DAOs Are Not the Next Home for Online Extremism

Wired published an article alleging that DAOs are potentially the next major hub for coordinated extremism online. It says:

“The year 2024 might be the one in which neo-Nazis, jihadists, and conspiracy theorists turn their utopian visions of creating their own self-governed states into reality—not offline, but in the form of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).”

The author of the article, Julia Ebner, is an academic extremism researcher who writes books on European political movements and has apparently “infiltrated” (read: “attend publicly advertised meetups and Discord audio chats”) of a few of them. These include very controversial, and very public, organizations like Les Identitaires and Reconquista Germanica.

Academic research of extremist groups of this kind is comparatively straightforward because, for the most part, participants of such groups are a bunch of LARPing dorks who post edgy content for public consumption with no opsec. An indication that an “extremist” group is possibly not as serious an enterprise as, say, Hamas or Hezbollah is where the servers the group utilizes are based in the United States. In these cases, the FBI can get a grand jury subpoena doxxing a user of those servers in the space of an afternoon, if they even need one at all (many companies will render voluntary disclosure of these records in emergency situations posing a threat to life).

Reconquista Germanica would have been particularly vulnerable to this attack vector as the organization ran itself from a Discord group, and Discord, Inc. is a San Francisco-headquartered social media company whose eponymous application displays all user communications in the clear (i.e. unencrypted), and thus these communications are freely disclosable to law enforcement, and often are disclosed. DAOs too, overwhelmingly use Discord for community management and outreach, including the allegedly right-coded “Redacted Club DAO” named in the Wired article.

I should be more impressed with Ebner’s assertions about DAOs if she had (1) mentioned a “DAO” other than ones which publicly advertise their Discord presence on Twitter, another U.S.-based platform. More impressive still would be (2) evidence, any evidence whatsoever, that any of the DAOs mentioned in the article employed…