Two teenage suspects who attacked the Islamic Center in San Diego on Monday, killing three people before turning the guns on themselves, were engaging with far-right extremist content on social media, authorities have said.
Authorities are working to determine a motive for the attack, which is being investigated as a hate crime.
The gunmen left behind a 75-page manifesto that preached hate, anti-Islam ideology, antisemitism and promoted violence.
The Times also identified social media accounts, believed to be used by one of the shooters, that contained content that idolized school shootings, white nationalism and neo-Nazi terrorism and memes from the online far-right community.
Teens are going online earlier and more often than past generations. And psychologists and psychiatrists say kids, in their formative years, could easily see extremist content online and, in some cases, possibly connect with extremist groups in search of social belonging.
Anne Speckhard, director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, has studied terrorists for the last 20 years. Historically, it was thought that homegrown terrorists couldn’t be recruited online, but she said, “that’s not true anymore because the [internet] is so personal.”
Anyone from another part of the world or even another state could spend time grooming someone else over the internet or through social media, Speckhard said.
“Radicalization required tight-knit face-to-face groups like a local gang or fringe clubs, but today social media algorithms actually simulate the exact environment at a massive scale,” said Morteza Dehghani, professor of psychology and computer science at USC.
Experts say a child can take their phone or computer into their room and spend hours with a recruiter or pre-made content online.
How can online radicalization happen
On social media, when a child or a teenager feels this intense moral alignment with an online group, it triggers this concept called identity fusion, which is this deep visceral sense of oneness, where the boundary between the personal self and the group blurs, Dehghani said.
“Our experimental data actually shows that this fusion is the primary driver that increases a person’s willingness to engage in radical behavior, and even fight or die for a group’s cause,” he said.
This is one of the ways extremism develops broadly, especially for teenagers, online.
Another way extremism can develop is when a young person is looking for belonging.
Speckhard said she interviewed 55 white supremacists and antigovernment militias for her book “Homegrown Hate: Inside the Minds of Domestic Violent Extremists.” During an interview, one man, who said he went to a KKK cross burning, told Speckhard he knew that’s where he belonged “because they came around him and gave him a sense of belonging and significance.”
“Everybody has a need for significance and belonging and purpose in their life,” she said. “But many of us are not getting it in our lives.”
That’s when a young person can turn to the internet and fall down rabbit holes.
“If there is extremist content, the algorithm will just feed you more and more and more,” she said.
What are the signs a young person is being radicalized?
A person’s teen years are spent discovering who they are. There is normal teenage rebellion, and there is radicalization, and sometimes it’s really hard to distinguish between the two, Dehghani said.
Dehghani advises that parents look out for shifts in the boundary between themselves and the group that they’re beginning to align with. That includes a sudden, visceral connection to a different group, a change in identity or morality.
Another red flag is that the child might start defending, talking about or favoring an online group with cult-like attachment.
A more extreme example is if the teen starts using “purity-related language,” which are words associated with physical or spiritual disgust, cleansing this corruption, or viewing groups of people in degrading ways, Dehghani said.
“This is a warning sign that they are not only generating extremist rhetoric, but [it’s happening because] they’re most probably absorbing it,” he said.
What can parents do about it?
Parents should try to break the echo chamber in which the child or teenager is receiving their information.
For example, Dehghani said, if a parent suddenly sees that their child is taking a very moralized perspective toward something such as immigration, or another social topic, it’s beneficial to expose them to the diversity of ideas that exist around that issue.
Parents can also engage their kids in conversation about their routines online and express interest in the sites they’re visiting.
The post How to talk to your kids about extremism online appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
