The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram

What did a deadly attack outside a gay bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022 have to do with mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and at a synagogue in San Diego in 2019? In The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram, FRONTLINE correspondents A. C. Thompson and James Bandler demonstrate how the three separate perpetrators were all groomed and radicalized online by white supremacists who have migrated into dark corners of the web, from platforms such as 4chan and 8chan to a new, barely supervised lair called Telegram. Building on a decade of reporting on white supremacist plotting, from Charlottesville to January 6, Thompson and Bandler mined online databases, legal documents, and law enforcement interviews to identify the leader of the self-proclaimed “Terrorgram Collective,” known as “Slovakbro.” They also exposed a strategy of “militant accelerationism” focused on inciting loners to commit murderous acts that the supremacists believe will bring about race wars culminating in the rise of white ethno-nationalist states. With gun violence and political extremism as pervasive as ever, and technology companies starting to face legal accountability for the harm they facilitate, FRONTLINE’s timely investigation wins a Peabody Award.