In the wake of the shooting of two Queensland police officers and a Wieambilla resident, experts say COVID-19 is making extremism difficult to handle, and there are no easy solutions.
Extremism analyst Katja Theodorakis accepts social media can create an "enabling environment" for radicalisation.
"We all had to come to terms with it … so those narratives resonate with a much broader section of the population." Ms Theodarakis says an individual's path to violence can be accelerated when, in addition, a "cognitive rupture" like a job loss, occurs.Queensland Police has announced it will investigate the online presence of the attackers and whether they were lured to the property.There will also be a coronial inquiry, which has broad scope to investigate the lead-up to the massacre.
When that's combined with "end of times" and "apocalyptic" beliefs, that can create a sense of urgency to act out violently, Ms Theodarakis added.Part of the problem the internet poses for law enforcement is the sheer volume of conspiracy content."We can comb the haystack with a much finer comb, but at the end of the day, we're looking at hundreds of chatrooms and hundreds of thousands of people," Ms Theodorakis said.
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