In the run-up to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Oregon led all states in per capita internet searches for “armed groups” and conspiracy theories.
Oregon leads U.S. in armed militia interest, is breeding ground for ‘FEMA concentration camps’ conspiracy theory: report
Updated Feb 24, 2021;
Posted Feb 24, 2021
Donald Trump supporters break into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A new report tracked violence-related internet searches in the months before the insurrection. (Win McNamee/Getty Images/TNS)TNS
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In the run-up to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Oregon led all states in per-capita internet searches for “armed groups” and conspiracy theories.
This data comes from Moonshot CVE, an anti-extremism tech company that, from September to December 2020, tracked internet disinformation and threats of violence that were linked to the U.S. presidential election.
When armed insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, Vidhya Ramalingam wasn’t surprised.
A day earlier, her company Moonshot CVE, which monitors and combats online extremism, set up a crisis team in response to a flood of indications that the pro-Trump rally scheduled for Washington could turn violent.
Moonshot works to pull back from the brink people who have been inculcated into white supremacist movements, conspiracy theories and radical ideologies, and it offered crisis intervention to some 270,000 high-risk users around the time of the Capitol breach.
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“For organizations like ours that have been working on domestic violent extremism for many years, and in the run up to the election and the months that followed, this was not a surprise, that this attack happened,” Ramalingam said.