As the fifth anniversary of the 2019 Christchurch terror attacks nears, it seems we are still only beginning to understand the terrorist’s motives and intentions, and how they were revealed in the years before the atrocity.

In research made public today, Chris Wilson and co-authors from the University of Auckland show how they identified the terrorist’s distinctive online posting, and how his activity in extreme far-right forums was part of his overall radicalisation.

Trawling through thousands of anonymous posts and threads, the researchers matched distinctive rhetorical, grammatical and geographical signatures to identify the terrorist. It is clear from these posts that his beliefs were reinforced and enabled in these forums, and that his plans took shape there too.

This is important, because the royal commission of inquiry into the terror attacks placed limited emphasis on the shooter’s behaviour on the message boards 4chan and 8chan, preferring to accept evidence that he was radicalised via other online sources such as YouTube.

The evidence amassed by the authors paints a different picture. “What we found overturns a great deal of what we thought we knew about him,” they write. “It also raises serious questions, not only about why this posting was not detected before the attack, but also why it has not been discovered in the five years since the March 15 attacks.”

Learning from this will not only add to our knowledge about how and where online radicalisation occurs, but it can also show “how government agencies can work together with specialist extremism researchers to prevent it happening again”.

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