Investigative Tips for Safely Tracking Far-Right Extremist Chatter

Right-wing extremist groups around the world present a lot of things in common in terms of safety threats and story opportunities for investigative journalists.

And impactful investigative angles in this field are also increasingly common. They include storylines like tracking donations to militias and finding links between public officials — whether police or judges or lawmakers — and neo-Nazi organizations.

Veteran reporters on this beat note that members of these groups often have a fragile confidence in their hateful ideologies that can lead to tactical mistakes in secrecy, the rapid deletion of evidence of wrongdoing, and the potential for sudden, unpredictable violence driven by personal humiliation. Mockery of their blunders in stories can trigger attacks on journalists just as readily as revelations of their criminality.

In one panel at the 2024 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, veteran journalists shared tips on how to monitor these groups and how to stay safe while doing so. The panel included David Armiak, investigative researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, Jessica Garrison, investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times, Emily Russell, reporter at North Country Public Radio, and A.C. Thompson, whose reports for ProPublica and PBS Frontline have triggered the prosecution of several violent white supremacists.

As far-right extremism spreads, investigative journalists from across the world require tools to monitor their chatter online. Image: GIJN; Illustration, Welt Am Sonntag

Monitoring and Searching Extremist Talk Online

Given the threats posed by far-right groups, Garrison made this important general point for reporters: “At times in this work, I’ve been actually scared. You shouldn’t have to work scared. So don’t do anything that makes you feel scared.”

However, one major takeaway was that — despite the “time suck” and unpleasantness involved — there simply is no substitute for reading, listening to, or searching what extremists say, whether on fringe social media, in podcasts, or in the streets. Systematic monitoring between multiple newsrooms has successfully tracked the path from online radicalization to far-right terrorism in investigations such as the Europe-focused Death Weapons project in 2023. In this case, reporters from Welt Am Sonntag, Politico, and Insider analyzed 98,000 Telegram messages from infiltrated chat groups.

“Reading through these extremist channels on alternative social media like Gab and Telegram — well, it’s the worst!” Thompson acknowledged. “But every time I quit doing that, I regret it.”

Other panelists had the same experience. Russell endured many hours listening to right-wing Facebook Live streams until she came across a revealing admission by a local sheriff. And Armiak admitted that “I sit at night looking through Telegram channels with Doritos [chips] on my chest.”

According to Thompson, one little-known tool to make this process more efficient — and less unpleasant — is Open Measures, an open source tool designed to search and pull data from fringe or less popular social media platforms including 8kun, Bluesky, BitChute, Odyssey, and many others. (Having asked for a show of hands, Thompson was surprised that almost no one in the IRE audience had used or heard of the tool.) A paid-for tool he also uses for this filtering process is Pyrra, which deploys AI to help identify “the posts that matter” involving hate speech and potential violence.

“Open Measures is a scraping tool for alternative social media, and it is pretty useful for querying all of these platforms at once,” he explained. “It collects 4chan, Telegram, and many others. You can follow individual accounts through Open Measures, or you can build in repeat searches that go over and over again.”

Supported by the Mozilla Foundation — and used by leak curation groups such as the  Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) journalism collective — the tool’s homepage states: “Open Measures is built to help journalists…  investigate harmful online activity such as extremism and disinformation. We are opposed to the threats presented by dangerous online users, malicious state actors, and conspiracies aimed at causing mass harm.”

Armiak added: “When someone is engaged in criminal conduct, their social media account usually gets nuked. You can lose almost all of their history, but if you’ve scraped what they’ve been saying in the run-up to the event, you have usable evidence. Meeting attendance lists posted on sites, event sponsor lists, videos — those will disappear after your first story. So archive those things.”

Panelists noted that a more targeted method involves verifying and searching leaked documents and curated databases. For instance, in 2022, a hacked database published by DDoSecrets revealed that numerous members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia in the United States were also elected officials or members of the military. However, Armiak warned that extremism coverage carries an added risk of targeted cyber attack, and that reporters need to beware of ‘leaked’ digital documents that are really designed to infect journalists’ computers.

In one of our recent Toolbox columns, GIJN detailed a number of online investigative tools currently in use by watchdog reporters around the world. Image: GIJN

“There are a lot of leaks out there, but be careful there are no viruses in them,” he warned. (As GIJN recently reported, a free tool called Dangerzone scrubs hidden malware from PDF copies of uploaded documents, and parks the original upload in a safe digital space.)

One new efficiency hack for audio — which can also spare reporters from the drudgery of enduring bigoted speech — is to use the open source Junkipedia tool to automatically transcribe and keyword-search extremist English-language podcasts. Created for journalists by journalists, this limited but multifaceted tool — developed by the Algorithmic Transparency Institute — can also automatically surface posts from accounts you select on several platforms favored by right wing groups, such as GETTR and Gab.

Armiak noted that these groups are often surprisingly open to strangers at the invitation stage of meetings and events — even if they often then close ranks, eject media, or delete information when things go wrong at those events.

“So I sign up to everything: email lists; webinars,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many events you could be invited to. Many say: ‘You can’t be media to be on this call,’ but if I’m on an email list that’s invited, I’m going to join notwithstanding.”

He cited TweetDeck (now called “X Pro”) as an important tool for collecting social media posts quickly after incidents of far-right violence, and the Wayback Machine as an essential resource for finding archived pages. (The AP’s Michael Biesecker has pointed out that the Archive Today tool can archive entire webpages, while the Bellingcat Auto Archiver tool automatically finds the best downloading strategy for video, allowing reporters to simply paste a post’s URL into a spreadsheet and keep searching an event.)

Minimizing Backlash of Digital and Physical Threats

“Too many reporters use their work phone numbers and even their personal phone numbers to call people who are essentially terrorists,” Armiak warned. “Those people share your number with their friends and you are barraged with hate calls.”

In addition to basic digital hygiene steps — including the use of two-factor authentication, encrypted communications, and password managers — the panelists agreed that reporters devoted to the far-right beat adopt the following best practices:

• Sign up for the DeleteMe privacy service, which scrubs your personal information from the internet. “I worked on a podcast on far-right extremism last year, and realized: ‘It’s time to take yourself off certain social media,’” said Russell. “I also subscribed to DeleteMe.” Armiak chimed in: “Whoever is not on DeleteMe, it’s time to get on it.”
• Use a caller ID masking service, such as Google Voice, if available, to reduce the risk of harassment, block spam, and search transcribed voicemail. “You can either use a Google Voice number or an entirely separate phone,” said Armiak. “It’s the same with computers: if you are searching extremist websites and social media, it is a good idea to have a separate computer, or use a virtual computer. At the very least, use a VPN at all times.”
• Consider an extreme privacy policy on family information if militia groups are your beat. “One thing I don’t do is post photos or videos of my family,” Armiak explained. “I’m very careful with this.”

While conducting on-the-street interviews with the protection of private security is an option for reporters, the panelists agreed that careful planning and risk-averse judgment calls had generally proved more effective for safety. Reporters, they say, should be especially cautious about attending smaller far-right protests where counter-protesters will be present, because small events are less likely to have a police presence and reporters can be mistaken for rival activists.

To fully interview a violent white supremacist his team had briefly met at the subject’s house, Thompson recalled how he vetoed a plan to invite the same man for a sit-down conversation at a hotel room.

“We’d had our moment of surprise; we were in and out,” he recalled of the first meeting. “But if we gave him an address, and 30 minutes to round up his gang of goons, we might all end up in hospital.”

There is also a trend in which neo-Nazi groups who intimidate minorities extend their targeted intimidation methods to reporters who expose their tactics, as was recently seen in the US when five members of a far-right network visited the home of a Raw Story reporter, showing Nazi salutes and a sign reading: “Freedom of press does not equal freedom from consequences.”

Thompson shared one darkly amusing anecdote that illustrates both the paranoia and unpredictability of right wing extremists: “At a Stop the Steal event [in the US], I was with a team of videographers, and people were surrounding them and were convinced we were all working for the FBI or CIA, and were planning to beat up our videographers. But then they looked really closely at our cameras, and they were, like, ‘Oh, those are really good cameras — you guys must not be working for the government.’”

Rowan Philp is a senior reporter for GIJN. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.