Atomwaffen Division and its Affiliates on Telegram: Variations, Practices, and Interconnections

Key Findings: 1) More than half the organizations captured in our research dataset appear to be recently formed, indicating that Atomwaffen Division (AWD) affiliate groups continue developing in multiple countries despite increased scrutiny from law enforcement and disruption of well known groups in a variety of national contexts. 2) Local divisions construct and promote individual brands but utilize a narrow aesthetic (colors, font, symbols, slogans) and specific genres of content. The limiting of aesthetics and genres works to create a shared visual vernacular that provides cross-linguistic and intercultural coherence,
as well as linking affiliate brands with the meta-brand of Atomwaffen and Siege culture. 3) Communicative practices on Telegram show regular reinforcement of members’ identification with Siege cultural norms at both the ideological and individual levels. This indicates such reinforcement is necessary for developing coherence across multiple divisions and unaffiliated actors, which work intentionally as a distributed, decentralized transnational network of cells. 4) AWD and affiliated groups in the dataset manage channel removal by creating “back up” channels with minimal differences in channel name or brand. This differs substantially from Jihadist channel naming practices, which obscure naming and branding on channels to avoid detection. This difference indicates that Far-Right violent extremist platform removal impacts have not yet reached
a scale that would alter AWD and affiliate groups’ brand-identification strategies. 5) Alliance formation between groups and platform practices that promote strong interconnection between affiliate organizations provide technical as well as practical benefits to these groups. Technical benefits of increased cross-channel membership and content sharing include redundancy (replication of content on multiple channels) and resilience (the ability of channels to reform) in relation to platform moderation and removal policies. Practical benefits include the ability to develop an approximation of “leaderless resistance” or non-hierarchical, small-cell organization intended to resist infiltration and disruption by law enforcement, through a transnational, digitally networked culture.