TRANSCRIPT
"There's certainly evidence that Terrorgram is used by people in Australia extremists, white extreme, white supremacists and extremists, and they have to be confronted."
That's Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, announcing the first ever counter terrorism financing sanctions on an entirely online entity.
Terrorgram is a network that primarily operates on the Telegram messaging app.
It promotes neo-fascist, white supremacist and militant accelerationist ideology, or as the UK Home Office says - it pursues the collapse of the Western world and a race war through violent acts of terrorism.
"We have to use all the tools of government to prevent the rise of extremism, to confront anti antisemitism and to confront hate in all its forms."
At least two attacks have been linked to the group - a stabbing of five people outside a mosque in Türkiye last year, and the fatal shooting of two men at a gay bar in the Slovakian capital in 2022.
The United Kingdom and the United States have listed Terrorgram as a terrorist group.
Two people have been arrested in relation to the network in the U-S for allegedly soliciting attacks on Black people, Jewish people, immigrants and members of the LGBTIQ+ community.
Honorary Fellow with the Australian National University Simon Copland says Terrorgram is part of a trend towards right wing extremism.
"For many, many decades, following September 11, we sort of thought about terrorism as only being an Islamic extremism issue, and what we've actually seen in the last 10 years or so is that right wing extremists are actually committing more terror attacks in places like the US and Europe than radical Islamic extremism."
Terrorgram members are encouraged to conduct racially motivated violent attacks, with instructions on how to carry them out shared through the online channels.
The network has published material designed to incite violence against ethnic and religious communities, including calls for antisemitic violence.
Dr Copland says it's not clear how widespread the group is.
"It's hard to measure how extensive it would be in Australia. What's been interesting about Terrorgram, there has been some widespread reporting that it has particularly infiltrated mainstream ideas in the US. It takes sort of what might be considered milder conservative views, and uses those as an entry point for people to get in."
The group largely operates on the Telegram app - which is a social media and instant messaging platform similar to WhatsApp.
Telegram supports end to end encryption, and has channels where a message can be broadcast to a large group of people.
But unlike other social media, those channels aren't public, and there's minimal moderation.
In a statement last year, Telegram said they have removed several channels that used variations of the 'Terrorgram' name, and continue to ban other similar content when it appears.
Dr Copland says he's concerned about the rise of white-supremacist ideologies within Australia.
"It's growing more widespread like we are nowhere near the level of what's happening in the United States or Europe but we are certainly seeing that in Australia, while we're not at that level, that we are at a level that is increasingly worrying. There was the arrest of, I think it was 20 Neo Nazis in Adelaide, which which represents kind of people who are, who are becoming more committed to these movements. There has been also the spate of antisemitist attacks, and those antisemitic views are often very directly linked to these far right white nationalist groups."
Senator Wong would not comment on if the group was linked to recent antisemitic attacks in Australia.
Whilst there's many reasons why people join these groups, Dr Copland says there's an emerging pattern.
"What is the clearest trend is we have a cohort of particularly young men who are feeling very disenchanted with society, feeling very disenchanted about their lives, and feeling very alienated from society. And that that's happening for a range of different reasons, poor economic outlooks, lack of security and jobs, changing social circumstances, the threat of climate change, all of these things that are really impacting people's lives. And the far right is doing a very, very good job of telling particularly young men that the cause of all these problems are changes to society through, you know, multiculturalism, increased immigration, gender rights, all of these things. And they're telling a very clear narrative. They're capitalising upon this story."
The sanctions mean that anyone who has financial dealings with the group could face up to 10 years in prison.
Dr Copland says there needs to be other approaches to avoid radicalisation online.
"It's bloody hard. It's really, really hard to intervene. So I think that there's a couple of things that we can be doing. I think that social media companies need to be playing a greater role. And then I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done in stopping people from getting into these groups in the first place, and that can mean things, particularly for young men, about getting them back into society, whether it's through youth groups or sport groups or church groups, even having men being integrated back into society in different ways, supporting men with employment opportunities, supporting people with social engagement, all of those kinds of things, that means that this right wing terror group isn't appealing to them, that they're not spending all their time online doing that."
