A Wisconsin teenager accused of murdering two family members and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump was inspired by Terrorgram, a white supremacist network that operated on the Telegram messaging and social media platform for half a decade, according to federal court records.
The Terrorgram community, which has been linked to around three dozen criminal cases around the globe, including at least three mass shootings, was profiled last month in stories and a documentary produced by ProPublica and FRONTLINE.
The court documents allege that Nikita Casap, a 17-year-old from Waukesha, Wisconsin, wrote a three-page manifesto calling for the assassination of Trump in order to “foment a political revolution in the United States and ‘save the white race’ from ‘Jewish controlled politicians.’”
In his manifesto, Casap allegedly encouraged people to read the writings of Juraj Krajčík, a longtime Terrogram figure who murdered two people in an attack on an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, according to the court records. Casap also allegedly recommended two publications produced by the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced alleged hit lists, videos and written publications — including instructions for building bombs and sabotaging critical infrastructure — and distributed them throughout the Terrorgram ecosystem.
Is it not possible to forcibly, shut down websites like this? I’m not so computer savvy. I’m only here cuz fuck reddit…
Telegram isn’t a website like reddit or Lemmy, it’s a messaging app, which makes it a lot more complicated.
Users can create groups and invite anyone to those groups… this can be handy, if you and your social groups all talk about a specific topic. It gets to be a problem when the topic your social group promotes is white supremacy and radicalization.
Could telegram possibly police this? They could do a lot fuckin more, that’s for sure. But anywhere users have the ability to create something, some of them will always create some heinous shit that ruins it for everyone else.
It’s been around for 5 years, and this nutbag in Waukesha found it. I am pretty sure it wouldn’t have been hard for law enforcement to know what was going on, if they had been looking.
I’m sure they were members of the group.
That’s like shutting Lemmy down because a small minority uses it for terrorism. Lemmy isn’t the problem, it’s just a system.
Not really, they’ll just move to the next host or even self host. It’s like trying to stop AM KKK radio broadcasts here in the states.