Australian right-wing extremists are making thousands of dollars to support their activities using a smorgasbord of online fundraising tools, according to a new report.
Despite being chased off many of the major platforms, far-right extremists still have access to a network of lightly or unmoderated digital platforms that allow them to make money from the attention they earn online.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute analyst Ariel Bogle’s Buying and selling extremism: New funding opportunities in the right-wing extremist online ecosystem examines how a sample of these groups, organised through the Telegram messaging platform, use different online tools to raise money.
“The fundraising facilitated by these platforms not only has the potential to grow the resources of groups and individuals linked to right‐wing extremism, but it’s also likely to be a means of building the RWE community both within Australia and with overseas groups and a vector for spreading RWE propaganda through the engagement inherent in fundraising efforts,” she wrote.
What Bogle found is that far-right funding has moved from being structured around groups — i.e. charging membership dues — towards an individual creator model, not unlike that of an Instagram influencer.
Individual right-wing extremists solicit donations or earn money through creating engaging and credible content (“[right-wing content creators] may be supported for ostensibly ‘living’ the ideology they propagate”) from their audiences.
This arrangement, Bogle argues, can also incentivise people to make right-wing extremist content to earn money rather than making content to support their beliefs.
The report documents more than 20 tools used to solicit donations, facilitate transactions, and earn and store money. These range from major platforms like Google and Amazon advertising programs used on far-right websites to niche “alt-tech” platforms which offer alternatives to popular streaming or video platforms. Activities supported by these platforms include livestreamed interviews, selling merchandise featuring right-wing extremist propaganda, or cryptocurrencies that allow money transfers that are difficult or impossible to trace.
The report notes that these platforms are generally opaque, making it difficult to ascertain how much money is changing hands between Australian right-wing extremist creators and their audiences. Small glimpses such as the sharing of cryptocurrency wallets with thousands of dollars or public gifts of up to US$50 to ask a question on a livestream shows that these funding methods can be lucrative.
Many of these platforms have policies ostensibly banning “hate speech” or other policies that would seem to preclude Australia’s right-wing extremists from using them. Bogle suggests their continued use of the platforms is because of limited enforcement, the relatively small size of Australian creators, or because of a lack of attention given to Australia.
While acknowledging that right-wing extremism is an issue that goes beyond its finances, Bogle makes a variety of recommendations to stymie its online fundraising efforts, including enforcing or considering new reporting counter-terrorism financing obligations, considering prosecuting fundraising efforts under existing laws that prevent criminals from benefiting from their crimes, and requiring more transparency reporting from the platforms.
“Australian law enforcement, intelligence agencies, policymakers and civil society should explore involves addressing and undermining the financial incentives that can help sustain and grow such movements,” she wrote.
“right-wing extremists solicit donations or earn money through creating engaging and credible content” Looks like the News Corp business model doesn’t it?
Except for the “credible” bit.
What mystifies me is just what it is that motivates these bitter and twisted individuals. It is truly a frightening sight to see angry young men here in Australia carrying Nazi flags and other similar insignia, not to mention giving Hitler salutes. Don’t these people watch films and videos of the horrors inflicted upon Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s by the fascists who they seem to admire? I simply cannot understand just what it is that causes these people to form the views that they have.
Perhaps the emergence of these dangerous malcontents is a sign that our free-market, free-for-all is not meeting everyone’s needs and is leaving some behind, (at its peril).
Agree, lots of good work been done on the origins of the far right in the anxiety and disruption, not to mention inequality, generated by capitalist modernity. See Fromm’s Fear of Freedom for a start.
If you are expressing anger, anxiety and frustration, not to mention alienation, the more shocking you can be the better it seems to you. Under it all for this lot, a propensity for violence, to shock and release emotions that they lack the maturity to regulate, let alone examine. What they believe is largely not what makes them tick, rather what they believe is what they need to meet their need. Or inadequacy if you like.
When I was in school 40 years ago, we didn’t study much 20th Century history. It more or less stopped at the Russian Revolution. At that time WWII was still in living memory and the Cold War consequences of it were all too apparent and very present. Maybe it was thought to be too recent and that greater objectivity and insight would emerge in time. With the passing of our elders, the ravages of the century seem to have passed too.
I hope it’s being taught now, if the teaching of history has not declined. (I really don’t know, but I fear it has.)
What motivates the right (extreme or otherwise) is fear, plain and simple. The more intensely fearful they are the further to the right the lean. I don’t really understand why fear makes people like that, but it seems it does. That may help explain why some people get more right wing as they get older – if you’re inclined to fear, aging can be scary.
Something else we can ‘thank’ Trump for giving to the world as if stolen election rhetoric wasn’t enough. Demonstrate a successful con and out come the con men.
The day after his election ‘Fake News’ became, as I bemoaned here a day ago, soi-disant ‘common wisdom’.
Not that the fake news was untrue but that the distinction had been abolished thanks to alterative facts from the likes of Kelly-Anne Conway-Twitters drool!
One thing that perplexes me is why the ready adoption of what Trump says is true and everything else is fake news? If we go to buy something and seller says only believe what I say! Can’t trust any other dealer but me as everything they say is fake! red flags launch and flap wildly as we exit the shop. Why such a different response?
Maybe people, including those in media, are too close to events in Australia, as opposed to reporting on the same in the US, and now more in the UK which makes links with the longstanding ideologues and grifters in the background, but who are careful not be associated in public.
These ‘extremists’ or alt/far right entertainers or provocateurs are not so different from many in the mainstream, radical right libertarians and the GOP on contentious issues they prosecute and amplify, whether ‘cancel culture’, BLM, refugees etc.; nor are their methods of funding for their cause or as likely, themselves.
Thank you for this!! I found 2 instances of it on twitter last night. A clue seems to be if you say something sensible and get multiple and innane replies from new accounts! Never would have thought to look were it not for your article!