MilitiaWatch
Greetings, MilitiaWatch readers! Hopefully, you had a good spooky season! (Many of those covered in this Monthly update did not.) In broad strokes, this monthly covers:
The previous MW Monthly (covering September 2023) can be read here:
MilitiaWatch took a break from weekly updates last week so this week’s update covers the last two-ish weeks. Here are some high-level highlights:
This article follows up a previous MilitiaWatch article on the use of Zello, a free walkie-talkie app, by the US-based armed far-right, including aggressive activists working in support of former president Donald Trump. That article with visualizations is available here:
Since that article, further investigation of right-wing militant groups’ use of Zello resulted in the direct recording of it being used at the 6 January storming of the US Capitol Building. This was then published in The Guardian. As references in that article, a list of over 800 channels was sent to Zello with a request for comment. Zello subsequently announced that they had banned 2000 militia-related channels, though they described groups’ use of the platform as “social media vanity messaging”. An On the media podcast covering this can be listened to at this link.
After a hiatus last week, we catch up with two weeks’ worth of weekly updates, including the following: