ABSTRACT
On 17 July 2011, five days before unleashing the attacks on Norway that he claimed were ‘atrocious but necessary’, Anders Behring Breivik opened accounts on the social networking websites Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, he painted a brief but later telling portrait of himself, identifying as a Christian and a conservative and his interests as Freemasonry and bodybuilding (BBC 2011). On Twitter he offered only a quote from John Stuart Mill – ‘One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.’ Six hours before the attacks, he posted a video on the video sharing website YouTube visually detailing his mani festo ‘2083 – A European Declaration of Independence’, depicting the threats to Europe he perceived from ‘Cultural Marxism’ and ‘Islamic Colonization’ (The Telegraph 2011). As a final deed before putting his violent plans into action, on the day of the attacks he sent out a mass email containing his 1,500-page manifesto. Before physically attempting to bring to life his extremist vision of how the world should be by first detonating a bomb at government buildings in central Oslo and then committing the mass shooting of sixty-nine people at an Arbeider partiet (Labour Party) youth camp on the Norwegian island of Utøya, Breivik carefully assembled his ideal world in the virtual realm online. Building a cyber environment more to his liking was an important first step towards creating such a world in actual reality. Although the horrific acts of Breivik are of course an extreme example, the Internet is increasingly providing a wide range of extreme-right groups with a forum to develop and test their vision of an ideal world online before committing to their plans in reality.
