Last month, two American teenage gunmen opened fire at an Islamic center in San Diego, California, killing three men who were outside the mosque.
Following this terrible incident, the two suspects, Caleb Vasquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, fled in a white BMW. They had installed a camera on the dashboard of their car so that they could broadcast the attack live.
In this footage, Vasquez is seen telling Clark to kill him, himself putting the barrel of Clark’s gun to his forehead. Clark then shot Vasquez twice in the head before killing himself.
Investigators discovered that the two teenagers had met and radicalized online. They glorified terrorists and spread their white supremacist hatred towards Jews, Muslims, the LGBTQ community, women, people of color, but also the left and the right.
This attack, like other recent shootings, illustrated the dangers and allure of nihilistic hatred and violence online. A phenomenon that has spread to the darkest corners of the Internet – which are full of hatred and conspiracies. Without a fixed ideology, this phenomenon is nevertheless saturated with anti-Semitism.
This is a terrible and dangerous trend, but what’s more terrifying is “how powerful and important it is” for those involved, says Oren Segal, who directs the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
“I don’t know if people join these [groupes en ligne] because they want to engage in violence. I think they do it because it interests them, it’s different and they find community there. Maybe they even end up believing it,” he continues.
An average person who consults these forums “would not be surprised by the horror of the images found there – he would be surprised by their fascinating nature”, he adds.
Monitoring the darkest corners of the Internet
The work of the ADL Center on Extremism, located in Midtown Manhattan, involves dozens of investigators and analysts who probe the darkest corners of the Internet in an effort to understand trends, monitor bad actors, and detect threats. Researchers share this information with law enforcement, as well as groups responsible for the security of the Jewish community, Segal told Times of Israel during a visit to the center last month.
Last year, the center analyzed nearly 30 million social media posts, and this year, it has already sent 101 threat alerts to 258 law enforcement agencies, the ADL said.
The center is part of a network of Jewish security organizations that are responsible, each in their own way, for protecting American Jews, whether by training volunteer guards and other members of street patrols at krav maga or by teaching them to assess security conditions in synagogues.
“Our job is to tell communities who are hostile to them,” adds Segal.
The Center on Extremism also publishes analyzes on anti-Semitism and its trends on platforms such as Cloudflare or Instagram, not forgetting AI video generators.
Security has become paramount for American Jews since the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018. The pogrom perpetrated by Hamas in October 2023 in southern Israel, which left 1,200 dead and triggered a surge in anti-Semitism around the world, redouble investments in security. The year 2025 has been the deadliest for Jews in the diaspora in decades.
Researchers at the Center on Extremism monitor platforms like Telegram, TikTok, Steam, Twitch, Discord and the gore site WatchPeopleDie. They learn about the subcultures of online extremist communities – their idioms, symbols and tattoos, which are often difficult for the uninitiated to decipher.
Hate as a hobby
Users’ obscure credentials signal their membership in these online communities, Segal explains. For example, some members of these online communities display themselves with a Sonnenrad, a neo-Nazi symbol little known to the general public but common among extremists, in order to “send a signal to those who, within their community, are capable of understanding white supremacism,” Segal specifies.
One of the San Diego shooters wore a Sonnenrad patch and other neo-Nazi paraphernalia on the day of the attack, and the suspect in the Charlie Kirk shooting had engraved obscure references to video games and Internet trolling on his guns, calling it “a big meme.”
“Hate is what attracts them. It is a form of leisure rather than an end in itself. I think that, for many people, it’s very exciting,” Segal emphasizes, referring to the people involved who, according to him, are individuals “attracted by the forbidden.”
“We are talking about anti-Semitism, hatred and violence. “Suggesting that these experiences would be important may seem strange, but that’s what they are for those who dedicate their time to them,” he adds.
Beyond just detecting threats against Jews, the Center on Extremism detects other dangers, starting with threats of shootings in schools, which we find on the same platforms. These threats are also communicated to the police, assures Segal.
Outside of the United States, the center reported threats in 20 countries last year, including Vietnam, Australia and Reunion Island, France.
Much of the center’s work remains confidential to prevent malicious actors from discovering its methods.
Segal talks about several of his successes, such as the one that made it possible to put an end to a series of incidents of ” swatting » against synagogues in 2023 and 2024. The center’s researchers found that attackers who made fake emergency calls to synagogues attacked congregations that were broadcasting their services live, with the aim of then watching the panic spread.
Thanks to observing the attackers’ discussions online, center employees were able to alert the synagogues and the police before the calls, and the responding police officers stopped climbing the synagogue bima during the live broadcasts. The perpetrators of the calls were thus deprived of the spectacle, following which the threats stopped and information collected by the center led to arrests, adds Segal.
The swatting is proof that many online threats emanate from a lively, interactive online ecosystem fueled by novelty, entertainment and a sense of community around the spread of hate.
“Some people enjoy themselves by watching things on TikTok or Instagram, which is rather harmless, where others are looking for dopamine rushes through anti-Semitic and violent acts,” Segal points out.
For example, members of the Goyim Defense Leaguea white supremacist group whose name is modeled on that of the ADL, film themselves live harassing people in front of Jewish places. Those watching live exchange jokes and make suggestions to those filming.
“They actually receive operational instructions from spectators. Imagine what it can do to a spectator to have an influence without having to move from their couch,” continues Segal. “And meanwhile, there are a thousand people encouraging this anti-Semitism, this hatred. Which creates community and engagement that is as exciting as it is dangerous. HAS”
La quête du martyre
In earlier times, anti-Semitism – hating and humiliating Jews – was a communal and entertaining activity. During medieval carnivals in Italy, Jews were forced to run naked through the streets to jeers from spectators who threw mud at them. The Nazis made a spectacle of cutting Jews’ beards, the better to humiliate them. Until the pogroms, which sometimes took place in an atmosphere of
«carnival».
This interactive online model also applies to more violent incidents, as attackers send signals back to their online communities during attacks, seeking some form of martyrdom. Some shooters who expect to die also write the names of former attackers on their weapons. When they die, thousands of people online create images and memes of the shooters, making them into saints and heroes of a very special kind. In this environment, some are no more than 15 years old.
“Their ultimate goal, much like in a game, is for the next shooter to write their name on their weapon when they carry out their attack. Thus their name will pass to posterity,” summarizes Segal.
“When you feel like you’re serving a cause and you think you won’t be forgotten, the likelihood of committing an attack is greater. HAS”
The San Diego attackers and other mass shooters idolized the man who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 and broadcast the killings live on Facebook.
According to Segal, anti-Semitism is the “backdrop” and “new normal” of many of these online spaces – which provide thrill and entertainment.
In their long manifesto, the San Diego shooters explained that Jews were “the universal enemy,” responsible for war, famine, child abuse and many of society’s ills, and that the only solution was “to simply kill them all.”
Some mass shooters engage in anti-Semitism online without attacking Jewish targets, like the man who killed two children at a Catholic school in Minnesota last year, or another who attacked people of color during a 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, in the State of New York.
“The psychological spring is the same for everyone. We all want to do something meaningful, to belong to a group, to not feel alone, to feel like we have a purpose in life,” Segal concludes. “It is also true for these people, who find meaning in their lives in these dark corners. HAS”
