In March of 2019, Facebook banned white nationalist and white separatist statements from its platform. White supremacism had been forbidden for some time, but last year’s Christchurch massacre seems to have convinced the social network that a more aggresively anti-racist approach was necessary. This ban is not comprehensive, and there are numerous holes in enforcement….
Italian neo-fascist Franco Freda has published and promoted books by Nazis, written that “[we] only have accounts to settle with the Jewish or Judaized Europe,” was convicted of trying to resurrect Benito Mussolini’s fascist party, was judged to be partly responsible for a 1969 far-right terrorist attack, and last year said that Russian president Vladimir…
On Monday, January 20, the city of Richmond, Virginia will be host to a massive gathering of militias and individual gun owners, protesting against a series of proposed bills in the state legislature. This event started as the annual “Lobby Day” rally for the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) but has quickly gotten out of…
At one neo-Nazi metal festival in Milan, Italy in April of 2019, cell phones and cameras weren’t allowed inside. But that wasn’t the case in December 2019 in Kyiv, Ukraine, at the annual Asgardsrei event, which is the neo-Nazi black metal music festival that’s made the Ukrainian capital home since 2015. This meant that fans…
In collaboration with the Autonomous Disinformation Research Network – @DisinfoResearch On Wednesday, November 6, 2019, leaked data from the defunct neo-Nazi forum, Iron March, emerged online, exposing the personal information of more than 1,200 members, including the locations of their IP addresses and, in some cases, their real names. Already, activists sifting through the database…
On October 13, photographs started circulating across social media showing a man resembling Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk on stage at the “Veterans Strong” concert event in Kyiv. This was, however, no ordinary concert — it was organized by a far-right figure accused of murder, and headlined by a neo-Nazi band. As later posts throughout…
Written by Michael Colborne with contributions from Oleksiy Kuzmenko They’re devoted to a brand of neo-Nazism so blatant, including openly glorifying Hitler, that even its leader admits is too “hardcore” for the public space. Wotanjugend, which its founder described in 2016 as an online “mini-university for supporters of right-wing ideology,” has praised far-right terrorists like…
In a previous joint investigation with BuzzFeed News and the Insider, Bellingcat disclosed the inordinately frequent travel of two Italian politicians from the close circle of the head of Italy’s far-right party Lega Nord, and self-styled “Italian Trump” Matteo Salvini. As previously reported by Italian media and BuzzFeed, one of the frequent travelers and advisers…
Ukraine’s Education Assembly (Освітня асамблея) is officially registered (archived copy) as a “community organization” in Ukraine. On its face, nothing about how they describe themselves sounds particularly worrisome, as seen in the group’s description of itself on their website: “Education Assembly is a project whose goal is comprehensive youth development (…) The project takes the…
On August 3, 2019, at around 11am local time, initial police reports indicated that a gunman had walked into an El Paso Wal-Mart and opened fire. As of the publication of this article, at least eighteen people have died and several others have been injured. One victim was a four-month old infant. As we’ve seen…
