Extremist influencers ‘weaponizing femininity,’ warns Canadian intelligence report – National

Women’s workout routines that devolve into anti-government rhetoric. Makeup tutorials with anti-feminist commentary. Personal finance videos that blame immigrants for stealing jobs.

According to a Canadian government intelligence report obtained by Global News, extremist movements are “weaponizing femininity” on social media to attract more women into their ranks.

Prepared by Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC), the report warns that female “extremist influencers” are using popular online platforms to radicalize and recruit women.

Their strategy: embed hardline messages within “benign narratives” like motherhood and parenting, allowing them to draw in women who weren’t intentionally seeking out extremist content online.

“A body of open-source research shows that women in extremist communities are taking on an active role by creating content specifically on image-based platforms with live streaming capabilities,” it said.

“These women foster a sense of community and create spaces that put their followers at ease, thereby normalizing and mainstreaming extremist rhetoric,” according to the Strategic Intelligence Brief.

While it does not name any influencers, it refers to alt-right extremist channels, anti-government rhetoric about COVID-19 lockdowns and “women-oriented blogs” that promote white supremacy.

Most spread extremist ideology, it said, but some go further, fundraising for their causes and even inciting their followers to violence, raising concerns about possible terrorist attacks.

Titled “Weaponizing femininity: female influencers’ use of social media to promote extremist narratives,” the report is dated August 2023 but was only recently released publicly under the Access to Information Act.

“While the intelligence assessment is two years old, the phenomenon it identifies has continued, and in some ways, has worsened,” said Eviane Leidig, author of “The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization.”

The report’s release comes as national security agencies and academic researchers are trying to better understand the role of women in terrorist and extremist groups in the age of social media.

Although women have long played prominent roles in violent factions, their contributions are often downplayed, resulting in fewer charges and lesser sentences than their male counterparts.

Only two women have ever been convicted of terrorism offences in Canada. Last week, Oumaima Chaouay, who joined ISIS and was captured in Syria, was sentenced to a symbolic one day in prison.

Despite the brief prison term handed out by the Montreal court, the case recognized for the first time that providing “family support as a spouse” to a terrorist group was a criminal offence.

Women have also been keenly involved in the post-pandemic far right. A third of those charged over the pro-Trump insurrection attempt at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, were women, it said.

At the same time, the ratio of extremists who were women more than doubled from six per cent to 14 percent between 2018 and 2021, the intelligence report said, citing data from the University of Maryland.

With an estimated 6,600 Canadian alt-right platforms on the internet, with some 50,000 users, “it is likely that women are just as present as men on extremist social media platforms,” the report said.

But the intelligence report said most analysis on the topic was focused on men and the role of women as radicalizers of others had not been as widely explored, raising questions about gaps in Canadian policy.

“In the online extremist milieu, female social media influencers are active participants in radicalizing others,” ITAC wrote. “Canada-based extremist influencers will continue to play an important role in the North American extremist milieu.”

To lure vulnerable recruits into their causes, extremist influencers have been packaging their messaging within content that appeals to women’s interests, according to the intelligence report.

Among them are so-called “mommy blogs” that discuss parenting and motherhood issues, but that became platforms for disinformation and conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

“Certain bloggers promote xenophobic and anti-2SLGBTOI+ rhetoric under the guise of expressing concern for children’s well-being,” it said. “Grievances related to sexual education in schools or vaccinations led to discussions that began with skepticism and concern and spiralled into anti-government extremism.”

Blogs about “tradwives” — women who promote traditional values — also thrived during the pandemic, but some have devolved into the targeting of immigrants, according to ITAC.

“Discourse about respecting women’s contributions at home often strays into anti-immigration rhetoric. Feminism is blamed for overburdening women with work outside the home and multiracial immigration is cited as the reason for white men struggling to find employment.”

Not all such influencers have large followings, but the report said that as of February 2023, tradwife content had attracted more than 100-million views on the social media platform TikTok.

Leidig, a researcher who specializes in anti-democratic politics and online extremism, agreed that female influencers were strategically using mainstream social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to “normalize and legitimize extremist ideas about gender, immigration, and race.”

“They co-opt lifestyle content such as health and wellness, food blogging, beauty, and motherhood to embed political messages while at the same time appealing to broad audiences,” she said.

“Importantly, these influencers successfully exploit the visibility and algorithmic amplification of these platforms with the reach of their content, which often passes as apolitical or unproblematic unless you can detect the coded language being used as a radicalization strategy.”

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca