The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram

This program contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.

A.C. THOMPSON, ProPublica/FRONTLINE:

Old Town in Bratislava, Slovakia. I was here to investigate a deadly attack that had terrorized this Central European city. It happened on the evening of Oct. 12, 2022. That night, on Zámocká Street, three friends sat talking outside a gay bar they frequented.

RADKA TROKŠIAROVÁ:

[Speaking Slovak] Tepláreň was a free and safe harbor for me. Many people found their second family there, especially those not out to their families.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Radka Trokšiarová was catching up with her friends, Matúš and Juraj.

RADKA TROKŠIAROVÁ:

[Speaking Slovak] Outside on the street, when the weather was good, there were three benches to sit on, but no table. Juraj was on the other side of the bench.

Matúš lit one up. He then leaned his head on my shoulder. Complete silence set in.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Radka saw another person standing in the shadows, not far from the bar.

RADKA TROKŠIAROVÁ:

[Speaking Slovak] That was about the time when the guy appeared. He was just standing there. First, we thought he was standing there because he was maybe also queer, just too shy to come in. We even said hello to him.

A.C. THOMPSON:

His name was Juraj Krajčík. He was 19 years old.

DANIEL LIPŠIC, Special prosecutor, Slovakia:

He was an intelligent student. He was very good in English. He was usually alone. It was not suspicious to anybody at that time.

A.C. THOMPSON:

But earlier that day, Krajčík had posted a hate-filled manifesto online, full of false narratives and racist conspiracy theories. He wrote that white people were facing “a critical situation” and that Jews and gay people should be eliminated.

RADKA TROKŠIAROVÁ:

[Speaking Slovak] He was dressed in a black hoodie. The guy must have stood there for about 40 minutes.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Krajčík pulled out a gun and aimed directly at the three friends.

RADKA TROKŠIAROVÁ:

[Speaking Slovak] He was shooting from this side. There was no chance. I heard this roaring sound of nine shots that blended into one.

The only thing I know is that Juraj fell down just in front of us, and Matúš, as he was shot, fell against me, taking us both down.

I must have blacked out for a couple seconds. No one was around.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Krajčík fired twice more into the bodies on the ground. Then he fled into the night.

MALE NEWSREADER:

[Speaking Slovak] A 19-year-old man who shot dead two people is said to have hated homosexuals.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

[Speaking Slovak] Police are still looking for the attacker.

DANIEL LIPŠIC:

[Speaking Slovak] He was determined to carry out such an act, which has the hallmarks of a terrorist crime.

[Speaking English] We did not know what the motive was. We knew it was a murder in cold blood. But of course, we didn’t have the shooter, who was at large, moving around the largest center of Bratislava.

MALE NEWSREADER:

[Speaking Slovak] Police confirmed that he had no accomplice.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Slovak officials believed no one else was involved in the shooting—that Krajčík was a so-called lone wolf. But his manifesto contained clues that, in fact, he’d been radicalized by a global community of online extremists to commit an act of 21st-century terror.

The Bratislava attack is important because it’s a pure example of how influencers today can encourage and inspire other people to go out and commit acts of terrorism. It explains and shows how terrorism works today.

For the past year, I’ve been reporting on the dark corners of the internet and social media that have given rise to a series of deadly far-right terror attacks.

MATTHEW KRINER, Institute for Countering Digital Extremism:

The ecosystem is designed such that anyone can pop off and create a very high-impact, damaging attack on society at the drop of a hat.

A.C. THOMPSON:

With a team of reporters from FRONTLINE and ProPublica, my colleague James Bandler and I have been investigating the anonymous and loosely moderated platforms where extremists have been able to share propaganda and terrorist instructional material—

PETE SIMI, Chapman University:

It was allowing for really unfiltered and unregulated hate and extremism to run rampant.

A.C. THOMPSON:

—and the transnational terrorist network behind the Bratislava attack known as the “Terrorgram Collective.”

JAMES BANDLER, ProPublica:

These people on the messaging and social media app Telegram were trying to stir other people to commit acts of incredible violence and to spark a race war, which they hoped would lead to a white ethno-state rising from the ashes.

CHARLOTTESVILLE WHITE SUPREMACISTS:

[Chanting] You will not replace us. You will not replace us. You will not replace us. You will not replace us. You will not replace us. You will not replace us.

A.C. THOMPSON:

I’ve been documenting hate groups in America for FRONTLINE and ProPublica for almost a decade. Back in August 2017, I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists made their biggest public show of force in years.

CHARLOTTESVILLE WHITE SUPREMACISTS:

[Chanting] White lives matter! White lives matter! White lives matter!

A.C. THOMPSON:

It was incredibly chaotic and disturbing.

The rally descended into racist, antisemitic violence.

A young counterprotester was murdered. Far-right extremists were arrested, criminally prosecuted and sued in civil courts.

THOMAS CULLEN, U.S. attorney:

We are here today to announce the arrest of four members of the militant white supremacist group—

A.C. THOMPSON:

For the movement, Charlottesville was pivotal.

One of the things that happened is the movement kind of splintered. And so there was a faction of the movement that said, “We’re going underground. We’re not going to meet in person anymore. We’re going to engage in terrorism and we’re going to communicate with each other through these online platforms. We can win a secret, clandestine battle, and we can try to bring down the government.”

In online chats I was monitoring at the time, extremists were increasingly promoting a violent ideology called militant accelerationism.

MILO COMERFORD, Institute for Strategic Dialogue:

Militant accelerationism is a terroristic ideology that is rooted in notions of white supremacy that looks to collapse the societal order and encourage race riots across Western countries in particular.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Milo Comerford is an extremism expert.

MILO COMERFORD:

This is really about encouraging violence, polarization and racial animus that can lead to a war and a conflict that can be used as the basis for forming a white ethno-state.

A.C. THOMPSON:

In 2019, this growing accelerationist movement would be galvanized by a horrific terrorist attack—on the other side of the world.

What happened in Christchurch, New Zealand, would provide a grim template: leaderless, decentralized terrorism, performed for an online audience.

Friday prayers, the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch—a hub for practicing Muslims on New Zealand’s South Island.

TEMEL ATAÇOCUĞU:

March 15, it was beautiful sunny day. I go Al Noor Mosque for my worshiping, and that is my regular mosque to go to every Friday. Imam started the speech when I hear the big bang sounds. And then I see someone with the helmet and vest. He’s prepared other weapon. And I see myself front of that weapon, and then I see the smokes come out and then I feel the bullets in my mouth.

He start walking towards us and serial shooting, “pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.” Sounds like that.

I see like he’s enjoying. It’s like a video game. He’s just focused what he’s doing.

While I’m seeing the bullets entering my legs, I said, “Oh, I think this is how you’re feeling when you get shot.” Bang, bang, you know, just—[sighs]. It seems like never stop.

IMAM GAMAL FOUDA:

All suddenly he left. The mosque is full of smoke. It went very quiet. I heard somebody by the door saying, “Imam, I know you are there. Come out. The police is here.” He pulled my hands. I wish that he had covered my eyes.

Because I saw here in that corner, three meters long this side, and high, people on top of each other and bleeding. And on that corner by that door, I saw people over there. That is the real massacre I have seen in my life now.

MALE NEWSREADER:

We’re interrupting normal programming with some breaking news after reports of a shooting in central Christchurch.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Forty-four people were killed in the attack at the Al Noor Mosque; dozens were injured. At a second mosque, seven more were shot dead.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Police arrested 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The gunman eventually pleaded guilty to the murder of 51 people and the attempted murder of another 40. He was given multiple life sentences.

In the aftermath of the attacks, a government inquiry, known as the Royal Commission, concluded that he was a “lone actor.” But recently published research from the University of Auckland found that Brenton Tarrant had been part of a global community of online extremists for many years.

CHRIS WILSON, University of Auckland:

We’ve got five years of him speaking candidly online, so being able to understand what drove him, being able to see him speaking completely unguardedly in his environment, where he kind of felt safe.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Researchers Chris Wilson and Michal Dziwulski uncovered more than 400 posts they linked to Tarrant, including threats against Muslims—all scraped from the online platform 4chan.

MICHAL DZIWULSKI, University of Auckland:

So this is 4chan, a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images. There’s a whole bunch of different boards that have got different types of themes. The most famous far-right one is the Politically Incorrect board, which we found Tarrant on.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Politically Incorrect was known as the “/pol/” board for short—a home for people with extremist opinions. As with all 4chan boards, every post is anonymous.

MICHAL DZIWULSKI:

This is just showing how thorough we’ve been with our multifactor authentication, right?

A.C. THOMPSON:

They linked the posts to Tarrant by scouring his known online history, cross-referencing thousands of posts—a digital trail of old usernames, spelling quirks and odd word usages.

MICHAL DZIWULSKI:

This email address he used in 2013 is the same address that he used right before his attack.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The researchers compared these posts to an account of Tarrant’s travels compiled by the Royal Commission, which uncovered that he had traveled to more than 50 countries in the five years before the attack—apparently alone. They matched Tarrant’s itinerary to posts on the /pol/ board.

MICHAL DZIWULSKI:

The flags on Politically Incorrect were a feature that was added to I guess promote nationalism. When he’s in these different countries, we can see that the IP address comes up with those flags.

A.C. THOMPSON:

And so the flags and the geography line up with the dates that the Royal Commission said he was in these places.

MICHAL DZIWULSKI:

That’s right. So all of the posts that we’re showing, they correspond to the countries that he was visiting at the time.

A.C. THOMPSON:

As he traveled, Tarrant stayed in touch with the /pol/ community on 4chan, which was increasingly becoming an echo chamber of hate.

PETE SIMI:

The history of 4chan is an interesting one in that it developed initially, very popular within anime culture.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Pete Simi is a sociologist who studies violent extremists and how they distribute propaganda online.

PETE SIMI:

It’s very rudimentary in many respects. They’re not glossy. They don’t look very digitally sophisticated. They look kind of old-school in a way, almost like the old bulletin boards from the early ’80s.

A.C. THOMPSON:

4chan was started in 2003 by 15-year-old entrepreneur Chris Poole as a space to communicate with his friends. Unexpectedly, it became a phenomenon.

CHRIS POOLE:

There are very few places, now, where you can go and not have identity, to be completely anonymous

and say whatever you’d like.

A.C. THOMPSON:

4chan became known as a meme factory. But with anonymity and little moderation, the content grew increasingly edgy. Despite some efforts to clean up the site, by the time Chris Poole sold 4chan in 2015, it had become a popular destination for racists and extremists.

PETE SIMI:

One of the things that started to happen on 4chan is a kind of accumulation of neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynistic, extreme hateful tenets and trends.

CHRIS WILSON:

These people are going in because it’s humor, there are memes. They’re getting all these ideas— antisemitism, Islamophobia, ideas of white genocide and so on. All in just little snippets that are really, really easy to take in. And maybe without even noticing that they are developing these ideas that are racist and potentially violent.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Tarrant’s path over the years appears to have followed that process of radicalization. The researchers found posts from 2015, after Dylann Roof killed nine Black members of a church in Charleston.

MICHAL DZIWULSKI:

These are posts from Tarrant dated June 2015, and they’re in response to somebody who posted Dylann Roof’s manifesto. “They are in the wrong country perpetuating the destruction of the white race.”

A.C. THOMPSON:

For Tarrant, it was a turning point.

The big moments on the 4chan /pol/ board are the moments where there’s a massive attack. 4chan is a place where when people go out and commit acts of white supremacist terrorism, they are celebrated and lauded and hailed as heroes. So you should not be surprised if that kind of adulation doesn’t spawn more people seeking that fame.

The current owner of 4chan, Hiroyuki Nishimura, did not respond to interview requests. The site’s administrators have said that any threat of violence or terrorist acts violates their rules and that they’ve banned users who’ve done so.

In August 2017, Brenton Tarrant moved to Dunedin, a city on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island.

It was here that he plotted his accelerationist attack, leaving clues of his intent on 4chan.

CHRIS WILSON:

He let everybody know that he was going to commit an attack at least twice. In two threads—in March and August 2018—he speaks angrily about the spread of people of color and the supposed spread of mosques in New Zealand.

MICHAL DZIWULSKI:

Somebody posts matches to indicate, “Hey, this would be a good idea to burn these mosques down.” And Tarrant comes in and says, “Soon.”

A.C. THOMPSON:

The truth of the matter is he was carrying out the aspirations of the online community. So he wasn’t a lone actor. He was a guy who was reflecting the values of his community.

As Tarrant prepared, he wrote a 74-page manifesto full of falsehoods and racist ideology. He called it “The Great Replacement,” after a conspiracy theory about a supposed plot to wipe out the white race.

And then came March 15.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Breaking news after reports of a shooting—

MALE NEWSREADER:

An anti-Muslim terror attack in New Zealand.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Multiple people ruthlessly gunned down.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Under his name online is a racist manifesto claiming—

A.C. THOMPSON:

Tarrant posted links to his manifesto on a site similar to 4chan, called 8chan. In a disturbing innovation, he also livestreamed the attacks on Facebook—filmed like a first-person shooter game.

CHRIS WILSON:

He used every available means of dissemination of his ideas that he could. Mainstream social media accounts. He used this new technology, the GoPro camera, to make a livestream, which would mean that the propaganda was almost impossible to stop and would continue for years to come.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The Christchurch attack convulsed New Zealand. In the aftermath, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued an edict.

JACINDA ARDERN:

He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing—not even his name.

A.C. THOMPSON:

His manifesto was banned; the attack video made illegal to possess. They were trying to stop Tarrant’s toxic propaganda and erase his name.

But online, Tarrant was becoming an icon. His racist propaganda was spreading. The manifesto was posted, quoted and shared worldwide. Facebook had quickly taken down the livestream, but new links were put up on 4chan and 8chan.

MATTHEW KRINER:

It was one of the most widely shared pieces of content of that nature, ever, in the history of the internet.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Matt Kriner is an expert on violent extremism and has studied how Christchurch became a model for future attacks.

MATTHEW KRINER:

He constructed a very clear formula for others to follow in his footsteps, because that’s ultimately what he wanted. He wanted others to see what he was doing as a call to action.

A.C. THOMPSON:

By the time of the Christchurch attacks, many far-right extremists had migrated from 4chan to 8chan.

JAMES BANDLER, ProPublica:

We wanted to see who created this platform with almost no content moderation, this platform that it becomes sort of a free-for-all for some of the ugliest speech. And we reached out to Fredrick Brennan and went and saw him.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Fredrick Brennan had started 8chan in 2013. He was born with a congenital condition affecting his bone structure.

FREDRICK BRENNAN, Founder, 8chan:

It’s a very rare disease, so there’s not much funding in research.

JAMES BANDLER:

What’s the disease called?

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

Osteogenesis imperfecta.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Early on, Brennan developed a passion for computers and coding, and discovered chat sites—including 4chan.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

I became really interested in how 4chan was set up technically. It was fun for me because I, especially as a kid, was very different from everyone else.

A.C. THOMPSON:

As a teenager on 4chan, Brennan used the platform’s signature anonymity to make outrageous and offensive statements.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

One of the ways that I rebelled was that I became this very fringe advocate for the Nazi movement of eugenics.

JAMES BANDLER:

To kill people like yourself.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

Yes, to kill people like myself. Yes. It made me feel really smart to be 15, 16 and to be saying things that these adults don’t know how to even conceive of somebody who was disabled telling them, people like me shouldn’t exist.

JAMES BANDLER:

Have you changed your views about eugenics and about—

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

[Laughs] Yes, of course. Yeah. No, I’m definitely not a believer in eugenics anymore. No, that was a teenage folly.

A.C. THOMPSON:

In 2013, inspired by 4chan, Brennan created his own site.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

I thought that it would be kind of like the next stage of 4chan’s evolution.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Brennan wanted 8chan to have even less content moderation than 4chan.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

See, on 4chan, the website’s administrators were still in charge of all the boards. So even the /pol/, politics board, on 4chan was not just a Nazi haven. But on 8chan, since it was all user-created, we didn’t have a /pol/ board until a user who wanted one created it. Well, that guy, he named his user account “Heil.” So what do you think his—

JAMES BANDLER:

Heil, as in “Heil Hitler”?

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

Yes. And he very clearly made it a Nazi stronghold.

JAMES BANDLER:

You’re basically asking people who are already in the site—

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

Yes, asking users, yes.

JAMES BANDLER:

—to police it?

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

Yes. Yes.

JAMES BANDLER:

How does that work?

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

Not very well. [Laughs]

A.C. THOMPSON:

Within two years, amid a wave of new users and mounting costs, he sold 8chan. But he continued working with the new owners until a falling out led him to cut ties altogether.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

I don’t know what the future holds.

Then in 2019, I was just starting to get over it. And I was thinking at that time, OK, these guys are nothing. You know what I mean? 8chan is not that big of a site; 4chan is still the main one. It’s just going to slowly die and sink into irrelevance. That’s what I thought, very foolishly. And then these shooters start using it.

MALE NEWSREADER:

There’s been a shooting at a synagogue in Poway.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—white male shooter entered with an AR-style rifle and opened fire.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Six shots, a pause, another burst. The sheriff believes the weapon jammed at that point.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Just six weeks after Brenton Tarrant had posted his manifesto and livestream on 8chan: the first copycat attack, near San Diego, California.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

One woman was killed, three other people wounded.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The gunman killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye, a 60-year-old member of the synagogue, and injured three others, including an 8-year-old.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The suspected gunman is identified as 19-year-old John Earnest of San Diego. He’s a college student with no criminal record. Worshippers say he—

JOHN EARNEST:

There was an enormous amount of police activity. We parked our car, and I can remember talking to a police officer. They had mentioned another house. And I felt this relief. “Oh, thank goodness it’s not us.” But that wasn’t the case. It was us. It was my son.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Authorities began investigating the shooter’s online life.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Police are reviewing an open letter he posted online slamming President Trump, the Jewish faith and conservatives.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The 19-year-old gunman bragged in his manifesto about starting a mosque fire in Escondido last month.

SUMMER STEPHAN, San Diego County DA:

This is the mosque, and he spray painted the name of this New Zealand shooter. And “/pol/” is from the 8chan. It’s “Politically Incorrect.”

A.C. THOMPSON:

San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan prosecuted Earnest for the attack.

SUMMER STEPHAN:

What happened is he first shot right from outside to the inside of the synagogue. He struck Lori Gilbert-Kaye. He went into a room where there were a lot of kids and began shooting. So he was prepared to do maximum damage.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The suspect, accused of shooting four people, killing one of them.

MALE NEWSREADER:

—including an arson fire in a mosque in Escondido.

MALE NEWSREADER:

—and numerous hate crime allegations.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Earnest eventually pled guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

This is the first time his father has spoken publicly about his son.

JOHN EARNEST:

He loved his family. He had friends. He was a fantastic pianist. He was never a part of any kind of a hate group.

A.C. THOMPSON:

I have to ask it. Your family are not antisemites. You’re not racist haters. Is that right?

JOHN EARNEST:

No. That—We are not, at all. He was never exposed to that from us.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Investigators said the shooter was radicalized over the course of about a year on 8chan and other sites.

SUMMER STEPHAN:

The entire process of him becoming radicalized appeared to have happened online only, taking someone who was a 4.4 student all the way to a cold-hearted killer.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Earnest’s father says his son started out on mainstream platforms like YouTube. Early on, he was a fan of conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro—until suddenly, he turned against him.

JOHN EARNEST:

John T. said that, “Well, that’s a Jew. This guy is hated. He’s part of the whole conspiracy, and that I don’t listen to him anymore.” And for me, that was such an abrupt change. It is something that kind of caught me off guard.

A.C. THOMPSON:

And then he moves to 4chan and 8chan.

JOHN EARNEST:

Yes. John T., he did talk to me a little bit about 4chan. I had heard about it, and then I had also heard about 8chan. I knew that that was something even darker, but I did not quite understand what it was all about.

A.C. THOMPSON:

In his manifesto—which was posted on 8chan—he wrote that Tarrant was a catalyst for him.

Did he talk to you about Tarrant?

JOHN EARNEST:

He had mentioned Tarrant and the heinous crime that Tarrant had committed against the mosque. He wanted to be very clear that he supported what Tarrant had done in the Christchurch shooting. He gave no hint that this is something that he would like to do as well.

A.C. THOMPSON:

So he was playing you, in your mind. He was savvy.

JOHN EARNEST:

At that point? I don’t know. I don’t know how this grows. It could be that he was playing me. In fact, I explicitly asked him at one point about violence, and he said that he would never resort to violence.

A.C. THOMPSON:

What prompted you to ask him about the possibility that he would engage in violence?

JOHN EARNEST:

Because so much violence was associated with the people that he seemed to be honoring.

SUMMER STEPHAN:

This is when he was arrested. It seemed like he was really aspiring to that mass killer. In less than a month had downloaded and searched the name of the New Zealand shooter 104 times.

A.C. THOMPSON:

A hundred and four times.

SUMMER STEPHAN:

Yes. He was hoping he would do the same as the New Zealand shooter and inspire a horrible generation of people that will also kill.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Three months later, another attack linked to 8chan, this time in El Paso.

MALE NEWSREADER:

At least 20 people dead, more than two dozen injured, the wounded ranging in age from 2 years old to 82 years old.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Moments before the mass murder in El Paso, the suspect detailed his plans and ideology in a post on the internet forum 8chan.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Although 8chan quickly removed the shooter’s manifesto—as it had done after San Diego—it was too late. It had been copied and would be widely reposted.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

Christchurch had happened, and that was the first large one. Then in San Diego. Then finally in El Paso.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Tonight, the man who created 8chan wants it shut down.

A.C. THOMPSON:

8chan’s founder, Fredrick Brennan, decided enough was enough.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

The current administrators of 8chan don’t care that this is happening.

A.C. THOMPSON:

He urged that the site he founded be shut down. 8chan was dropped by the companies that kept it up and running on the internet and soon went dark.

But it would be a short-lived victory.

FREDRICK BRENNAN:

You know, these white supremacist groups adapt, right? It’s like, you take away their toy and they’re not going to just sit around and do nothing. You know what I mean? They’re going to try to find a new platform.

A.C. THOMPSON:

That new platform would turn out to be Telegram—a messaging and social media app started in 2013 by Russian tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov and his brother Nicolai.

JAMES BANDLER:

One of their chief marketing pitches was that this would be a place free of censorship, that it would be a place where free speech was paramount and it was also private and secure.

All right, I’m starting a new document.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Open it up and share it.

JAMES BANDLER:

I’m calling it “Letter to Pavel.”

A.C. THOMPSON:

Telegram is based in Dubai. It has close to a billion users, but only about 60 employees, many of them engineers. From the start, Telegram took an extreme approach to free speech and offered more powerful features than other platforms, giving it mass appeal.

So you can send encrypted messages to your friends. You can create big chat groups where you have thousands of people chatting. Or you can turn it into a one-way broadcast system where you are pumping out your propaganda and your message day after day to a group of people who are subscribing to your broadcast channel.

JAMES BANDLER:

Telegram, much like the chans, was a platform where almost anything went. There was virtually no moderation.

This platform became immensely useful for social justice activists in repressive countries, and it also became a place that was also useful for people committing crimes and terrorists.

A.C. THOMPSON:

In 2015, the app became popular with ISIS.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

There’s an app called Telegram that more and more members of ISIS are using.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Telegram became the preferred communication method for ISIS. The group used it to claim responsibility for the Paris attacks.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Under pressure from European governments, Telegram began to shut down ISIS channels. But accelerationists soon followed the ISIS example.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Extremists started plotting in a chat room called Telegram.

A.C. THOMPSON:

By 2019, white supremacists were flocking to Telegram—from 8chan, and from major platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which were increasingly policing content and banning users.

There was an organized effort by white supremacists and accelerationists to move onto Telegram, and they saw it as their new home, and a place where maybe they wouldn’t be harassed and kicked off the platform for a while.

These are all people who have met to encourage one another to engage in acts of lethal terrorism and industrial sabotage. This is a very militant, aggressive, dangerous community.

Nobody from Telegram would agree to an interview. In a written statement, the company said it “has always screened postings for problematic content” and “calls for violence from any group are not tolerated.”

But on Oct. 12, 2022, a young man who had spent years in accelerationist chats on Telegram made the leap from online extremist to real-world terrorist—here, in Bratislava.

That night, Radka Trokšiarová had seen her two friends get gunned down outside the Tepláreň bar. She’d also been shot—twice, in the leg—but dragged herself to safety.

RADKA TROKŠIAROVÁ:

[Speaking Slovak] I remember shutting the door from the inside and crawling under a bench, but I couldn’t make it any further. I was in terrible pain because the bullet went through my thigh bone.

I was deeply confused. Why would anyone do it?

A.C. THOMPSON:

In the hours after the attack, as 19-year-old Juraj Krajčík went on the run, he kept posting on social media. His handle was an acronym: NTMA0315—”Never Take Me Alive March 15,” an apparent reference to the Christchurch attack.

MALE NEWSREADER:

[Speaking Slovak] This brutal attack was condemned by the president, prime minister and other politicians.

MAREK MADRO:

[Speaking Slovak] Personally, I live on the street next to Zámocká Street, and I heard the gunshots.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Marek Madro is a psychologist who runs a youth crisis hotline in Bratislava.

MAREK MADRO:

[Speaking Slovak] A few hours later I was asked by the police to try to contact the attacker and speak with him.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

[Speaking Slovak] Police are still searching for the attacker.

A.C. THOMPSON:

As the manhunt continued, the shooter was threatening to kill himself.

MAREK MADRO:

[Speaking Slovak] I had his phone number from classmates and also from the police, and after 12 text messages he finally picked up the phone. My job was to save a life in danger. He told me that he had to die, and that he hoped what he had done would shake up society. That it made sense what he had done, and that, yes, he was very scared. But without killing himself, it wouldn’t make sense.

You don’t really connect to the content, you connect to the way they’re talking. Then the shot rang out, and there was silence.

A.C. THOMPSON:

I came here to try to understand more about what had motivated this 19-year-old to launch a terror attack and then kill himself. At the time, the authorities examined the shooter’s manifesto, but little was known about his online connections to far-right extremists or who he’d been communicating with about his plans.

How’s your morning going?

I met the prosecutor who oversaw the investigation of the attack.

DANIEL LIPŠIC:

We knew about the manifesto when we were on the crime scene already because he published it I think a few hours before the attack. Now, that manifesto, if you read it, 90% of that is antisemitic. Frankly speaking, only a small part of it is against LGBT. The bulk of it is antisemitic.

A.C. THOMPSON:

What do you think led him to commit this act of terrorism and to subscribe to this extremist ideology?

DANIEL LIPŠIC:

Well, based on, of course, he made it very clear in the manifesto. He was interested very much in the Christchurch attack in New Zealand and the attack committed by John Earnest in California. Those were the role models for him. It was kind of like—to a certain extent, you might call it a copycat crime.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Do you know if the attacker was a member of any real-world groups?

DANIEL LIPŠIC:

We were not able to establish that he was involved in any groups. From the investigation, it seems that he was a lone wolf.

A.C. THOMPSON:

But as I dug deeper, a different story began emerging. In his manifesto, Krajčík had thanked the “Terrorgram Collective” for what he called its “incredible writing,” “political texts” and “practical guides.”

I’d already heard of this group in 2019; it had started as an informal network on Telegram.

At first it’s just a handful of chat rooms and channels on Telegram. Then it is bigger and bigger and bigger, and finally it takes on a formal shape. And people within that group say, “Now we’re starting something called the Terrorgram Collective, and this is going to be our organized arm that is going to generate in-depth propaganda, in-depth material for this community.”

They’re saying, “Hey, these guys like Brenton Tarrant, these people are heroes. We’ll call them ‘saints,’ and you should act like them. You should become a disciple of Brenton Tarrant and go out and kill people.”

He posted that on Twitter?

KARIN SÓLYMOS:

I think, but I have to check.

A.C. THOMPSON:

I had been able to obtain a trove of archived posts from Telegram and other platforms. I teamed up with investigative journalists Lukáš Diko and Karin Sólymos, who had reported on Terrorgram in the aftermath of the Bratislava shooting.

In his manifesto, Krajčík had also singled out a key individual from the Terrorgram Collective, known as “Slovakbro.” Using the trove, we began to piece together a picture of Slovakbro.

Lukáš came up with a bunch of usernames, and I took those usernames and put them everywhere I could find. And my understanding, from looking at his social media history, is that Slovakbro starts off being kind of a “normie,” and eventually he gets into accelerationism and terrorism, and you see the whole arc of his change online.

The posts showed that Slovakbro was a founding member of the Terrorgram community and one of its most prolific content creators.

Slovakbro is a big guy in this world. He has thousands of people in his channels. He’s spreading all kinds of stuff. Some of it is instructions. “This is how you do a crime and you don’t get caught.” “Don’t talk about what you’re going to do on here.” Some of it is inspirational. It’s like, “Here’s a graphic that’s going to inspire you to go kill people.” Some of it is operational. It’s like, “Here’s a manual for making high-powered explosive, or to 3-D print a gun.”

Slovakbro’s real identity was Pavol Beňadik, a 22-year-old Slovakian student. He’d been arrested and jailed months before the Bratislava shootings and charged with more than 200 terrorism offenses, stemming from his Telegram posts.

We wanted to find out what the Slovak authorities knew about any ties between him and Juraj Krajčík.

LUKÁŠ DIKO, Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak:

Were you able to establish if they were in any kind of communication?

DANIEL LIPŠIC:

Well, they were in communication. Because we, of course, interrogated the person known as Slovakbro in this case, and yes, they did communicate, but only very briefly.

A.C. THOMPSON:

And this was a direct message between the two?

DANIEL LIPŠIC:

Yes. Of course, they did not know about their identities, but that was it. There was nothing significant in their communication.

LUKÁŠ DIKO:

You mean that Slovakbro didn’t incite him to go and kill people?

DANIEL LIPŠIC:

No. No, not at all.

A.C. THOMPSON:

But Slovak authorities didn’t have the whole picture.

The prosecutors say, “Oh, they didn’t really know each other. They didn’t communicate. They only had one brief interaction.”

Before we came here, I didn’t know what Krajčík, the Bratislava attacker, had done online. Didn’t know who he was online. I didn’t know what he had posted. And when we were here, we discovered what I believe is his handle, his account in these Telegram chats. And it helped tell a different story than what law enforcement was telling.

LUKÁŠ DIKO:

Can you go just one more up?

A.C. THOMPSON:

To find Krajčík’s handle, Lukáš Diko and I pored over thousands of archived Terrorgram chats from the trove.

LUKÁŠ DIKO:

Slovak’s War Room.

A.C. THOMPSON:

This is Slovak’s War Room.

LUKÁŠ DIKO:

That’s the one Slovakbro deleted?

A.C. THOMPSON:

Yeah.

I started going through these chats looking to try to figure out who Juraj Krajčík was. Is he in these chats? Does he connect with Slovakbro? And then I found someone speaking Slovak, and it wasn’t Slovakbro. It was someone else. Then I thought, “Oh, this person could be Juraj Krajčík.”

This is Slovakbro, and now he’s speaking in your language.

LUKÁŠ DIKO:

“It’s Bobby, my friend. Let’s fight.”

A.C. THOMPSON:

The user went by the name “Bobby Bowie.”

These are chats with another Terrorgram group.

Zeroing in on Bobby Bowie revealed more than 500 posts in Slovakbro’s chats in late 2019—the early days of Terrorgram.

Then there’s other language in here that’s like the language in his manifesto. It’s almost exactly.

It soon became clear that Bobby Bowie was Juraj Krajčík.

This is his manifesto, and he’s talking about these memes that he saw on 8chan about Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch attacker. In the post on Telegram, he’s talking about the same exact thing, comparing Russia and America and saying they’re both controlled by Jews. All the stuff that—

LUKÁŠ DIKO:

All the stuff Krajčík mentions in the manifesto.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Yeah.

We could now track Krajčík’s radicalization on Terrorgram and see what his life was like before the attack.

This is the apartment complex?

LUKÁŠ DIKO:

Yes.

A.C. THOMPSON:

He had been living a comfortable life with his family in a middle-class neighborhood a few miles from the center of Bratislava’s Old Town. The chat logs show he’d spent many hours a day on Terrorgram.

You know, Juraj Krajčík got on that platform, he was already a racist. But he was molded and shaped by the veterans on that platform, who were really looking for someone for the things that they wanted to do.

Krajčík was only 16, getting primed for the militant accelerationist cause, discussing the merits of other so-called saints with Slovakbro, including synagogue attacker John T. Earnest.

There’s conversations between Juraj Krajčík and Pavol Beňadik, where Pavol Beňadik says, “John Earnest down in San Diego, he messed up. He didn’t kill enough people. And he was running from these Jewish people in the synagogue.” He’s like, “That’s a bad look. That’s bad optics. You need to be better than that. Train, prepare, be a better killer.” These are conversations that he was having with Juraj Krajčík. It was all about killing.

Krajčík was in. He soon began posting about potential targets for terror attacks, spending hours in Slovakbro’s chat—in one instance posting his own photographs of LGBTQ protesters at a climate rally.

Amid the hundreds of posts we looked at, one popped out.

This is it. This is the thing that f—— blew my—This is what blew my mind. I’m scrolling through here and then I see that the attacker has posted about the place where the attack happened, years before. This is his username talking about the place that Krajčík was going to go to shoot—the cafe. The gay bar. And then there’s all this discussion between Krajčík and Slovakbro about attacking the place.

And Slovakbro says, “I don’t want to even use nail bombs with that joint. What I want to do is so unprintable that hell is going to be preferable.” And the guy we think is the attacker says, “Just saying it will instantly make a squad of federal agents appear behind you and arrest you.”

So this is from September of 2019. He’d been thinking about it for years.

I brought the trove of Terrorgram posts to London—

PIERRE VAUX, Open source investigator:

This is an amazing library of data.

A.C. THOMPSON:

—where Pierre Vaux works as an open source investigator.

PIERRE VAUX:

Once you start building up a huge amount of data, you need to start putting it into a different graphical setting, because otherwise it becomes overwhelming to read.

A.C. THOMPSON:

He created a database from our chat archives as well as other sources that showed how the Terrorgram network expanded in the years after 2019—and how Slovakbro was central to it.

PIERRE VAUX:

This is Slovakbro, who ran a Telegram channel called Slovak’s Siege Shack. And the chat room attached to that really had a sort of who’s who of the Nazi scene at that time as members of it.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Oh, wow.

PIERRE VAUX:

So you can see his emergence in 2019. These are people mentioning him, and these are messages from him.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Yeah. Interesting.

PIERRE VAUX:

Each of the lines here is a forward or a mention. That’s one channel sending people to another channel.

So this is a visualization that really shows us where these people are talking, often quite candidly because of the perception of privacy that Telegram brings. Especially as some of these are private groups.

A.C. THOMPSON:

He was able to find more evidence of Krajčík’s activity in the Terrorgram community.

PIERRE VAUX:

So Bobby Bowie had come up lots of times in this dataset because he was coming up as a member of these chats, but we didn’t know who he was. You’re looking for what nodes turn up in networks over and over again.

So Krajčík’s account is Bob Bowie, and we can expand that one. He was a very active user of these channels.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Wow.

PIERRE VAUX:

I’ve got another 40 channels he was in.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Holy s—. These are all chats?

PIERRE VAUX:

Yep.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Oh, wow. So I knew he was in 14 Words. He’s in some Q stuff. He’s in some trucker stuff.

PIERRE VAUX:

Yeah, there’s—

A.C. THOMPSON:

But that’s a lot more than I knew.

PIERRE VAUX:

Especially it looks like Slovakbro was bringing him into his much smaller chats.

A.C. THOMPSON:

What’s really clear now is that Slovakbro had been trying for years to influence people to engage in terrorism, and he was successful. Juraj Krajčík is his product. Juraj Krajčík is somebody that he influenced.

We took our reporting on Slovakbro and Juraj Krajčík to Slovak authorities.

It’s really become clear to me that Juraj Krajčík and Slovakbro had ongoing conversations for years.

PETER KYSEL [on video chat]:

But you know, for us, this communication was not the normal communication.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Peter Kysel is the prosecutor who oversaw the investigation into Slovakbro. But he said he’d never seen the 2019 messages between the two men.

PETER KYSEL [on video chat]:

The fact is that we were not aware of these communications. The prosecution office was not aware about this communication.

A.C. THOMPSON:

You were surprised when you learned that they were having these extensive conversations.

PETER KYSEL [on video chat]:

Yeah, because there was a communication in 2019, and the attack was in 2022. So there was a really gap.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Yeah, and I believe that that connection persisted past 2019, but it seems to me like Slovakbro lied to you about his level of connection.

PETER KYSEL [on video chat]:

Yeah, it’s possible.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Throughout 2020, Terrorgram was evolving from a loose network of accounts into a prolific propaganda machine made up of dozens of accelerationist channels—with Slovakbro at its center.

HATELAB PODCAST HOST:

Hey, everybody, and welcome to HateLab. All right. Slovakbro is joining us for the very first time on HateLab.

A.C. THOMPSON:

That year, Pavol Beňadik—as Slovakbro—was interviewed on a Terrorgram-related podcast.

PAVOL BEŇADIK:

Yeah, I’m the guy who runs Slovak’s Siege Shack . . . I’ve been in this thing for a couple of years and then I decided to become a f—— content producer, because that’s what this “movement,” quote, unquote, really needs, you know?

A.C. THOMPSON:

Law enforcement in the U.S. and abroad was taking notice.

REBECCA WEINER, NYPD:

What’s interesting about this collective is how transnational it is and how interconnected some of the players are in it.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Rebecca Weiner is deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the NYPD. Her unit was monitoring Terrorgram as it stepped up production of extremist content.

REBECCA WEINER:

The influence of Slovakbro in this world was quite strong. Not just around Terrorgram Collective and propaganda output, but also encouraging people to take next steps into action.

PAVOL BEŇADIK:

You are the revolutionary, so act like it.

Hail victory, man. Get ready. Read useful literature, get useful skills.

A.C. THOMPSON:

By 2021, Slovakbro and others had begun calling themselves the Terrorgram Collective and released an official publication under the new name.

MILO COMERFORD:

This was the first time that we started to see the bringing together of some of the ideological output of saints culture and of the broader aesthetic of the Terrorgram Collective, with specific instructional material that was calling for attacks against specific groups and really generating a clearer violent extremist ideology.

A.C. THOMPSON:

It was posted as a PDF, designed to be shared widely. More official Terrorgram publications would follow.

REBECCA WEINER:

So you have this sanctification of martyrs who’ve come before, combined with the ideology that you see at play in many of these manifestos: neo-Nazi propaganda, targeting guidance and tactical guidance, how to make certain kinds of explosives, as well as who you might want to target.

A.C. THOMPSON:

In October 2021, a new series of Terrorgram publications began to emerge called “The List”: alleged assassination targets, with addresses, maps of their homes and rationales for killing.

And it’s basically just this ongoing hit list of dozens and dozens of people—American corporate leaders, government officials, academics and others.

Telegram tried to shut down user accounts that were posting The List. In its statement to us, the company said it had been removing groups and channels using the Terrorgram name since it first surfaced and that it was harder for criminals to open accounts on Telegram than other platforms.

But in many cases, we saw in the archived posts that users had just opened new accounts and new channels and continued posting about assassinations.

MILO COMERFORD:

The nature of Telegram as an app is that many of the channels are highly ephemeral in nature. They come and go and are able to be easily replaced. It’s very easy to sidestep enforcement attempts that really try to use a whack-a-mole approach to takedown.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The targeting of Americans triggered an international criminal investigation involving law enforcement in the U.S. and Europe. In May 2022, Slovakbro was arrested and was ultimately sentenced to six years in prison for more than a hundred terrorism offenses.

But the Terrorgram Collective lived on.

MATTHEW KRINER:

Terrorgram is not reliant on any one individual or entity to make it what it is. What we often see is these leaders in the Terrorgram space come and go. They fall off, they build back brands, they gain prominence, they lose prominence. It’s very much a fluid environment where no one person owns a commanding stake of it.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Researcher Matt Kriner has studied how other Terrorgram leaders emerged after the arrest of Slovakbro, including one known as “MissGorehound.”

MATTHEW KRINER:

MissGorehound is one of the aliases that we know to be a central figure within the Terrorgram ecosystem. She has been a strong proponent of the development of the Terrorgram publications, ran a number of channels that had direct influence and ownership over the saints culture.

MissGorehound picked that up and said, “This is a model. We can actually turn this into a very consolidated pipeline for radicalization and mobilization of individuals to carry out more terrorist attacks.”

PIERRE VAUX:

So there’s a lot of overlap between these people. MissGorehound, otherwise known as RWBC, standing for Right-Wing Book Club, who runs another range of Telegram channels in the Terrorgram network. We can select that, and we can see that she’s got her Cat Enjoyers Anonymous channel. She’s got the Right-Wing Book Club one. She’s got Ryder 88, Ryder Returns, MissGore 88.

Now, when we highlight these groups, again, we get a lot of shared channels with MissGorehound. This is a closed chat, but these individuals are really active in it.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The database showed that by mid-2022, Juraj Krajčík was a member of a group chat run by MissGorehound.

PIERRE VAUX:

If you look at someone like MissGorehound, they’re superconnected because they’re creating loads of channels and they’re infiltrating loads of channels. Whereas someone like Krajčík are the opposite of that, in a way. They’re just really desperate to get into this. They found a wonderful world of friendly, like-minded people with their funny memes that they can consume, and it gives them a sense of camaraderie and belonging.

A.C. THOMPSON:

What you see in the chats that I’ve read is that he’s getting ideas from the older people. He’s expressing his desire to target specific targets and he’s being pushed in this very violent direction. And also this direction of sort of self-immolation—that it’s heroic to go and kill and then kill yourself.

MissGorehound is alleged to be this woman: Dallas Erin Humber. She’s pleaded not guilty to terrorism charges and is in jail awaiting trial.

Her identity was originally exposed and posted online by a group of activists.

ANTI-TERROR ACTIVIST:

We felt that people needed to know who these Nazis were.

A.C. THOMPSON:

One of them agreed to speak to us if we granted them anonymity.

Tell me about Dallas and her life.

ANTI-TERROR ACTIVIST:

She is a 35-year-old woman from Elk Grove, California. She considers herself an artist.

A.C. THOMPSON:

And what was her role in the Terrorgram Collective? From what you can tell.

ANTI-TERROR ACTIVIST:

It looks like she started as the narrator of mass murderers’ manifestos.

A.C. THOMPSON:

It was a new kind of propaganda: manifesto audiobooks.

ANTI-TERROR ACTIVIST:

Any mass murder manifesto she got her hands on, she would turn into an audiobook and put it out.

DALLAS HUMBER [reading manifesto]:

Mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities—

A.C. THOMPSON:

The shooter audiobooks became a signature.

DALLAS HUMBER [reading manifesto]:

—long before low fertility rates ever could.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The audiobooks were posted to Terrorgram channels linked to her.

How important would you say she was in the Terrorgram Collective? In the Terrorgram scene?

ANTI-TERROR ACTIVIST:

I think initially she was just a mouthpiece. But over time, as certain members of Terrorgram started to get doxxed or arrested, it created this vacuum. And in that vacuum, Dallas Humber managed to carve out a niche for herself. And through that, she absolutely came up to lead that collective.

A.C. THOMPSON:

We could see in the trove of Terrorgram chats that MissGorehound was working with another prolific propagandist with the username BanThisChannel, or BTC.

PIERRE VAUX:

We can zoom in on an individual. So here we’ve got BTC, which is the alias behind several Telegram channels, which all have similar initials. So, BowlTurdsCoin, BanThisChannel and BigT—Chica. Now, BTC is a superspreader in terms of Telegram group membership.

JAMES BANDLER:

BTC was the white whale of the Terrorgram Collective. Everyone knew about his posts, but no one knew who he was. And this, for us, was a big puzzle.

So BTC first emerged on YouTube, and his shtick was creating content that was controversial enough to get him banned. He created dozens of channels and groups on Telegram.

PETE SIMI:

I wasn’t sure whether BTC was one person, whether it was maybe a small group of people that were putting these videos together.

JAMES BANDLER:

When did you first become aware of BTC?

PETE SIMI:

I first became aware of BTC through a specific video that BTC produced called “The Last Battle” on a Telegram channel that I was monitoring. And then started seeing other videos circulating on Telegram that were also allegedly made by this BTC.

PROPAGANDA VIDEO VOICE-OVER:

We’re building, we’re organizing.

PETE SIMI:

They serve the purpose of propaganda to do things like recruit new people and sustain members. And in this case, encouraging violence.

PROPAGANDA VIDEO VOICE-OVER:

It’s about to be a white boy summer.

A.C. THOMPSON:

BTC posted around 120 videos, many of them with graphic racist and antisemitic violence, clips of the Christchurch attack video and homophobic imagery.

Terrorgram’s most infamous video was a BTC/MissGorehound collaboration.

PETE SIMI:

We know that the narrator is Dallas Humber.

DALLAS HUMBER [in video voiceover]:

A hundred and five white men and women of action have taken—

PETE SIMI:

So “White Terror” is meant for somebody who’s been indoctrinated, and the push is, if you do commit an act of violence, this is what you can expect. You will be celebrated, too.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Breaking news right now. The Justice Dept. charging two people, saying that they were leading a white supremacist group that wanted to ignite a race war here in—

A.C. THOMPSON:

In September 2024, the mystery of BTC’s identity was solved.

MALE PROSECUTOR:

The indictment charges in 15 counts that—

A.C. THOMPSON:

Federal prosecutors announced they had arrested two “leaders” of the Terrorgram Collective. One was Dallas Humber. The other, a 37-year-old man named Matthew Allison.

JAMES BANDLER:

We were very familiar with Dallas Humber. The second person was a 37-year-old we’d never heard of. But as we talked with researchers over the next day, it became pretty clear to us that Matt Allison was none other than BTC.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Allison lived in Boise, Idaho.

JAMES BANDLER:

We wanted to find out who Matt Allison really was. We went to Boise and started talking with people who knew Matt Allison in the real world.

Hi, I’m James Bandler. Are you a friend of Allison’s?

And the story that we unraveled was frankly very disturbing, because this man was living a complete double life.

A.C. THOMPSON:

We learned that in public Matthew Allison was an aspiring DJ who worked menial jobs and partied with friends in the local electronic dance music community. But federal investigators say that in private, he was helping run the Terrorgram Collective.

JAMES BANDLER:

We quickly got a picture of a person who was very well liked, who hung out with a very multicultural group of friends, and a person who was also a gay man. So while he was living the life of a gay man in Boise, on Telegram he was making posts celebrating the murders of gay people in Bratislava.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Matthew Allison agreed to talk to James—against the advice of his lawyer. No cameras were allowed in the jail. After the interview, James called me.

Hey, so what happened?

JAMES BANDLER [on video chat]:

So he came out, he’s exactly like we were told. Tall, rangy, skinny guy. He confirmed—He said he didn’t confess to the crimes, he just confessed to being BTC to the FBI.

So he said he urged people to just be legal on the channel and to not actually incite actual violent acts. He chalks it up to being an artist. “This is my free expression. I’m an artist.” And he’s really proud of a lot of his work.

A.C. THOMPSON:

So he’s not contrite. He’s not taking it back.

JAMES BANDLER:

No, no, no. I don’t think he’s contrite at all about it. And I think he’s going to push a hardcore free speech case on it if he can.

He described himself as a video artist, a person who was creating art and content that was protected under the First Amendment. He denied being a terrorist. He denied wanting to incite people to commit murder.

He admitted that he was an ethno-nationalist. And he says, “I believe white people need to band together,” meaning to “tribe up”—”tribe up” was how he put it. And he called the indictment bulls—.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Prosecutors allege that Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison were both in direct contact with the Bratislava shooter, Juraj Krajčík, in the year before his attack. The indictment accuses Humber of pushing a message in her posts: To become a Terrorgram saint, you had to be white and kill those deemed inferior. The mission was clear: to indoctrinate younger people on Terrorgram.

She allegedly wrote about one user, “He’s like 18 years old and seems very impressionable. I’m trying to radicalize him.”

I found posts from July 2022 where she was promoting a new Terrorgram publication. Soon after its release, Juraj Krajčík was talking to her about it.

Look at this. He says, “Just finished reading

. It’s excellent.” And then this is the U.S. person who’s a Terrorgrammer, Dallas. And it says, “I haven’t finished reading it yet, but it’s a literary and artistic masterpiece.” And she says, “What were some of your favorite passages?”

I know that Juraj Krajčík and Dallas Humber were in contact. And I know that Dallas Humber was repeatedly encouraging Krajčík to engage in terrorism and cheerleading for terrorism. That’s her own words.

She says, “I love those, too. I hope the next saints out there read those passages and feel inspired.”

At the same time, Juraj Krajčík had started posting on a private Twitter channel.

That’s the Twitter.

LUKÁŠ DIKO:

Yeah. We have all the screenshots.

A.C. THOMPSON:

It was the diary of a fully radicalized accelerationist.

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

We find ourselves in a critical situation. We will need to radically alter the course of history, and only radical action can do that.

A.C. THOMPSON:

In mid-August 2022, Krajčík starts to do reconnaissance. He posts about targeting the prime minister of Slovakia.

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

Hashtag Eduard Heger. Hashtag NTMA0315. Test and preparation.

JAKOB GAJDOŠ:

There were several targets. The perpetrator made a list of targets based on the difficulty to commit a successful attack.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Jakob Gajdoš was a counterterrorism official assigned to the Krajčík case.

JAKOB GAJDOŠ:

Preparing on the attack, he took several pictures of the potential targets. The highest-ranked place of hitting the prime minister. And I think it’s this one, because you can identify the bush, identify the two windows that are on the picture, actually.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Oh, yeah. It looks like it.

August 15: Krajčík tweets three selfies in front of the home of the prime minister along with the caption:

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

Just taking a look at some places . . .

JAKOB GAJDOŠ:

In his rankings of the targets, an attack on a Jewish community should follow.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Later that day, Krajčík tweets sarcastically:

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

As a proud LGBTQIAP+ Jew, I would like you all to join me at the Chabad office today, before we proceed to the LGBTQIAP+ bar for a drink.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Attached are two more selfies: one in front of a Jewish community center, the other in front of his final target, the Tepláreň bar. In the coming weeks, his tweets reflect his commitment to violence.

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

I don’t expect to make it. In all likelihood I will die in the course of the operation.

A.C. THOMPSON:

September 6:

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

I want to damage the system to the best of my abilities.

A.C. THOMPSON:

September 16:

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

Accelerationism means helping the system collapse faster.

A.C. THOMPSON:

October 10:

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

People who I consider heroes and role models: Brenton Tarrant and John T. Earnest.

A.C. THOMPSON:

And finally, October 11:

MALE VOICE [reading Krajčík tweet]:

I have made my decision.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The next night, when Krajčík was on the run after his attack, U.S. prosecutors say he sent a direct message to Matthew Allison—BTC. He wrote: “Not sure how much time I have but it’s happening.” They allege he also sent Allison his manifesto. It was posted on several accounts linked to BTC. MissGorehound’s accounts also announced the news.

Juraj Krajčík was hailed as “Terrorgram’s very first saint.”

DALLAS HUMBER:

We mourn St. Krajčík’s death—

A.C. THOMPSON:

A few days later, she released the manifesto as an audiobook.

DALLAS HUMBER:

His manifesto is absolute f—— fire, and I—

A.C. THOMPSON:

Here was someone that they successfully indoctrinated and encouraged to kill, and he’d gone out and done it.

By the time of the Bratislava attack, law enforcement was already closing in on the Terrorgram Collective.

The downfall of the Terrorgram Collective starts with the arrest of Pavol Beňadik. He gets arrested in 2022, and then you see a cascade of arrests around the world of people who are both collective leaders and people who are responding to the collective’s propaganda and part of this broader Terrorgram community.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The FBI disrupted a plot—

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

An 18-year-old is accused in a plot to destroy a PSE&G power plant.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Authorities would arrest around a dozen people allegedly tied to the group, including Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison. They were charged with leading a transnational terrorist organization, encouraging hate crimes and terrorist attacks.

PETE SIMI:

Are these arrests the end of Terrorgram? You may have a collapse specifically of this particular network, but is that the end? Absolutely not.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Neo-Nazis walked through Nashville—

MALE NEWSREADER:

—conspiracy by white supremacists to attack a portion of the northwest power grid.

PETE SIMI:

These groups come and go all the time. Individuals come and go all the time.

MALE NEWSREADER:

—the group chanting “white power” and other racially provocative language.

PETE SIMI:

And unfortunately there’s no indications that these ideas and emotions and practices that are associated with things like Terrorgram are going anywhere.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Hate crimes have been on the rise for the past several years—

PETE SIMI:

Especially given the broader climate that exists within our society. There will be new Terrorgrams that take its place by another name, and we will continue to see this kind of extremism propagated through platforms of various sorts, not just Telegram.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The U.S., U.K. and Australia have officially designated Terrorgram as a transnational terrorist group. And Telegram, the platform, is facing its own troubles.

FEMALE NEWSREADER::

Pavel Durov has been arrested—

MALE NEWSREADER:

—for allegedly failing to moderate criminal activity on the platform.

MILO COMERFORD:

So in August 2024, we saw the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, arrested and charged on the basis of alleged complicity in the spread of a range of different illegal content on his platform, from child sexual abuse material through to engagement in drug trafficking. This is a hugely significant moment in really showing how far the platform had come and how authorities were frustrated by its unwillingness to take actions. This is really unprecedented.

After Durov’s arrest, he publicly pledged to work more closely with law enforcement on action against illegal content on the platform, including providing IP addresses in cases of legitimate warrants being served.

A.C. THOMPSON:

Durov has called the charges misguided for trying to hold a CEO personally responsible for crimes committed by a third party.

Telegram told us while it is still dedicated to upholding free speech, it now has around 750 contractors to moderate problematic content. It said since 2022, it has partnered with a counter-extremism group to remove more than 129 million pieces of content.

JAMES BANDLER:

Telegram is still one of the more lawless places. The Terrorgram channels, a lot of them have disappeared or gone dark, but you can still find plenty of awful content on Telegram.

Even five months after Matthew Allison was arrested, you could still go on Telegram and find all his racist videos—the ones urging people to kill; the assassination manuals. It wasn’t until we actually pointed this out to Telegram that they took this content down.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Texas and Florida both passed laws restricting tech platforms from moderating content and blocking political views.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Does the First Amendment protect these companies—Facebook, TikTok, YouTube—from curating content?

A.C. THOMPSON:

For years now, social media companies have been trying to balance two things: how to make their platforms safe, and then also how to also give people a place where they can express themselves.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

Republicans have argued there’s too much content moderation on social media. Democrats often say there is not enough.

A.C. THOMPSON:

The debate recently has been about whether the policing of content has gone too far, and whether content moderation basically amounts to censorship.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Hundreds of Twitter accounts belonging to far-right activists and QAnon theorists have been re-instated.

A.C. THOMPSON:

That debate is going to keep going.

MARK ZUCKERBERG:

We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes.

A.C. THOMPSON:

But this is what the Terrorgram story is about, is the extreme end of all this. What do you do as a company when you have people on your platform saying, “Let’s go kill folks. Let’s assassinate people. Let’s do sabotage and terrorism”? How do you deal with that?

GAMAL FOUDA:

We call upon governments around the world to bring an end to hate speech and the politics of fear.

JAMES BANDLER:

What we’ve seen through the Terrorgram story is that there are consequences to unfettered free speech, to having influencers out there advocating violence or mass murder.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Thousands of people gathered at a vigil in Slovakia to commemorate two people killed outside a gay bar.

ZUZANA ČAPUTOVÁ, Former president of Slovakia:

[Speaking Slovak] It’s not us and them. Hate crimes are directed against all of us.

JAMES BANDLER:

If you look at what happened over the last five years, you have to ask a question: What have we reaped as a result of this? What new whirlwind are we throwing ourselves into?

RADKA TROKŠIAROVÁ:

[Speaking Slovak] I’m not sure if one can get over it to be fully OK. I don’t see into the heads of radicals. What in their brain tells them to load a gun and fire at people? I just don’t get it.

Someone incited him to do the wrong thing and he followed. The question is, why?

DIRECTED BY Thomas Jennings Annie Wong

WRITTEN BY Thomas Jennings & A.C. Thompson

PRODUCED BY Annie Wong Thomas Jennings A.C. Thompson

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