Holly Baumann

Holly is an 8th grader at LREI. She chose to do her topic, Cults and Online Radicalization, because she is passionate about it. She thinks that hate groups violent behavior is concerning, and hopes to contribute in spreading awareness.

Interview With Cloee Cooper, a Journalist Who Combats Extremism With Her Words

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On Wednesday at 2:00 PM, on March 1st, we interview Cloee Cooper. Cloee is a Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates, which is a social justice research and strategy center. She has been working for PRA for about 5 years, and longer in journalism as a whole. Although our interview with her was somewhat last minute, we were able to touch on so many issues in our time with her.

In our interview, we talked a bit about what we think the next 10 years will be like, in terms of online radicalization and extremism. She told us that she thinks there will be a lot more violence, but she hopes that it will eventually calm down. She mentioned a couple of times the events of 2020 and how police brutality came into the spotlight. Once something is revealed, people don’t just forget about it.

We’re really appreciative that we got to interview Cloee and are happy with the information we found out.

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Interview With Denise Zaraya and Andrew King

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On Tuesday, January 24th at 2:00, me and my group had a called with Denise Zaraya and Andrew King who work at IAS (Integral Ad Science). IAS is a company that analyses advertising on the internet, and checks to see if its appropriate and safe.

In our interview with them, they taught us a bit of how the system works, and why it is useful. We talked a bit about current events, like how Elon Musk just bought twitter, and how he discovered how many bots there were. To lessen the amount of these bots, he introduced a subscription plan. Besides that, we talked about how on social media platforms, there is a massive amount of bots and false advertisements, thats purpose is to cause a stir to get more engagement. When we asked them why these bots are even there, they responded by saying that the main reason is to make money.

Andrew and Denise gave us a lot of information about how they censor certain ads online, and why it is helpful.

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Interview With Patrick Riccards

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On Friday, January 20th, me and my group had a call with Patrick Riccards, the CEO of the non-profit organisation Life After Hate. Life After Hates mission is to help former extremists find their humanity again, and regain compassion. Patrick is the first person to be CEO of LAH, without being a former extremist, so it was interesting to get his close up perspective.

We asked Patrick a variety of questions, like how he gets through to people who are former extremist, what role social media plays, and what made him want to be apart of LAH, but his answer to one of them stuck out to me. When we asked him if he feels bad for any of these former extremist who are struggling, he bluntly says “no”. He goes on to explain that its hard to feel bad for them when they have done horrific things, and they need to take accountability for that, which is one of the hardest things to do when trying to turn over a new leaf.

Patrick gave us a better understanding on different parts of hate groups, and it was cool to get his perspective.

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Interview With Kalil Oldham

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On Friday, January 13th at 12:30, me and my group met with Kalil in his office to interview him. Kalil is LREIs Director of Equity and Community, and his jobs is to make sure LREI stays diverse, and he uses his expert knowledge around diversity and community to make sure everyone feel comfortable in the schools environment. In our interview with him, we decided to focus on how online radicalization affects minorities, who they try to recruit (and why), and how lots of time, people in these hate groups (like the proud boys) are parading their harmful view and ideals in plain sight, and acting upon violent endeavors.

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