The videos juxtapose traditional fitness and martial arts imagery with white supremacist flags, symbols, and messages. TikTok is now rushing to remove them.
Recruitment videos for a new cluster of white supremacist groups called “Active Clubs” may have accumulated millions of views on TikTok, according to a Forbes review of related accounts and hashtags on the popular short video platform.
The hashtags #activeclub and #aktivklubb had received a cumulative 4.5 million views on the platform as of Saturday Oct. 14, with variations like #activeclubfrance, #activeclubdietsland and #activeclubfinland bringing in hundreds of thousands more.
Many of the videos feature scenes of white men working out and fighting — often with their faces masked, blurred or covered — alongside white supremacist symbols, flags and messages. Some feature actions, like men pulling down and trampling pride flags and confronting police officers at protests. One video from @activefinland juxtaposed footage of muscular white men punching at the camera with scenes of nonwhite immigrants in boats. Other posts featured Confederate flags and the insignia of the Three Percenters, an American and Canadian far-right group that helped organize the January 6, 2021 siege on the U.S. Capitol.
Active Clubs were first developed by Robert Rundo, founder of the racist Rise Above Movement, and popularized through a podcast co-hosted by Rundo and German neo-Nazi Denis Kaputsin in 2021, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The clubs cast physical fitness and survivalism as necessary for white men to prepare for racial violence and fights against “antifa.” Like other far-right militia movements, the Active Club network has embraced a decentralized, localized model that makes it more difficult for law enforcement agencies — and social media companies — to identify and track them.
TikTok’s community guidelines do not allow “[c]ontent that praises, promotes, glorifies, or supports any hateful ideology” or includes white supremacist symbols, logos, flags or other objects related to the white supremacist movement.
After receiving a request for comment from Forbes, TikTok removed a number of videos using Active Club hashtags. Company spokesperson Mahsau Cullinane said in a statement, “There is no place for hate speech or hateful ideologies on TikTok, and we moved to remove content that violated our policies as soon as we were made aware of it.”
Still, at the time of publication, the TikTok hashtags #activeclub and #activklubb still surfaced numerous videos connected to the Active Club movement. Mahsau did not answer questions about whether the company planned to reduce the visibility or recommendability of content that used these hashtags, or about whether the hashtags themselves would be made unavailable on the platform.
TikTok is not the only social media company that has struggled to control violent far-right groups in recent years. Between 2019 and 2021, militarized groups like the Boogaloo Bois and hundreds of local “militia” groups across the United States used Facebook (as well as TikTok) to recruit and organize. In August 2020, the company announced that it would ban militia groups that discussed violence, and would downrank and suppress accounts and pages associated with militia groups, even if they were not themselves violent. But militias continued to grow in prominence on the platform, even after one such group organized a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and multiple others contributed to the violent January 6, 2021 siege on the Capitol. Even after the events of January 6, the groups continued to thrive on Facebook.
Searches on Facebook and Instagram for #activeclub, though, did not return recruitment videos like those present on TikTok. In Forbes’ Saturday review of the TikTok hashtag page for #activeclub, 47 out of the top 50 featured posts were related to the white supremacist movement. (The other three were posts made by a company advertising period products for active women.) On Facebook, only one of the top 50 posts was related to the movement. Instagram only surfaced 28 posts on the #activeclub hashtag page; three appeared to be related to the movement. The hashtag #activklubb was unavailable on Instagram, accompanied by a message saying, “The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.” Meta declined to comment.
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