White Supremacist Active Clubs Gain Traction on Telegram
Active Clubs are decentralized white supremacist groups growing in popularity around the world, though particularly on Telegram.
TLDR
Active Clubs are decentralized white supremacist groups found throughout the US and the world. They often use physical training and camaraderie as part of their recruitment strategy aimed at men.
According to Open Measures' dataset, the most popular Active Club Telegram channels are from Lithuania and France. Certain locations in the US are popular as well.
Active Club-related Telegram channels often share and forward images and text with one another. This suggests that despite the centralized nature of the groups, they are often aware of and supporting one another.
Background
Active Clubs are white supremacist-affiliated groups that have been popping up around the world since Jan. 2021. Founded by American Robert Rundo, the group has a heavy focus on combat sports and physical training. This is an intentional strategy to recruit young men looking for community and to prepare them for violence.1
Active Clubs have known associations with other right-wing groups such as Patriot Front and White Lives Matter, among others. In addition to spreading racist ideas such as the Great Replacement Theory—the belief that white populations are being “replaced” by non-whites through immigration and birth rate disparities—the group espouses anti-LGBTQ+, antisemitic, and anti-Native American ideologies.
Unlike many similar movements, Active Clubs use a decentralized model. This both frustrates efforts of researchers to track the group(s) while allowing separate Active Clubs to focus on pertinent issues in their specific country or region.
Open Measures researchers identified dozens of Active Clubs at least nominally connected to various regions of the US. Additionally, they identified Active Clubs in Finland, Italy, Ireland, France, Germany, Greece, Slovakia, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Canada, the UK, Denmark, Slovenia, Estonia, Norway, and Armenia. For this research, we focused primarily on US-based groups. Researchers identified Active Clubs present on other social media platforms including Gab and Rumble, though the bulk of identified activity was on Telegram.
Telegram, a messaging app, has many different Active Clubs on its platform. While Telegram can be used for peer-to-peer messaging, users can also join Telegram channels or groups. Groups can range from a handful of individuals to tens of thousands of active accounts. Open Measures monitors dozens of Telegram groups associated with Active Clubs.
Analysis
Query
To start our investigation, we turned to Open Measures’ Telegram dataset: smat-telegram-data. We found that many Active Clubs used the term “active” in the branding on their channel. Some examples:
Note: The channelusername field is the username for a channel, and the channeltitle field is the colloquial “title” of a channel. To understand the relationship between these terms, channelusername and channeltitle are analogous to a formal Twitter “handle” and the “name” of a profile, which is often the same as the individual or organization behind the handle.
On Twitter, for example, @Open_Measures is the username and “Open Measures” is the profile title. On Telegram, a similar example would be “baystateactiveclub” as the channelusername and “Bay State Active Club” as the channeltitle).
For this reason, we started our investigation with the following query:
channeltitle:active OR channelusername:*active*
Given the generic nature of the term “active”, we refined our query by asking it to disregard any channels that used the term “interactive”:
(channeltitle:active OR channelusername:*active*) AND NOT channeltitle:interactive
Activity Levels
Using this query, we started by examining the total volume of messages sent by Active Clubs-affiliated channels for the first five months of 2024. Within Open Measures’ Telegram dataset, there was a monthly average of 1,724 messages originating from these groups.
We wanted to determine which Active Clubs’ Telegram channels were the most active by volume of messages for the first five months of 2024. Using the same query as above, and breaking the data down by channel information, we found that Active Club Lithuania generated the most content.
Active Clubs Messages
The Active Clubs channels Open Measures researchers reviewed often had a strong focus on recruitment, highlighting the social aspects of joining these clubs. A sampling of messages from May 2024 include:
Often, text about meetups and events were shared verbatim across various Telegram channels. This suggests that despite the decentralized nature of Active Clubs, clubs are interlinked, supporting and likely drawing inspiration from one another.
Active Clubs also share text and images purporting to show meetups between distinct clubs, again reinforcing the idea that these clubs have contact and overlap with one another. Many Active Clubs appear to also interact with and promote content from other like-minded groups, especially white supremacist groups like Patriot Front.
While much of their public-facing content is focused on sharing the benefits of joining an Active Club, the content also contains white nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ+ themes.
Multimedia Content
Researchers used Open Measures’ newly released Media Application feature to better understand the type of media content—both photos and videos—these groups shared. The same query was used for this part of the investigation:
(channeltitle:active OR channelusername:*active*) AND NOT channeltitle:interactive
Reviewing media posts from the past year revealed that many of the Telegram channels repost and share the same content and images, demonstrating the interconnectedness of these groups. Oftentimes these groups may show overlap with other white supremacist groups, such as the Patriot Front.
Shared content often depicted physical training exercises, protests, or acts of commemoration to historical figures. These included General George Custer, a prolific American general during the Indian Wars who was killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn, as well as Birth of a Nation director D.W. Griffith.
Conclusion
Open Measures will continue to monitor Active Clubs and other right-wing extremist groups across alt-tech platforms.
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Lamoureux, M. (2023, September 22). Neo-nazi fight clubs are growing rapidly, new research shows. VICE. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgw4bz/neo-nazi-active-clubs-rising-globally.