Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism
As an investigative journalist, Julia Ebner had the freedom to do something she freely admits that as an academic (the hat she currently wears as postdoctoral researcher at the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences at the University of Oxford) she have been proscribed from doing – posing as a recruit to study violent extremist groups. That, as you might expect, gave her special insight into how these groups attract new blood, and on the basis of that work, as well as more traditional research for groups such as the Quilliam Foundation and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, she has been hosted by the United Nations, national legislators, intelligence agencies and Big Tech.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Ebner details some of the mechanics of her undercover research for host David Edmonds before discussing the prevalence and characteristics of violent extremist groups. Given the variety of ways governments tally these groups and the groups’ own amorphousness in an online age, determining whether such groups are on the rise – which seems to be a perennial fear – proves devilishly difficult to determine. “I would say,” Ebner concedes, “it often comes and goes in waves, but now we are seeing a very strong wave of very young people, including minors, radicalizing towards violence.”
That radicalization proves remarkably similar regardless of ideology, Ebner notes. Plus, it’s not straightforward determining who might be open to recruitment. “Based on my research, I would say that everyone is potentially susceptible to radicalization, especially in vulnerable moments in our lives, and everyone has them.”
Ebner serves up that potential universality in a different context to close the podcast. It’s what keeps her up at night: “I think the mainstreaming of some of the extreme concepts and ideas and language that I used to observe only in the darkest corners of the internet, but that is now being heard in parliaments, that is now being seen in large social media channels of influencers or voiced by politicians.”
Given her journalistic chops, it is no surprise that Ebner has written extensively on extremism in a series of well received books. The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism, received the Bruno Kreisky Award for the Political Book of the Year 2018; Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists was a Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 and Germany publishing’s Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres 2020 (“Science Book of the Year”) Prise as well as the Dr Caspar Einem Prize from the Association of Social Democratic Academics; and Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over, was published in 2023.
To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.
David Edmonds: Prevent is a UK government initiative to stop people from becoming violent extremists. Violent extremism is the area of research for Austrian-born Julia Ebner. Dr Ebner leads the Violent Extremism Lab, part of Oxford University Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion. But her background is in think tanks and in investigative journalism, in which role she infiltrated several extremist networks.
Julia Ebner, welcome to Social Science Bites.
Julia Ebner: Thank you for having me.
Edmonds: We’re talking today about violent extremism, your area of research. This podcast talks to leading social scientists, but I think you’re the first person we’ve interviewed who’s actually gone undercover in the course of undertaking their research. So tell us a little bit about that.
Ebner: Yeah, that was a few years ago for my research, which I did in my personal capacity, so outside of the academic setting, I don’t think any ethics committee would have approved of it. But I wrote a book called Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists, for which I went undercover with a whole range of different extremist movements, for example, jihadist groups, but also neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements, misogynist and conspiracy theory movements.
And the purpose of this was to get a better understanding of the people involved in extremist movements, but also the people who would radicalize all the way towards violence. And I also wanted to understand better what is driving them, why are they staying in these movements?
And on a very human level, I was interested in understanding a bit better how to also prevent people from becoming radicalized in the first place.
Edmonds: What were the logistics of this? Did you have to create a whole new identity for yourself, a whole history so that they couldn’t do a quick Google search and realize that you were a fake or researcher or journalist or whatever?
Ebner: Yeah, that’s right. I had to set up different fake identities or avatar accounts online. I mean, online, this is, of course, quite easy to do. I had to create basically an entire persona around this. So I had to think very carefully about what is their past, their present, and their future, what have their lives looked [like] previously? Why are they now being recruited, or potential recruits of an extremist movement? I set myself, of course, also ethical boundaries, so I would never do anything to help support their cause or would help their recruitment efforts. I would not produce any type of propaganda or say anything hateful myself. But I would rather pretend to be a naive newcomer.
I was also interested in learning more about their tactics, and for example, I was able to join some of their strategy meetings, hearing more about how they are mobilizing followers, how they’re recruiting people, and so on.
Edmonds: But you had to create fake websites, fake blog posts, fake Twitter accounts, fill in the details.
Ebner: Yeah, I had to create a whole fake background. So I had to create fake online accounts, or sometimes on the big social media platforms. But of course, some of these extremist movements are also more active on some of the alternative, so called old tech platforms. So this was before the academic part of my career. It was when I was still very much involved in think tank work and policy advisory. So I was doing a lot of monitoring of these spaces. I knew the type of language that they spoke, I knew the type of insider references already. So that helped, because I could easily immerse myself in those subcultures and understand what they were talking about.
But I also had, to some extent, adopt some of these insider references and some of these subculture specific elements, and also when creating, for example, some of my own profiles, I would to some extent, also try to adhere to, without getting into the hateful territory, but still playing a little bit with the symbols or with the references that they would use.
Edmonds: And you mentioned that you would never get away with this in academia. It’s a drawback to academia, isn’t it, that you couldn’t pursue this line of research, because obviously it can uncover all sorts of interesting things that are of great use to researchers.
Ebner: It is, and it isn’t. I would say it did also come at a great personal cost, and there was definitely a security risk that I faced in the aftermath of this. I think there is a place for it, and that’s probably in the field of investigative journalism, or of course, that’s also what some of the intelligence communities or intelligence agencies are doing. And it’s important, because I think on a human level, it’s really important to understand the dynamics in these groups, including in the online groups, and also see sometimes what’s actually happening offline when these people meet. So that’s also why I joined some of their meetings in person. It did help also my academic research, I would say, in the sense that it shaped some of the questions, the research questions that I would then follow up more closely on with more analytical work. It helped me to understand also some of the human layers in the radicalization process that I would have probably otherwise only perceived as something very abstract, and in that sense, it was definitely helpful. But I would probably not advise anyone to go down the same path, and it did come, as I said, at a great personal risk where I had a lot of threats at the time, when my identity was then inevitably discovered or uncovered by some of these movements, and then I faced a lot of campaigns. It was, yeah, not something that I would recommend to everyone.
Edmonds: It does sound extremely frightening, scary. You had to take precautions. Then presumably, are you worried? Now, have all those threats passed?
Ebner: I mean, I still sometimes get worried, and I think there’s a lasting effect, in general, to being exposed to these types of extreme contents, which I still, to some extent am. I think they can create chronic trauma, even being exposed to violent content, and that is still, to some extent haunting me. But I don’t face the same types of threats anymore, precisely because I’ve changed direction in my own work and in my own research. But of course, I sometimes still get paranoid.
But I think it’s very important in general for researchers who are studying dark or difficult, tricky fields and difficult subjects or controversial subjects, that they do everything to protect themselves on the psychological level, but also, of course, on the physical level and on the cybersecurity level, from any potential backlash. Because now, increasingly, we are seeing campaigns that hit not just journalists and politicians, but also increasingly researchers who simply cover topics, such as far right extremism or extreme forms of misogyny or Islamist extremism, there is a very strong rise in these types of hate and harassment campaigns that are also hitting the academic community to some extent.
Edmonds: So a resurgence of these movements. Let’s get to the body of the research itself, the substance. Are there ways of measuring levels of violent extremism? What are the metrics that one should use?
Ebner: That’s a tricky question, because, of course, every country has statistics in terms of people who’ve been arrested for plotting violent attacks, and especially terrorist attacks. Also statistics on radicalization cases. In the UK, we have, of course, quite a sophisticated system with prevent actually, really giving quite a good overview in terms of statistics of the different demographic backgrounds and the different ideologies in extremists, or violent extremists who have been referred to Prevent and who have been confirmed as radicalization cases. But then every country uses its own metrics, and it’s very hard sometimes to compare, because even the definitions of extremism, violent extremism and terrorism, vary to a very strong degree across different countries.
And then what also makes it quite hard is the online world, where you often don’t know where people who join a certain movement are based. Also overlapping memberships — so some people might be members of various different movements at the same time. Actually, that’s very often the case now, and it’s very difficult to assess who is actually a member, a full-time member, of an extremist or violent extremist group, and who is just loosely affiliated with them, perhaps following their content.
And in general, there is now a trend towards more loosely organized forms of extremist movements which are no longer hierarchically structured or locally rooted, which no longer follow the traditional structures of extremist groups that we used to have maybe a decade or two decades ago.
Edmonds: So I was going to ask you about how these movements are evolving in the modern world. But to return to my previous question, do we think that violent extremism is on the rise?
Ebner: Violent extremism is on the rise in some population segments and in some countries, I would say. But in the past, we’ve seen that there have been waves of high levels of mobilization in different violent extremist communities. So of course, we had the wave of ISIS-inspired violent extremism, even terrorism, terrorist attacks. Then we had a wave of far-right extremism, which we’re now seeing a resurgence of. And we also had a wave of conspiracy, myth inspired extremist mobilization, including violence, the use of violence. So I would say it often comes and goes in waves, but now we are seeing a very strong wave of very young people, including minors, radicalizing towards violence. And that’s something that is very new. ISIS previously also recruited some very young members or from very young population segments, and to some extent it pioneered these youth culture focused propaganda tactics, focusing very strongly on gamification of their propaganda and on pop culture references. [This] now has been increasingly used, also by far right white nationalist and also conspiracy myth movements who are recruiting younger members.
Edmonds: So these different extremist groups, far-right groups, Islamist groups, they sound like they’ve got completely different ideologies, but they use the same methods of recruitment.
Ebner: Absolutely. They also tap into very similar audiences or similar vulnerabilities. We see very similar patterns in the people who do join, whether that’s jihadist movements or far-right movements or other types of extremist movements. There is no real profile in terms of demographic background. People come from all types of age groups, from different socioeconomic or educational backgrounds. But what we do see is that most of them face some type of identity crisis that extremists can very skillfully tap into, and where they can exploit these difficult moments in an individual’s time to radicalize them to fit the personal grievance to their collective narrative. And that often provides a cognitive opening where people then are very susceptible to radicalization.
It’s also interesting, because whether we look at jihadist movements such as ISIS or white supremacist movements or other types of extremist groups, very often the radicalization is not primarily about the ideological indoctrination. But the much more important process is the social dynamic, the social process of becoming part of an exclusive subculture. [It’s] a very strong type of group cohesion, which I’m also researching here in Oxford, which is called Identity fusion, where you start to perceive your in-group as kin like, or as family like very often, these social aspects are much more important than the ideological indoctrination.
Edmonds: We’ve done an interview on Social Science Bites about identity fusion, and are those people who suffer an identity crisis, are they a particular personality type, or is everybody potentially susceptible to this kind of manipulation?
Ebner: Based on my research, I would say that everyone is potentially susceptible to radicalization, especially in vulnerable moments in our lives, and everyone has them. Sooner or later, there is a moment of weakness or of personal struggle. There is nonetheless. psychologists have shown, for example, in studies, that there is something called a conspiracy mentality, where some personality types and some people might be more prone to buying into conspiracy myths specifically. And of course, conspiracy myths often form part of extremist ideologies, but not necessarily. But that personality type with conspiracy mentality, these people, once you start believing in one conspiracy myth, even if that’s a very benign one or one that isn’t very harmful, like, for example, Flat Earthers, it’s the strongest predictor of susceptibility for additional conspiracy myths is if you already believe in one of them. So once you start going down the rabbit hole, basically, you’re much more open to adopting more and more layers to a conspiracy myth, or new conspiracy myths.
Edmonds: Because that might work two ways. It might be causal, or it might be correlation. So it might be that you’re more likely to believe the second conspiracy theory because that’s the sort of person you are, or it might be that the first conspiracy theory leads you down the route to the second conspiracy theory. Which is it?
Ebner: I don’t think there is a conclusive answer to that. I don’t think any study has been able to show which one of the two it is, but there is certainly a correlation. The question is, if it’s a gradual thing, where you move down the rabbit hole, or if it’s something that is indeed more rooted in the personality structure.
Edmonds: And gamification you mentioned earlier as a way of recruiting into these groups. How does that work?
Ebner: It’s a really strong trend at the moment. Gamification means just adopting a very playful way of communication, recruitment, propaganda, to some degree now we even see forms of gamified violence, gamified terrorism. If you think about the Christchurch attack that happened in New Zealand in 2019, that was probably the first case of what I would call gamified terrorism, where the terrorist attacker killed over 50 Muslims in two consecutive mosque attacks, and he put on this first-person “ego shooter” angle type of camera, and live streamed it to his followers using very gamified language, using all these insider jokes and references to gaming culture. There were then very soon, gaming scoring boards that were developed off the back of this live stream, where people also gave points for each target that he hit, and deducted ammunition, and turned it into almost video game, like propaganda materials. This is a very extreme but very representative example of how terrorism works today. In many, many of the cases that we’ve seen, we then saw several copycat attacks that were inspired by this attack that also used these methods of gamification.
And on a less violent level, but also dangerous level, we see gamification in, for example, the outreach activities of different extremist movements when they try to recruit especially very young followers. So for example, the British white nationalist movement, Patriotic Alternative, has used, for example, video game tournaments to learn in very young people, including school-age children who write into the chat groups, “I have to go to school tomorrow,” but also use an avatar that is named after Adolf Hitler, or that uses symbols referring to the Nazis. So this is often used as an entry gate because it offers a social dynamic, that you are exclusive subculture, that you can be a part of. It also offers an antidote to boredom. It’s an entertainment factor in itself now.
Edmonds: This seems pretty obvious, but social media and the internet must have totally transformed the recruitment process.
Ebner: It has and it hasn’t. [It] certainly changed the speed at which people can be recruited, mobilized, radicalized, and it’s also changed the international networking factor, where it’s much easier now to recruit from the other side of the world, to have people from the US join a group that also has members in the UK, in Germany. So we see that a lot, that there’s a lot more international networking with like-minded people, where otherwise these people would have never been able to connect, and probably would have never had the same impact, because they would have been smaller in numbers.
But of course, the patterns in those subcultures and in the social dynamics, they often stay the same. And what I spoke about earlier in terms of this very strong social cohesion factor and this identity fusion, and also this exclusive offer that extremist groups make, that is also not just on an ideological level, but very much on this more subcultural or social level. That is really a pattern that we’ve also seen previously, of course, before the age of social media.
Edmonds: For the police and for the security forces, these internet networks must at least be an area of vulnerability that they can penetrate.
Ebner: Yes, it’s a double-edged sword, because, on the one hand, it’s very hard for them nowadays to find the needle in the haystack, because the internet has, of course, given rise to a huge, massive ocean of death threats, threats of violence, threats of even terrorist attacks or plots that they would need to investigate where they don’t have to human resources or the capacity to do so for all of the threats that they would have to monitor. But at the same time, it also has given them a potential route for investigating people’s backgrounds, especially when people don’t know exactly how to protect their own identities. Some of the members of extremist groups have become very skillful at also really covering up their identities, at using VPNs and proxies and using everything to be completely anonymous, but it is often also an entry gate into being able to get to more information than without the internet and without social media.
But it also is extremely hard these days for them to understand, for example, the difference between an empty threat and the credible threat. That’s also what a lot of my research has focused on, building a risk assessment tool that is based on psycholinguistic analysis, where I analyzed patterns in the speech or in the writings of terrorist attackers, and I used a control group of nonviolent authors of political, even extreme, manifestos, also non-extreme manifestos. I designed this framework to help security services and the intelligence community better understand the difference between people who actually are at risk of committing an act of violence on a psychological level, and how that is expressed in language, how that can be traced in language, and people who might just use empty words, empty threats, but who might not pose a significant risk.
Edmonds: How fascinating! Is it the way the threat is made? Is it the amounts of threats that are made?
Ebner: It’s the combination of various risk factors that can be traced in language. There is a cocktail of four really statistically significant factors that when they come together, the risk is significantly higher. These ingredients are identity fusion, which I mentioned earlier, which is when the personal identity becomes one with the group identity, and people are much more willing to commit extreme acts of violence, even self-sacrificial acts of violence on behalf of their group to basically protect your in group from a perceived threat from the outside.
And that’s already the second factor — a perceived threat from an external group — and the third factor is the systematic dehumanization and/or demonization of that out-group, so essentially out-group othering. And the fourth factor is violence, condoning norms within the in group. So you can essentially split it up into very strong love or group coherence with the in-group and very strong hatred of the out-group. But in essence, those four factors, or those two bigger overall categories, make the threat significantly higher than if some of these aren’t present. You can trace that in language. For example, identity fusion often shows up in kinship language that is used for fellow members of a group who are then perceived as family. So, for example, people would say my fellow white brothers or my fellow European Christian sisters, my fellow jihadi family or my QAnon siblings. But they might also talk about metaphors of shared blood or shared essence. So it’s all about because of this fusion of personal and group identity. It’s showing up often in this type of language, and when that is combined with this idea of an existential threat to this new family, metaphorical family, from a demonized or dehumanized outgroup, and violence is condoned, then it becomes really dangerous and toxic.
Edmonds: In a way, this is spotting the problem at the wrong end, when people have already become radicalized. Are there means to deradicalize people at the root before they get to the stage where they become a threat?
Ebner: Well, you can now dissect these different factors, and we can, of course, try and prevent the emergence of any of these four ingredients. So I would say that identity fusion, you can try to defuse people when they become fused with their peers or with other people of the in group. Fusion usually arises from shared dysphoric, really personally transformative experiences like trauma that is shared with the group, for example. And you could try and prevent people from fusing, or defusing them, if something like that has happened. But fusion in itself, just on its own, is not yet dangerous, so it’s really only when it’s combined with these other factors. So you could, of course, also try and start with trying to prevent dehumanization or demonization of out-groups, for example, by creating more empathy for outgroups by rehumanizing perceived enemies.
The problem with all of these things is that these are deeply, often subconscious psychological processes that are happening and sometimes are not being observed by family members or by people who are in the immediate surrounding of these people, because often people who radicalize are socially isolated or are going through very difficult phases. So yeah, there’s definitely a difficulty here.
Edmonds: What keeps you up at night?
Ebner: I think the mainstreaming of some of the extreme concepts and ideas and language that I used to observe only in the darkest corners of the internet, but that is now being heard in parliaments, that is now being seen in large social media channels of influencers or voiced by politicians. I think that is something that I find hugely worrying. So the successes of, for example, far-right populist parties across Europe, but also, of course, politicians like Trump in the US, and how radical some of that rhetoric is and how it’s flirting with some very extreme concepts and audiences. Yeah, that’s probably one of my biggest worries at the moment.
Edmonds: Julia Ebner, thank you very much indeed.
Ebner: Thank you.
