Early last year, Matthew Allison could be found at the Space Banana dance club, awkwardly swaying to his own beat. Clutching the cheapest house beer, he’d greet people with a bear hug, a broad grin and his familiar, “Yo, bro!” salutations. Allison, then a 37-year-old convenience store worker and Saturday-night DJ, seemed to like everyone he met in Boise, Idaho’s small electronic dance music scene. And most people seemed to like him back. He was so gentle, former friends remember, that for a time he eschewed honey so as not to cause harm to bees. He was “a little goofy,” a former friend, Tyler Whitt, recalled. “But bro goofy.” But that lovable persona hid a more sinister core. When he was behind his computer screen, Allison used the handle BTC, short for BanThisChannel, he told ProPublica and FRONTLINE. On the social media and messaging platform Telegram, authorities say, Allison was a key figure in a network of white supremacist and neo-Nazi chat groups and channels known as Terrorgram. There, Allison held court, promoting himself as “the most infamous and prolific propagandist of our time.” Hyperbole aside, BTC was infamous. Extremism researchers in the U.S. and in Europe studied his posts but did not know who he was. Leftist activists sought to expose him. And law enforcement authorities tried to identify and jail him. Last September, he was finally arrested. Prosecutors allege that Allison was one of the leaders in the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced propaganda and instructions for terrorists, and disseminated that information through the Terrorgram ecosystem. They say Allison used the Telegram platform to solicit “attacks on government infrastructure, such as government buildings and energy facilities,” to encourage the assassination of “‘high-value targets’ — like politicians and government officials” with a “hit list,” and to help produce and distribute a Terrorgram Collective publication that featured instructions for making “Napalm, thermite, chlorine gas, pipe bombs, and dirty bombs.” Authorities also contend in court filings that Allison had fantasies about committing gruesome violence and sexual assault, and that he may have been planning to act on them. Allison has pleaded not guilty. For about five years, the Terrorgram network operated largely unchallenged on Telegram, which has nearly one billion users. The Dubai-based company did little to prevent influencers like Allison from circulating their propaganda and encouraging isolated young men to kill, a ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation found. The news organizations obtained a trove of now-deleted Telegram chats and channel logs and used them to trace Allison’s activity and influence in the Terrorgram network.
via propublica: A “Goofy” DJ’s Secret Life at the Center of an Online Terrorism Network