff, advisers, and partners. Several of the people believe Meta, Microsoft, YouTube, and X have steered the consortium in a way that has undermined its potential. “The result is almost certainly more users are being radicalized,” claims one of the sources, who has been in consistent contact with GIFCT since its inception. Many of the people sought anonymity because their employers or GIFCT hadn’t authorized speaking with WIRED.

The four tech giants have presided over the consortium since they announced it in 2016, when Western governments were berating them for allowing Islamic State to post gruesome videos of journalists and humanitarians being beheaded. Now with a staff of eight, GIFCT—which the board organized as a US nonprofit in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre—is one of the groups through which tech competitors are meant to work together to address discrete online harms, including child abuse and the illicit trade of intimate images.

The efforts have helped bring down some unwelcome content, and pointing to the work can help companies stave off onerous regulations. But the politics involved in managing the consortia generally stay secret.

Just eight of GIFCT’s 25 member companies answered WIRED’s requests for comment. The respondents, which included Meta, Microsoft, and YouTube, all say they are proud to be part of what they view as a valuable group. The consortium’s executive director, Naureen Chowdhury Fink, didn’t dispute WIRED’s reporting. She says TikTok remains in the process to attain membership.

GIFCT has relied on voluntary contributions from its members to fund the roughly $4 million it spends annually, which covers salaries, research, and travel. From 2020 through 2022, Microsoft, Google, and Meta each donated a sum of at least $4 million and Twitter $600,000, according to the available public filings. Some other companies contributed tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but most paid nothing.

By last year, at least two board members were enraged at companies they perceived as freeloaders, and fears spread among the nonprofit’s staff over whether their jobs were in jeopardy. It didn’t help that as Musk turned Twitter into X about a year ago, he kept slashing costs, including suspending the company’s optional checks to GIFCT, according to two people with direct knowledge.

To diversify funding, the board has signed off on soliciting foundations and even exploring government grants for non-core projects. “We'd really have to carefully consider if it makes sense,” Chowdhury Fink says. “But sometimes working with multiple stakeholders is helpful.”

Rights activists the group privately consulted questioned whether this would count as subsidies for tech giants, which could siphon resources from potentially more potent anti-extremism projects. But records show staff were considering seeking a grant of more than tens of thousands of dollars from the pro-Israel philanthropy Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust. Chowdhury Fink says GIFCT didn’t end up applying.

This year, Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X amended GIFCT’s bylaws to require minimum annual contributions from every member starting in 2025, though Chowdhury Fink says exemptions are possible.

Paying members will be able to vote for two board seats, she says. Eligibility for the board is contingent on making a more sizable donation. X had signaled it wouldn’t pay up and would therefore forfeit its seat, two sources say—a development that ended up happening this month. It had been scheduled to hold tiebreaking power among the four-company board in 2025. (Under the bylaws, Meta, YouTube, and Microsoft could have ejected Twitter from the board as soon as Musk acquired the company. But they chose not to exercise the power.)

Many of the people close to GIFCT who spoke with WIRED contend that Meta, YouTube, and Microsoft must banish X altogether because it has allegedly been allowing extremists to openly engage in illicit behavior on its platform, such as reportedly selling weapons. The Times last month reported on calls to oust X.

The public copy of GIFCT’s “tech solutions” code of conduct is largely redacted for “operational security,” but it does state that a company can be banned for “sustained inappropriate behavior.” By the consortium’s own telling, “membership should be recognized and appreciated as a strong indication of good stewardship for the internet and its users.” X reported this month that it suspended over 57,000 accounts in the first half of this year for violating its violent and hateful entities policy. It didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The four companies in charge of GIFCT also have had a crucial and little-examined role in crisis response, one of the organization’s most visible functions. The group uses technology—computer scripts that convert image, video, and text files into short, distinct codes—to upload these hashes of problematic content they spot to a database operated by GIFCT staff and hosted on Meta servers. Members can then compare the millions of hashes in the database against hashes of content on their services and can reasonably believe that matches may reflect posts they should remove.

After a gunman streaming live on Twitch shot to death 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in early 2022, a worker at a member company alerted a Slack community that GIFCT hosts for sharing tips. Once GIFCT staff saw the message, they began reaching out to YouTube, Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft. At least three of the board companies had to sign off on issuing the group’s most serious threat alarm, which they eventually did for the third time about two hours post-shooting.

In the nearly 26 hours after the board sounded the alarm for Buffalo, members uploaded hashes of about 870 problematic videos and images of the shooting. Later, GIFCT hired a freelance researcher, who provided thousands of hashes covering parts of the shooter’s manifesto that people were likely to glowingly repost.

Companies contend hash sharing has brought efficiency to the complex field of moderation. They avoid the expense and potential user privacy violations of exchanging giant media files, while the collaboration arguably slows the spread of content before it becomes too impossible to contain.

But under the leadership of YouTube, Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft, GIFCT has imposed little transparency and introduced few safeguards to avoid companies erroneously erasing nonviolent content. None of its 25 members discloses the amount of content removed as a result of hash matches, let alone how many of those takedowns are appealed by their users. Only YouTube has reported its contributions to the database—about 45,000 hashes last year. The group declined to say how many are added by its own staff or as a result of tips from researchers or governments, and to what extent it spot-checks hashes from outsiders.

Even which companies currently use the database isn’t public; as of last year, just 13 members had access. The group doesn’t know how many of them manually review content—as opposed to relying on automation—before sharing hashes or acting on matches. “That's the kind of thing that I'm trying to explore a little bit more,” says Skip Gilmour, GIFCT’s recently hired director of technology policy and solutions.

The tech consortium insists that innocuous content rarely ends up in the database. But the board hasn’t allowed outside auditing or ordered comprehensive internal reviews despite confirmed lapses.

In 2022, one social media company noticed that two hashes from the database matched thousands of copies of a music video on its service. The song in question? WIRED learned it was “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the Rick Astley pop tune turned prank meme about love and affection. GIFCT previously disclosed the gaffe without naming the song. It hasn’t shared why another company submitted the song in the first place. Erin Saltman, GIFCT’s membership and programs director, says “testing” and “sample hashes” are sometimes to blame.

A small audit by several members in 2022 also flagged invalid submissions, the number of which the tech consortium never disclosed. But removing them, even as new material was being added, cut the database to 2.1 million hashes that October from 2.3 million about 18 months earlier.

This year, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner—whose counterparts in the Home Affairs Department are formal advisers to GIFCT—demanded Google, Meta, and X turn over details about their counterterrorism work. The findings are expected to be published eventually. “We do not know the answer to a number of fundamental questions about the systems, processes, and resources that these tech behemoths have in place,” the eSafety office wrote.

Some critics of how Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X have run the counterterrorism forum say the companies already have a playbook in front of them to protect legitimate speech and better curb violence-inciting hate. GIFCT commissioned a human rights impact assessment from the consulting firm BSR that was published in 2021 and recommended 47 changes—many of which the board has yet to carry out.

Without naming TikTok or anyone specifically, the assessors suggested approving the membership of high-risk, non-US companies “with appropriate measures” to minimize human rights harms, because it would leave the GIFCT “better positioned” to fight extremism. They recommended banning members from contributing hashes without human review. And they described a board with just the four founding members as “not a sustainable model,” proposing that activists and academics take half the seats.

GIFCT also has an independent advisory committee that formed in 2020, but Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X haven’t always enacted its suggestions. GIFCT’s executive director at the time billed the advisers as the consortium’s conscience. But some of the nearly two dozen professors, rights activists, and governments that compose the panel have felt ignored, with a couple “quiet quitting” this year. “We have no real power,” says Courtney Radsch, a freedom of expression advocate on the advisory panel. “[GIFCT] is yet another example of how tech self-regulation is ineffective and insufficient. To address the real abuse happening on these platforms, we need to have a more meaningful governance structure with accountability and transparency.”

Current executive director Chowdhury Fink says she appreciates the advisers’ constructive criticism. Privately, GIFCT staff have logged discussions between advisers and Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X as “tense,” records show. (The rights assessment recommended that GIFCT publish minutes of board and advisory panel meetings. That hasn’t happened.)

A key contention has been whether GIFCT is falling short of the “global” in its name. Staff have helped companies respond to terror attacks in about 60 countries. But some advisers want it to recruit more companies with influence outside the US. They have urged greater emphasis on tools to suppress white supremacy and far-right gangs; increased attention on studying violence in Africa (where the sub-Saharan region is regarded as the new “epicenter” of terrorism) and in Asia; and a reset from what they view as a disproportionate focus on stemming Islamist extremism.

“Less Euro-North American–centric and really more worldwide-centric,” Ghayda Hassan, a clinical psychologist at University of Quebec in Montreal who chairs the advisory panel, said on stage at the consortium’s annual summit in Singapore this year.

Hassan tells WIRED the advisors recently wrote to the board with concerns about their leadership. She expects the addition of new board members to be vital. “The board has to be more diverse and inclusive, just like GIFCT overall needs to diversify.”

Some GIFCT advisers and staff have protested the board allowing the consortium to facilitate what it called “timely and effective action to remove terrorist and violent extremist content” tied to Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas. The group has avoided becoming a conduit for content takedowns during other wars, and several employees considered the involvement in the Gaza crisis as siding with Israel, two people with direct knowledge of the concerns say. The UN, whose definitions prevail inside GIFCT, lists neither Hamas nor Israel as a terrorist group. GIFCT director Saltman says she’s been gathering advice on handling “protracted war.”

Nearly everyone WIRED spoke to, including critics of GIFCT, believe the world would be worse off without some sort of coordination. The alternative would be individual companies struggling to close interconnected gaps and governments imposing stricter censorship. “Global chaos,” says Farzaneh Badiei, who runs internet governance consultancy Digital Medusa and coauthored GIFCT research.

Services cast off by the GIFCT board, including TikTok and PornHub, have found help from Tech Against Terrorism, an initiative funded by governments such as Canada, UK, and France as well as tech companies. It automatically alerts 135 companies to extremist content on their services and will soon launch a certification program and its own database for sharing hashes of images.

GIFCT had been paying Tech Against Terrorism hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to evaluate and train potential GIFCT members. But increasing clashes between the two organizations about their overlapping goals and identities frayed the relationship. Microsoft, YouTube, Meta, and X decided to cease the contract with Tech Against Terrorism and consolidate control over the process: GIFCT staff will handle the training starting next year.

[sidleyparkhermit]

And in local Justice Dept. indictment news:

From a residence in Boise, Matthew Allison, 37, is accused of fostering a loosely connected online haven for extremists seeking to incite a race war. His tactics included splicing adulatory videos about prior terror attacks and compiling detailed how-to guides that included the nuts and bolts of how to make bombs and chemical weapons, how to find a suitable target and how not to get caught, according to a Department of Justice indictment and news release. In pursuit of ways to “accelerate” violent clashes around the globe to speed up the creation of a white ethnostate, the conspirators looked to radicalize new recruits and incentivize their violent ideations, calling attackers “saints” and promising to commemorate those who succeeded, authorities said. One document that was in the works, called the “Saint Encyclopedia,” included mugshots of white supremacist killers and still photographs from a shooter’s 2019 livestream of a Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre, which killed 51 Muslims attending prayer services. The network of communications channels, group chats and archives was built on the social media app Telegram and is known as “Terrorgram.” The activities on the platform and charges against Allison and alleged co-conspirator Dallas Humber, of Elk Grove, California, were detailed in a 37-page indictment released by the Justice Department on Monday.

The Telegram web was replete with instructional manuals for how to make bombs, videos valorizing past attacks motivated by racist ideologies, detailed instructions for targeting important infrastructure and words of encouragement for any would-be attackers. Here are some of the international terrorist attacks that federal authorities linked to Allison and Humber, and documented in the indictment. SLOVAKIA A 19-year-old Slovakian killed two people and injured a third in a shooting at an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava in October 2022. He then killed himself. Before the attack, the shooter authored a manifesto and sent it to Allison, “thanking Terrorgram for inspiring and guiding him.” A section of “Recommended Reading” included one of the Terrorgram’s documents, which the shooter called a “practical” guide to carrying out their agenda. Humber later created an audiobook version of the manifesto. Before his attack, the shooter had been in “frequent” conversation with Allison online, and was celebrated by him in reposts after the killings.

NEW JERSEY In July, an 18-year-old was arrested for allegedly plotting to attack an electrical substation in New Jersey. He had been an active member of Allison and Humber’s Telegram group chats, and had thanked other members for sending him “accelerationist propaganda” videos created or spread by Allison. One of Allison’s videos had recommended a particular method to break an electrical transformer; the New Jersey attacker recommended that an accomplice — who turned out to be an undercover agent — use the same method. TURKEY In mid-August, an 18-year-old from Turkey was arrested in the stabbing of five people outside a mosque in a city southeast of Istanbul. He wrote in his manifesto that he had used Terrorgram’s documents to plan his attack, and also shared the 2022 manifesto of the Slovakian attacker. In a separate instance last December, Allison encouraged another user who had expressed his plans to commit a mass shooting, the indictment said. “Wish you the best in everything homie,” Allison wrote to him.

[politixpulse]

Federal Prosecutors Charge White Supremacist Leaders with Plotting Attacks

Federal prosecutors announced charges on Monday against two alleged leaders of a white supremacist group, accusing them of using the messaging app Telegram to incite violence and carry out attacks against marginalized communities.

The group, identified as "The Terrorgram Collective," allegedly used Telegram to glorify global white supremacist violence and solicit further racially motivated crimes. The indictment charges Dallas Humber, 34, from Elk Grove, California, and Matthew Allison, 37, from Boise, Idaho, with 15 counts, including conspiracy, soliciting hate crimes, threatening federal officials, and distributing bomb-making instructions. If convicted, each faces up to 220 years in prison.

The Terrorgram Collective is said to promote a radical white supremacist ideology, advocating for violence and terrorism to trigger a race war and establish a white ethnostate. This group was designated as a terrorist organization by the UK government in April.

“Today’s indictment charges the defendants with leading a transnational terrorist group dedicated to attacking America’s critical infrastructure, targeting public officials, and committing deadly hate crimes,” stated Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

According to the indictment, Humber and Allison, who joined the group in 2019 and became leaders in 2022, were instrumental in developing a document that justified their extremist views and included detailed plans for terror attacks and bomb construction. They allegedly created a "hit list" targeting a U.S. senator and a federal judge as part of their campaign.

“The defendants solicited murders and hate crimes based on race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity,” said U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert. “They also doxxed federal officials and conspired to support terrorism.”

Prosecutors revealed that Humber and Allison encouraged followers to commit attacks and remain silent to amplify unrest. They reportedly celebrated various incidents of white supremacist violence, including the 2019 Christchurch massacre.

The indictment also alleges that the men promoted a doctrine where members could attain "Sainthood" by committing acts of violence to advance their racist ideology. They managed a network of Telegram channels and group chats to facilitate and support these activities.

Lisa Monaco, Deputy Attorney General, emphasized the gravity of the charges, stating that the defendants used Telegram to promote their extremist agenda, solicit hate crimes, and provide instructions for terrorist acts.

The charges against Humber and Allison follow a broader Justice Department initiative targeting individuals and groups seeking to incite civil unrest through violence. In July, federal authorities charged Michail Chkhikvishvili, a Georgian national known as "Commander Butcher," for plotting to poison Jewish children in New York City. Chkhikvishvili, 20, was arrested in Moldova under an Interpol order.