‘The fringe didn’t disappear’: Expert explains how to combat online threats, antisemitic propaganda

Online hate is no longer confined to the darkest corners of the Internet, putting all of us at risk of encountering nefarious figures or entities from a shadowy realm we can’t see. Extremist subcultures, conspiracy networks, and foreign influence operations that were once confined to fringe message boards have broken into the mainstream and infiltrated social media platforms, reaching millions of people. 

The average person never knows when a bad actor, such as a foreign agent, extremist, or impersonator, will strike in the virtual world. That’s where Alex Goldenberg, an open-source intelligence and cyber-threat analyst, comes in.

Goldenberg tracks online extremism and foreign influence operations and trains international law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify emerging online threats, enabling them to better protect vulnerable communities. 

“I frequently brief law enforcement on issues ranging from foreign influence to ghost guns created with 3D printers, to drones equipped for mass casualty attacks that are being weaponized with bombs and guns and sold to consumers,” Goldenberg explained to the Magazine.

“I also train security folks in the private sector to help them better understand threats emerging online that can have a real-world impact.” 

After receiving his MA in global affairs, with a concentration in transnational security, from New York University in 2019, he worked as a director of intelligence, lead analyst, and adviser for the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit research institute that analyzes threats emanating from the cyber-social domain. In 2024, he co-founded Narravance, a threat intelligence company, the same year that he testified before Congress on Chinese foreign influence operations in the US.

This past April, Goldenberg founded his own national security consulting firm, Silent Index, to help governments, institutions, and organizations mitigate the risk and potential impact of online threats. He has been a senior research fellow at the Rutgers University Miller Center for the last five years. In 2026, for the second year in a row, Goldenberg was named a Top 40 Thought Leader by Life Safety Alliance, a global nonprofit organization for the security and life safety profession.

“I think my entire career has really been about one question: How do bad actors exploit emerging technologies such as social media, artificial intelligence, and prediction markets, before the rest of us understand them?” he said.

He warns that the consequences of extremist ideologies spread through social media “are no longer virtual. Radicalized online communities have inspired real-world violence against Jews around the world.”

He became interested in the growing field of threat intelligence because of his father, Paul Goldenberg, a globally recognized police and security expert. “I was definitely influenced by him and his desire to make an impact on the world that’s positive,” he recalled. “He always said, ‘If you can change just one life in your lifetime, it will all be worth it.’ That always stuck with me.”

Due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work, Goldenberg could not reveal specific details about his investigations, but he offered insight, observations, and advice from his unique position as a Jewish threat intelligence analyst about the climate of antisemitism online.

When did online threats toward the Jewish community start to increase? Which websites were the first to disseminate antisemitic hate and propaganda?

It has accelerated in the past 15 years. There was always a prevalence, so long as the Internet has existed, of antisemites, going back to Stormfront (launched in 1995), which was an online space for neo-Nazis to communicate with each other.

In 2003, things started to change with the advent of image boards like 4chan, which created, almost organically, what we refer to as an “Internet meme,” where you have a photo with text over it. 4chan created the Pepe the Frog meme, which is now unfortunately considered a hate symbol, but wasn’t always.

They wanted to make him unpalatable to normal people, so they started making Pepe the Frog look like Hitler. These communities started engaging in ironic hatred and ironic antisemitism – antisemitic memes and stereotypes under the guise of humor and parody in an effort to be edgy or to troll. If you get social points on your online communities for spreading this type of content, the irony fades away – it oftentimes just becomes hate.

Groypers emerged in 2019, named after a variant of Pepe the Frog, and they’re loosely defined as a set of followers of Nick Fuentes [an avowed antisemite and white nationalist]. Their goal is to show up inside broader conservative spaces and apply pressure from within. Fuentes openly tells his followers: conceal your views, get credentialed, get hired.

Why are these fringe memes, ideologies, humor, etc. gaining in popularity? How is social media helping to amplify these messages?

The hate I studied years ago (and still study today) was trafficked in tight, highly active subcultural communities like Telegram or Discord or Gab, and quarantined to message boards in the worst corners of the Internet. These still exist, and they still have millions of people in them.

But the hate, and the meme culture that carries it, has broken out of containment and gone mainstream. You see it on X, in Instagram Reels, on TikTok. The platforms’ own algorithms amplify it, and our kids are inundated with the likes of Fuentes and Candace Owens [the right-wing, anti-Israeli media personality] without ever going looking. The fringe didn’t disappear; it just stopped being fringe.

Which nefarious movements or organizations, which pose a threat on social media to young people, should parents be aware of? Do they result in violence in real life?

The Incel movement is an online movement of frustrated young men, motivated by involuntary celibacy, who are unable to find a significant other, and hold resentment against the world because of that. It has inspired countless attacks that have led to dozens of casualties. They venerate previous individuals – who have killed on behalf of this movement – as saints.

On June 22, 2026, there was a violent attack in a Montreal neighborhood with a large Jewish community that left the shooter, Seth Hatfield, a police officer, and an innocent Israeli bystander dead. Hatfield had a manifesto that promoted this Incel ideology and expressed hatred toward women, Zionists, and capitalists. He [also] hated the police.

When we think of true crime, we think of a murder mystery docu-series on Netflix. There is a more extreme segment of the True Crime Community (TCC) that is interested in mass shooters and serial killers, which some of them seek to emulate.

We’re increasingly seeing young women engage in violent attacks. A study conducted by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that approximately half of those who traffic in this True Crime Community are young women.

On December 16, 2024, Natalie Rupnow, a 15-year-old girl active in the TCC, killed two people and injured six at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. She took her own life at the scene. Her TikTok account had antisemitic and racist memes. The FBI said she was motivated by nihilistic violent extremism.

How does your organization expose the plans of these radicalized online subcultures?

For years, I’ve been briefing the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Officials to raise awareness, so they can better understand these groups and potential indicators of violence. I’ve also briefed the Pentagon’s insider threat team. I can’t name them, but I’ve also worked with social media platforms.

How do you infiltrate these communities online, and what do you do once you’ve blended in? 

Essentially, you create a sock puppet or an avatar account [a fake account with no personally identifiable information]. You signal in your bio that you are part of the “in” group in some of these subcultural communities.

You get invited to their Telegram or Discord channels, and essentially, you just watch. Sometimes you may catch indicators of violence, but it’s also worthwhile just monitoring for trends and narratives because it could give you potential indicators of who the targets are in these communities as well.

Is AI also playing a role in influencing the minds of young people? 

There’s a loneliness epidemic. Young people have fewer close friends and fewer romantic partners than any generation before them. A lot of them are finding solace online, increasingly with AI chat interfaces.

We’re seeing people form long-term romantic relationships with AI characters. What makes that different from social media is that these systems talk back, and they are designed to agree with you. For a lonely kid, that feels like connection. For the angry and isolated, it could create a dangerous echo chamber that reinforces dangerous behaviors.

What happens when radicalized people start interacting with AI?

AI chat interfaces, like ChatGPT, are very sycophantic. They tell you exactly what you want to hear, and they reinforce your beliefs, even when those beliefs are problematic. In a few circumstances, they have assisted in the planning of mass shootings.

What can parents do to protect their children from dangerous content and predators on the Internet?

The uncomfortable truth is that filters and parental controls are largely theater at this point. What actually works is inoculation – teaching kids to recognize the tropes, the irony-as-cover, the “just asking questions” funnel before the algorithm serves it to them.

The other thing that works is simply talking about it. Ask your kids what’s in their feed. Most parents are shocked by the answer.

“Don’t talk to strangers” is an age-old saying, yet many parents are comfortable giving their teens a device that connects to billions of them. Some of them are intense and capable of doing real harm.

Parents need to be aware that their child is only a few clicks away from a digital hellscape and can end up there without looking for it. They should seriously consider limiting social media for their kids altogether.

There’s a growing movement around this called the “anxious generation,” after Jonathan Haidt’s book [on the subject], built on a few common-sense norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, and phone-free schools.

The book provides data that shows how social media is having a negative impact on youth, raising levels of anxiety, potentially raising levels of suicide, eating disorders, and the like. I think there’s a new norm now that sees social media as akin to cigarettes or alcohol, but even worse.

Networks of parents should create new norms for social media use together; they can’t do it alone, because the cost of opting out falls on the kid whose friends are all online, but when parents act together at the school or community level, it works.

The movement is gaining real momentum with phone-free school laws passing across the country. The best defense is a kid who gets involved in the community and belongs somewhere real, be it theater or the football team.

What can people do to protect themselves if they are receiving threats on social media?

If you are the subject of a coordinated doxxing campaign, I would lock down your personal exposure. It’s important to have no digital footprint, or at least a minimal footprint, so your home address, workplace, etc. is not online. You can go to data broker removal services, like Delete Me.

Typically, once these bad actors experience some friction, they go on to the next target. Turn on the strongest authentication available everywhere, starting with two-factor authentication. The more sophisticated harassment campaigns often include attempts to take over one’s account (like Gmail).

During a pile-on, oftentimes there is an instinct to respond to the trolls. Don’t – that’s exactly what they want. Most of the time, these pile-ons burn out in 24 to 48 hours.

What are social media platforms doing to combat antisemitism? People have told me that when they report antisemitic posts, they’ll often receive responses stating that the posts do not violate their community standards/guidelines.

The detection and enforcement machinery for credible threats and incitement has genuinely improved. What has not improved, and by some measures has gotten worse, is everything below that line: the dehumanization, the tropes, the conspiracy content, the “ironic” hate that primes people for violence without ever explicitly calling for it.

Meta’s January 2025 policy changes loosened its hate speech rules (what it now calls “hateful conduct”) but left the violence-and-incitement policies largely in place. They’ve gotten better on direct violence but worse on hate.

Do you have any recommendations for how Jewish organizations should combat online antisemitism?

Unfortunately, there’s what I refer to as the antisemitism attention economy right now. If you amplify antisemitism, you’re going to get views and “likes” and retweets, which means you get revenue. We need to spend money exposing these networks, both online in the real world. The cost of being an antisemite needs to be high professionally and socially.

Is there a great need for more people to go into your field, especially given the extreme rise in online antisemitism? Do you have any advice you’d like to share with prospective threat intelligence analysts?

I think our community is facing real threats that would benefit enormously from having people within our community inside disciplines that track those threats, but there are some honest caveats. This work certainly carries real personal exposure. Researchers in my field who track extremism, like myself, have gotten doxxed and harassed. I’ve been on the receiving end of death threats; some of them were legitimate.

Anyone entering this field should certainly have some operational security habits from day one. Separate your personal identity from your research identity. Use a VPN. Make sure that you don’t have any personally identifiable information attached to the accounts that you use to research these communities that I’ve been talking about.

This expertise can be extremely beneficial for those going into law enforcement, for those who want to join the Trust and Safety teams of social media companies, and community security organizations. It’s a growing field with real career paths. I do recommend it, but it’s not for the faint of heart. ■