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As an investigative journalist, Julia Ebner had the freedom to do something she freely admits that as an academic (the hat she currently wears as postdoctoral researcher at the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences at the University of Oxford) she have been proscribed from doing – posing as a recruit to study violent extremist groups. That, as you might expect, gave her special insight into how these groups attract new blood, and on the basis of that work, as well as more traditional research for groups such as the Quilliam Foundation and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, she has been hosted by the United Nations, national legislators, intelligence agencies and Big Tech.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Ebner details some of the mechanics of her undercover research for host David Edmonds before discussing the prevalence and characteristics of violent extremist groups. Given the variety of ways governments tally these groups and the groups’ own amorphousness in an online age, determining whether such groups are on the rise – which seems to be a perennial fear – proves devilishly difficult to determine. “I would say,” Ebner concedes, “it often comes and goes in waves, but now we are seeing a very strong wave of very young people, including minors, radicalizing towards violence.”

That radicalization proves remarkably similar regardless of ideology, Ebner notes. Plus, it’s not straightforward determining who might be open to recruitment. “Based on my research, I would say that everyone is potentially susceptible to radicalization, especially in vulnerable moments in our lives, and everyone has them.”

Ebner serves up that potential universality in a different context to close the podcast. It’s what keeps her up at night: “I think the mainstreaming of some of the extreme concepts and ideas and language that I used to observe only in the darkest corners of the internet, but that is now being heard in parliaments, that is now being seen in large social media channels of influencers or voiced by politicians.”

Given her journalistic chops, it is no surprise that Ebner has written extensively on extremism in a series of well received books. The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism, received the Bruno Kreisky Award for the Political Book of the Year 2018; Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists was a Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 and Germany publishing’s Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres 2020 (“Science Book of the Year”) Prise as well as the Dr Caspar Einem Prize from the Association of Social Democratic Academics; and Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over, was published in 2023.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: Prevent is a UK government initiative to stop people from becoming violent extremists. Violent extremism is the area of research for Austrian-born Julia Ebner. Dr Ebner leads the Violent Extremism Lab, part of Oxford University Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion. But her background is in think tanks and in investigative journalism, in which role she infiltrated several extremist networks.

Julia Ebner, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Julia Ebner: Thank you for having me.

Edmonds: We’re talking today about violent extremism, your area of research. This podcast talks to leading social scientists, but I think you’re the first person we’ve interviewed who’s actually gone undercover in the course of undertaking their research. So tell us a little bit about that.

Ebner: Yeah, that was a few years ago for my research, which I did in my personal capacity, so outside of the academic setting, I don’t think any ethics committee would have approved of it. But I wrote a book called Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists, for which I went undercover with a whole range of different extremist movements, for example, jihadist groups, but also neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements, misogynist and conspiracy theory movements.

And the purpose of this was to get a better understanding of the people involved in extremist movements, but also the people who would radicalize all the way towards violence. And I also wanted to understand better what is driving them, why are they staying in these movements?

And on a very human level, I was interested in understanding a bit better how to also prevent people from becoming radicalized in the first place.

Edmonds: What were the logistics of this? Did you have to create a whole new identity for yourself, a whole history so that they couldn’t do a quick Google search and realize that you were a fake or researcher or journalist or whatever?

Ebner: Yeah, that’s right. I had to set up different fake identities or avatar accounts online. I mean, online, this is, of course, quite easy to do. I had to create basically an entire persona around this. So I had to think very carefully about what is their past, their present, and their future, what have their lives looked [like] previously? Why are they now being recruited, or potential recruits of an extremist movement? I set myself, of course, also ethical boundaries, so I would never do anything to help support their cause or would help their recruitment efforts. I would not produce any type of propaganda or say anything hateful myself. But I would rather pretend to be a naive newcomer.

I was also interested in learning more about their tactics, and for example, I was able to join some of their strategy meetings, hearing more about how they are mobilizing followers, how they’re recruiting people, and so on.

Edmonds: But you had to create fake websites, fake blog posts, fake Twitter accounts, fill in the details.

Ebner: Yeah, I had to create a whole fake background. So I had to create fake online accounts, or sometimes on the big social media platforms. But of course, some of these extremist movements are also more active on some of the alternative, so called old tech platforms. So this was before the academic part of my career. It was when I was still very much involved in think tank work and policy advisory. So I was doing a lot of monitoring of these spaces. I knew the type of language that they spoke, I knew the type of insider references already. So that helped, because I could easily immerse myself in those subcultures and understand what they were talking about.

But I also had, to some extent, adopt some of these insider references and some of these subculture specific elements, and also when creating, for example, some of my own profiles, I would to some extent, also try to adhere to, without getting into the hateful territory, but still playing a little bit with the symbols or with the references that they would use.

Edmonds: And you mentioned that you would never get away with this in academia. It’s a drawback to academia, isn’t it, that you couldn’t pursue this line of research, because obviously it can uncover all sorts of interesting things that are of great use to researchers.

Ebner: It is, and it isn’t. I would say it did also come at a great personal cost, and there was definitely a security risk that I faced in the aftermath of this. I think there is a place for it, and that’s probably in the field of investigative journalism, or of course, that’s also what some of the intelligence communities or intelligence agencies are doing. And it’s important, because I think on a human level, it’s really important to understand the dynamics in these groups, including in the online groups, and also see sometimes what’s actually happening offline when these people meet. So that’s also why I joined some of their meetings in person. It did help also my academic research, I would say, in the sense that it shaped some of the questions, the research questions that I would then follow up more closely on with more analytical work. It helped me to understand also some of the human layers in the radicalization process that I would have probably otherwise only perceived as something very abstract, and in that sense, it was definitely helpful. But I would probably not advise anyone to go down the same path, and it did come, as I said, at a great personal risk where I had a lot of threats at the time, when my identity was then inevitably discovered or uncovered by some of these movements, and then I faced a lot of campaigns. It was, yeah, not som