An 800-page inquiry into the March 2019 Christchurch mosque attack, which claimed the lives of 51 Muslim worshippers, sheds light on the murky online world of far-right extremists.

Analyzing the report’s findings, experts on online radical movements claim that social media giants, such as YouTube, have not done enough to deny a platform for fringe movements, of the kind to which terrorist Brenton Tarrant subscribed. Tarrant was jailed for life, with no possibility of parole.

Andrew Fleming, an Australian writer and expert on the radical right, told The National that it was difficult to stamp out radicalization, but “what you can do is limit the growth of the milieu out of which he emerged … by doing so, you limit the number of future Tarrants”.

The inquiry found that the “only information that directly referred to the terrorist attack was an email the individual sent to the Parliamentary Service (as well as politicians, media outlets and individual journalists) just eight minutes before the terrorist attack began”…The report said the intelligence function of New Zealand Police “had degraded and from 2015 was not carrying out strategic terrorism threat assessments” and concluded “there was an inappropriate concentration of counter-terrorism resources on the threat of Islamist extremist terrorism”.

Given these factors, the report concluded that security services would have had “no plausible way” of detecting Tarrant’s intentions, “except by chance”.

Source: The National