The Third Generation Of Online Extremists

Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has worked on this.

I am fascinated by mass shooters, just because I wonder who exactly gets to that level, so I came across this New York Times column about the PA shooter and found it decent. In it, they link a research paper about the three generations of online extremism. It looks like this:

First Wave: The Internet simply allowed movements that existed in the real world to broadcast their propaganda and communicate covertly.

Second Wave: Because of social media, radicalizing extremists would congregate in so-called echo chambers.

Third Wave: For those radicalized online in recent years, Ware wrote, “Not only are organizations less important; ideologies are less important.” Many extremist chat rooms, he wrote, “now trade in a fatalistic ‘doomerism’ which encourages greater violence by normalizing, and even celebrating, suicidal ideation and glorifying forum members, for example, ‘going ER’ — an incel term denoting ending one’s own life in an act of suicidal mass murder.” In this new era, Ware wrote, we might be seeing a narrowing of “the distance between a ‘terrorist’ and more conventional, and nonideological, American mass or school shooters.”