Terrorgram’s Propaganda – An Overview of Publications Designed to Incite Accelerationist Terrorism Attacks
By Julia Kupper and Miro Dittrich
Introduction
This article provides an overview of the propaganda authored and disseminated by the Terrorgram community, a “loosely connected network of Telegram channels and accounts that adhere to and promote militant accelerationism”.[1]
Between June 2021 and October 2022, four officially designated Terrorgram publications and another product similar in style and content were released on different Telegram channels. The overall communicative function of the publications is to incite lone-actor[2] terrorism attacks, serious physical harm and other types of violent criminal activities against a diverse range of soft and hard targets. Individuals are called to action and encouraged to mobilize to violence through three core means:[3][4]
1. Ideological justifications in which conspiracy narratives of white genocide, the great replacement, and other white supremacist theories are used to construct the militant accelerationist worldview.
2. Instructional guidance on preferred tactics, techniques, procedures (TTP) and targets for imitators, including the use of firearms and explosives and live-streaming of attacks.
3. Glorifying and lionizing far-right terrorists through the promotion of “saints culture,” which appoints perpetrators as heroes or martyrs on Terrorgram.
In addition, the publications outline the key targets which future assailants are encouraged to attack to “fight against the system.” Human targets include racial and ethnic minorities, such as Jewish, Muslim, Black and other non-white communities. They also encompass the LGBTQIA+ community, law enforcement, pro-abortionists and left-wing individuals and groups. Non-human targets include critical infrastructure sites, such as the power grid, telecommunications, oil pipelines, water lines, railroad tracks, highways and bridges. Religious centers of worship are also singled out alongside news organizations, abortion clinics and police stations.
Breakdown of Terrorgram Publications
The written Terrorgram publications can be categorized as zines (digital magazines),[5] an expression used for pamphlets originating from alternative or anarchist circles. In this case, the zines were collectively authored by individuals from across the Terrorgram network under pseudonyms in a coordinated effort to propagate extremist ideologies and incite violent actions. To date, there have been three officially branded Terrorgram editions, indicated by a seal and caption on the half-title front page. One product lacking formal branding has also been regarded as an unofficial Terrorgram release, and a documentary-style video was disseminated as a “Terrorgram Production.”
The first publication, “Militant Accelerationism: A Collective Handbook,” was released on Telegram on June 16, 2021. The 136-page document described “terror” as “the language of the unheard” and featured calls for terrorism alongside sinister imagery and vignettes detailing violent fantasies targeting minorities. The authors declared they were passing “the torch of terror” to their readers, “men of action.”
The second publication, “Do It For The Gram: The Collected Writings Of Terrorgram,” was distributed on Telegram on December 16, 2021. Unlike its first counterpart, this 268-page document had no visual content, but maintained the call to violence for “those who prefer to die on their feet rather than live on their knees.” Contrary to the rest of the publications, the authors’ pseudonyms were linked to prominent Terrorgram channels.
The third publication was a 136-page document titled “Make it Count - A Guide for the 21st Century Accelerationist.”Although released on Telegram channels in the United States and Australia on June 2, 2022, it was not officially branded as a Terrorgram publication.
The fourth and last written publication to date, “The Hard Reset: A Terrorgram Production,” was published on July 14, 2022, on a private Terrorgram channel. The 261-page document featured a notable upgrade in the use of visuals and placed a greater emphasis on providing detailed instructions for violent action, including guides for bomb-making and sabotaging critical infrastructure.
Representing a shift to audiovisual formats, “White Terror” was a 24-minute Terrorgram documentary narrated by a female voice and released on a private Telegram channel on October 14, 2022. The footage depicted 106 individuals celebrated by Terrorgram for their lone-actor attacks between April 1968 and May 2022 that targeted Jewish, Muslim, Black, immigrant and LGBTQIA+ communities, as well as pro-abortionists, perceived political elites and law enforcement. Those included individuals were not an exhaustive list of saints used elsewhere in the Terrorgram ecosystem, nor were they all self-declared accelerationists.[6]
Analyzing Terrorgram’s Dissemination of Publications
To examine the dissemination of Terrorgram’s publications, we used a dataset curated by the Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS), spanning from March 23, 2017, to December 31, 2023.[7] This set of data encompassed more than 1,400,000 messages across 152 Telegram channels and 8,100,000 messages within 75 Telegram groups associated with the Terrorgram network.
The channels and groups were categorized as part of the Terrorgram community due to their circulation of content prominently featuring militant accelerationism. Markers for this included but were not limited to praising the saints, sharing Siege or Terrorgram publications and calling to start a civil or race war.
From this dataset, we conducted an extraction of all file names within the shared files (a total of 131,416 files) and employed a keyword-based search to identify specific Terrorgram publications. Our analysis revealed 54 distinct files, collectively shared 990 times, with an aggregate viewership in channels exceeding 91,700 shares, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Evaluating viewership within the groups was not possible as Telegram’s API does not include such data. The identified files encompassed PDFs, images, videos and audio recordings, with PDFs constituting the predominant format (639 instances). Notably, image files within the dataset posed a challenge due to the absence of individualized naming conventions conducive to keyword searches.
Discrepancies in file variations can be attributed to language variations—with Militant Accelerationism disseminated in French, Portuguese and Spanish—or differences in file size and resolution. Additionally, variations in file names contributed to the presence of eight distinct PDFs of Militant Accelerationism within our dataset.
Figure 1: Terrogram publication shares
The Terrorgram community deployed various unique methods of distributing their publications. Individual pages of The Hard Reset were repurposed as flyers and frequently shared as images with accompanying links to the full publication, including in dedicated private Telegram channels established for the purpose of disseminating each page individually. Furthermore, all three official Terrorgram publications were circulated in audiobook format, narrated by a woman who was later identified as living in Sacramento, California, and who is also the narrator of the White Terror documentary.[8] Most of the channels and groups that shared these files have been terminated by Telegram.
Categorizing Terrorgram Publications
Targeted Violence Communications
We propose that both the written and audiovisual Terrorgram publications can be categorized as targeted violence communications, as they serve to encourage lone-actor terrorism attacks by promoting destructive and disruptive actions while also fostering community-building.
The written publications differ from previous known types of terroristic communications, such as targeted violence manifestos[9], which predominantly justify a single planned event against a specific target and are typically authored by one individual. Terrorgram zines, however, are a general call for terroristic and other types of accelerationist violence written by several authors. Although both function as propaganda tools and overlap in content, the Terrorgram publications are much more explicit in their call for mobilizing to violent action.
Audiovisual material poses a heightened concern for its ability to vividly illustrate the impact and viability of attacks. Indeed, following its written predecessors, Terrorgram’s White Terror documentary encourages violence by celebrating attackers as heroes and saints. It particularly praises perpetrators who filmed their incidents in the form of a targeted violence live-stream, defined as a real-time transmission of an attack over the internet, broadcast to a global audience by the perpetrator in a first-person shooter perspective.[10] In doing so, the documentary encourages further visual evidence of lone-actor incidents while promoting the illusion that the next imitator will be part of “something bigger:” the Terrorgram community accelerating the collapse of the modern world.
Soft and Hard Propaganda
We suggest that targeted violence manifestos can be considered a form of soft propaganda, intended to be consumed as motivational and instructional materials for a more general audience during their (self-)radicalization and mobilization phases. In contrast, or supplementarily, Terrorgram publications are hard propaganda, authored for already radicalized and recruited would-be terrorists who plan and prepare to commit an attack.
This division aligns with how both hard and soft propaganda have been perceived by perpetrators who have attempted or committed mass casualty attacks that were motivated by accelerationism concepts. While intertextual links have been evidenced across targeted violence manifestos and live-streams of ten seemingly unconnected far-right attacks,[11] Terrorgram publications were referenced only once by name in a manifesto authored in connection to the Bratislava terrorism attack.[12] The author of that manifesto also thanked the Terrorgram community for producing the zines: “You know who you are. Thank you for your incredible writing and art, for your political texts; for your practical guides. Building the future of the White revolution, one publication at a time.”
A recent case in Florida underscores the possible link between possession of Terrorgram publications and planned violence. In January 2024, 26-year-old Alexander Lightner, who posted several statements on Telegram indicating his intention to carry out a mass shooting, was arrested. During the search, alongside multiple firearms, ammunition and a bullet proof vest, the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered the Terrorgram publication Militant Accelerationism[13]—which was described as an instructional manual on how to inflict mass casualty attacks.
Operational Implications
Lone-actor terrorism and other types of violent attacks from militant accelerationists pose a serious threat to Western nations. This threat is particularly challenging given the diverse range of targets against which Terrorgram encourages attacks. Governments must work to ensure the protection of racial, ethnic, sexual and gender minorities who have been predominantly targeted in recent acts of violence. Furthermore, law enforcement—seen as supporters and upholders of the “tyrannical system”—are consistently singled out as clear targets in many Terrorgram publications. Notably, 11% (12 out of 106) of the “White Terror” documentary perpetrators specifically targeted police during their acts of planned violence. Although most recent lone-actor attackers did not exchange gunfire with responding officers, the heightened risk of being targeted by these types of offenders should not be underestimated.[14]
As Terrorgram publications provide would-be offenders with highly specific instructions for terrorism preparation and targeting, we suggest the possession of Terrorgram publications may be an indication that an individual could be in a later stage of preparing for an attack, when assessed through the lens of the pathway to intended violence.[15] This threat assessment framework emphasizes that targeted violence is not an event but a process: developing a grievance against a specific target, ideating an act of violence, planning and preparing for an incident, probing and breaching the target’s security, and subsequently committing an attack.
Lone-actor terrorists who move along the pathway to violence are often difficult to detect as they tend to operate in secret and silence; however, an informed public (i.e., family members, friends, fellow users of non-extremist platforms) can identify and report concerning behaviors that emerge during the different stages. Multi-functional threat assessment teams within intelligence and investigative authorities can then assess and mitigate these types of threats.
Endnotes
[1] Matthew Kriner and Bjørn Ihler, Analysing Terrorgram Publications: A New Digital Zine, Global Network on Extremism & Technology, September 12, 2022, https://gnet-research.org/2022/09/12/analysing-terrorgram-publications-a-new-digital-zine/
[2] Lone-actor terrorists plan, prepare, and implement attacks alone with no direct affiliation to or direction from a terrorism group. However, these types of offenders might identify with larger movements that advocate violence-justifying ideologies.
[3] Accelerationism Research Consortium, Intelligence Bulletin Do It For The ‘Gram, 2023.
[4] Accelerationism Research Consortium, Intelligence Bulletin Make it Count, Hard Reset and White Terror, 2022.
[5] Kriner & Ihler, 2022.
[6] Accelerationism Research Consortium, Intelligence Bulletin White Terror, 2022.
[7] Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS), https://cemas.io/en/
[8] Christopher Mathias, “Exposed: Dallas Humber, Narrator Of Neo-Nazi ‘Terrorgram, Promoter Of Mass Shootings“, Huffpost, March 2, 2023, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dallas-humber-terrorgram-narrator-mass-shootings_n_64010e78e4b0d14ed6a6a545?qah
[9] Julia Kupper and Reid Meloy, TRAP-18 indicators validated through the forensic linguistic analysis of targeted violence manifestos, Journal of Threat Assessment and Management 8, no. 4, (2021) 174–199, https://doi.org/10.1037/tam0000165
[10] Julia Kupper et al., The Contagion and Copycat Effect in Transnational Far-right Terrorism: An Analysis of Language Evidence, Perspectives on Terrorism 16, no. 4 (2022), https://www.jstor.org/stable/27158149.
[11] Kupper et al. (2022).
[12] Julia Kupper, Matthew Kriner and Kacper Rękawek, Terrorgram’s First Saint: Analyzing Accelerationist Terrorism in Bratislava, Accelerationism Research Consortium (2023), https://www.accresearch.org/accreports/terrorgrams-first-saint
[13] United States Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida. “Venice Man Charged with Threatening To Commit A Mass Casualty Event And Unlawful Possession Of A Silencer.” Department of Justice (January 18, 2024). https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/venice-man-charged-threatening-commit-mass-casualty-event-and-unlawful-possession
[14] Examples include Brenton Tarrant, John Earnest, Patrick Crusius and Payton Gendron. An exception to this was Stephan Balliet, who engaged in a brief firefight with law enforcement officers before escaping and later being captured.
[15] Frederick Calhoun and Stephen Weston, “Contemporary Threat Management: A Practical Guide for Identifying, Assessing, and Managing Individuals of Violent Intent,” Specialized Training Services, San Diego, (2003).