“Fuck shit fuck,” wrote one international neo-Nazi group on their public-facing Telegram channel, alongside a link to an ABC News article about Smith. “EVERYONE CUT CONTACTS WITH anti-kosmik HE GOT ARRESTED” the group’s leader added.

News of Jarrett Smith’s arrest rattled the far-right ecosphere on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. Smith, an American soldier, was known in those circles as Anti-Kosmik 2182. One day before his arrest, he’d unwittingly shared his bomb-making expertise with an FBI agent on the app undercover.

“For the most hardened rank and file extremists, there is a definitive shift toward encrypted or smaller platforms where the messaging is both more vile and violent,” said Brian Levin, who leads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Telegram makes a lot of sense for those groups: The app allow users to upload unlimited videos, images, audio clips and other files, and its founder has repeatedly affirmed his commitment to protecting user data from third parties — including governments.

VICE News analyzed 150 public-facing far-right Telegram channels and found that more than two-thirds were created in the first eight months of 2019. And not only do white nationalists have a much more robust presence on Telegram than they did two years ago, but their channels have grown more sophisticated, violent and terroristic over time.

“There is a definitive shift toward encrypted or smaller platforms where the messaging is both more vile and violent.”

Exiled from mainstream social media and adrift since 8chan was taken offline earlier this summer, violent right-wing extremists like Smith are taking a page out of the ISIS playbook by flocking to the encrypted messaging app Telegram. There, white nationalists are building international bridges, spreading propaganda, and encouraging lone-wolf attacks around the world.

“What’s Anti-Kosmik’s contact info?” someone on another channel wrote. “We need to find out whom he was talking to.”

“There’s been a shift from fantasy to action in these groups. I think we have definitely seen, especially since Christchurch, an uptick in language that is really calling adherents to action,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, professor of education and sociology at American University and an expert in extremism, who recently testified before Congress about the threat.

Many of the channels that have cropped up in the last six months promote an extremely violent philosophy known as “accelerationism,” a belief that the fastest way to establish a new white civilization is to commit violent acts and undermine social stability. Those channels offer “how-to” guides for building pipe bombs, stockpiling weapons without the feds noticing, and preparing for a mass shooting.

We also categorized each channel by the type of hate dominating the conversations, like “general hate,” “Islamophobic” or “misogynistic,” to understand how the ideological bent of the far-right extremism on Telegram has intensified over the last two years.

Our dataset was drawn from a recent anonymous online post that listed the handles of 375 alt-right and neo-Nazi Telegram channels. Of those, we analyzed predominantly English-language channels (many others are in Russian, Ukrainian, Italian, and German) with more than 300 subscribers in our sample.

The dynamics of white nationalism on Telegram in the last two years mirror how the rhetoric and actions of far-right extremists have intensified in real life.

White nationalist extremists were responsible for at least 50 deaths in the U.S. in 2018, up 35% over the previous year. This year has seen deadly attacks by white nationalists at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, a synagogue in Poway, California, and more recently, at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The scale of the attacks thrust the threat of the global far right into the international spotlight: Congress has held at least six hearings on the threat since April, and last month U.S. Homeland Security recognized white nationalism as a serious national security threat and unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy to combat it.

“There’s been a shift from fantasy to action in these groups.”

The thriving far-right Telegram community is also a reminder that exiling extremists from mainstream social media platforms and forcing their websites, like 8chan, offline, may temporarily inconvenience the movement — but doesn’t necessarily fix the problem.

And in some cases, it might even make things worse.

“Whenever there’s single platform shutdowns or deplatforming, these clusters of hate evolve and move around, and get smarter,” said Miller-Idriss. “It’s Darwinian. It can lead to more creativity to figure out how to get around bans. In general, I think banning has never worked as a solution to stem any kind of extremism, but it can send important signals to everyone else.”

From alt-right memes to accelerationism

Ninety-four of the 150 far-right Telegram channels examined by VICE News were created in the first eight months of 2019. But there’s a spike following the March 15 attacks in Christchurch, which killed 51. In the month following at least 22 new channels cropped up in — more than VICE News counted for the entirety of 2017.