Online Hate and Offline Violence: What We Learnt from the Dan Wootton Saga

It took a dumb minute staring at the email for the penny to drop: we’d been hacked. It was a request for two-factor authenticated access to a confidential research document to do with Byline Times’ 2023 exposé of the GB News star presenter Dan Wootton as a serial sexual catfish.

Just two other people ought to have known the sensitive cloud-shared file – a small part of an exhaustive three-year investigation – even existed. And the name on the screen was neither of them.

I rang my colleague Tom Latchem for our usual (encrypted) morning catch-up: “Hello mate – erm, have you noticed anything strange going on?”

“Well, someone smeared blood on my car windscreen last night. But apart from that…”

Things had taken a turn for the unusual the day before. Wootton had given a six-minute prime-time live TV monologue in response to a Byline Times exclusive unmasking him as the fictitious showbiz agents Martin Branning and Maria Joseph – two online identities connected to more than 10 years of catfishing activities targeting a large number of men and women, many in the public eye, with attempts to obtain sexual images by deception.

Wootton addressed the story by admitting to unspecified “errors of judgement in the past” – but denied criminal behaviour. He said: “Who doesn’t have regrets? Should I be cancelled for them many years later, or do you accept I have learned and changed?”

Wootton then went an unexpected step further. He told the GB News viewers that our reporting was politically-motivated – a “smear campaign” by a “hard-left blog” and an affront to “free speech” orchestrated by “dark forces out to try and take this brilliant channel down”.

“We have all found ourselves under attack,” Wootton said. “And that’s because GB News is the biggest threat to the establishment in decades, and they will stop at nothing to destroy us.”

Now, there is no evidence Wootton could have foreseen – or was any part of – the events that followed this extraordinary broadcast, which propelled the story on to the ITV national news bulletins and turbocharged it on X. But things did get interesting afterwards.

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‘Blood Will Flow’

For the record, Byline Times is neither ‘dark force’ nor ‘establishment’. It is, however, a staunch defender of lawful free expression and a fan of good journalistic values.

Yet here was a billionaire-funded, Ofcom-regulated broadcaster with mainstream pretensions framing legitimate reporting on a public figure falsely as an act of Culture War.

The worrying episodes multiplied in the days after broadcast. Alongside the hack attack – ‘stealer’ malware masquerading as “information that you may find useful for your investigation” – and Tom’s bloody windscreen, a further anonymous email arrived to the newsroom headed: “Over Dan Wootton”.

“See you at your office and blood will flow,” it promised.

There was also a phone call to the personal mobile number of an executive editor. “You’re going to regret this,” said an anonymous northern British male voice; an alleged act of intimidation that remains a police matter today (and on which Byline Times will be reporting in due course).

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New Threat Landscape

Adapting to this rapidly-evolving threat landscape in real-time, while still rolling out a major piece of live journalism, was stressful. We went through the practical steps of defensive housekeeping – police reports, malware sweeps, counter-surveillance protocols for home and work – in a bubble of shock and disbelief.

We agreed that it was deeply disturbing that such sophisticated attempts were being made to shut down a three-year investigation into a powerful public figure with legitimate questions to answer.

For his part, Wootton says he took to his GB News platform simply to reply to our investigation into him, which – aggravated by a subsequent misogyny scandal – set the stage for his mainstream cancellation.

The saga continues today with one alleged catfishing victim pursuing civil action against Wootton, while the accuracy of Byline Times’ reporting has remained unchallenged in any court, despite many legal threats.

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Lone Wolf Activity?

Wootton’s aggressive prime-time amplification of the story – and the sinister events that followed – left us all wondering what might happen next. We were advised by the police to take precautions, and started running counter-surveillance measures at home and work.

Vehicle registration details, home addresses, phone numbers, and emails had already been compromised, which was pretty dark. But threats to kill journalists? In London, in July 2023. That was next level.

In more than 25 years in the job I’d never known such an onslaught of “black ops”. Writing as a past whistle-blower on the illegal newsgathering of Fleet Street in its wild west noughties, that says a lot.

The skulduggery put everyone involved on edge. I sent my kids away in case they became accidental targets and cut short a trip, fully expecting to find blood on my welcome mat. In that moment, it was a war footing.

Intel started to trickle back from sources plugged into the organised far-right in the UK. There was no obvious chatter about attacks on Byline Times over the Wootton exposé, they told us.

“The best guess is lone-wolf activity,” said one well-placed source, adding: “It’s almost impossible to track. We’re seeing it more and more. It’s not like in the days of Combat 18 or the BNP. It’s fragmented now – much more random. It’s people in social media echo chambers reacting directly of their own accord. It’s a nightmare to monitor.”

And it’s a nightmare with a name – ‘stochastic terrorism’.

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What is Stochastic Terrorism?

Forensic psychologist Dr J. Reid Meloy and former FBI profiler Molly Amman are real-life Mindhunters and global authorities on stochastic violence.

In their 2021 report, published in Perspectives on Terrorism, they define stochastic terrorism as “an interactive process between the originator of a message, its amplifiers, and one or more ultimate receivers”.

“A charismatic public figure, or perhaps an organisation, lobs hostile rhetoric against a targeted out-group or individual into the public discourse to further some political or social objective,” they explain.

“An unrelated consumer of the rhetoric absorbs and reacts with anger, contempt or disgust, often mirroring the speaker’s emotional state, and adding his own fear and anxiety to that cocktail of negative emotionality.”

The researchers identified how signals for violence are often hidden “in the noise of extremist rhetoric” but resonate loudly and clearly with “primed receivers”.

“Lone offenders and regressed groups, when reacting to threat discourse, want to act quickly given the seemingly urgent nature of the threat communicated by the speaker,” say Meloy and Amman. “They feel compelled to engage in imminent violent action.”

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An Emotional Bonfire

Meloy and Amman point to the inflammatory effects of Donald Trump’s infamous Save America speech ahead of the 2021 storming of the Capitol building in Washington.

They explained how Trump built an emotional bonfire from messages of gross injustice, injury to core values, and imminent existential threat, which ignited a collective instinct among the rioters to act from defensive necessity.

On a wider level, when media triggers foment into such a tangible threat in hidden corners of the internet, it represents a daunting challenge for public protection.

For the police and intelligence communities to somehow identify and prevent bad acts that inevitably unfold at speed requires digital hypervigilance, efficient real-world intervention, and uncommon luck.

“It is as dire as it sounds,” say Meloy and Amman. “Law enforcement officials have to win the race every time, but a violent actor only has to win once.”

Dr William Allchorn is one of Britain’s leading academics on stochastic violence and online far-right and incel hate activity.

And although it most often affects public figures – journalists, politicians, activists – it can happen to anyone, he says.

“When online hate campaigns become normalised, ordinary individuals – like schoolteachers, healthcare workers, or marginalised community members – can become targets,” Allchorn, Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at Richmond, the American University in London, tells Byline Times.

“Stochastic violence thrives in environments where hateful rhetoric is tolerated or amplified. If society dismisses these warnings… the consequences can escalate beyond the intended targets, fostering broader societal fear, suppression of expression and the possibility of further vigilante attacks.”

The main drivers, Allchorn says, tend to be ideological agitators like extremist influencers or political commentators who use covert coded language – or dog whistles – to incite hatred without directly calling for violence.

These are the trigger events that, after a spin cycle online, create threat potential from random sources.

For example, Trump’s regular references to journalists as “enemies of the people” peddling “fake news” were triggers that led to escalating threats against media professionals, including mail bombings and threats at Trump rallies.

Online algorithms are another critical component. While polarising content creates the engagement advertisers demand, it can also amplify inflammatory voices, and in doing so seed entire communities of new potential bad actors, whether radicalised by far-right ideology or incel echo chambers.

The power of the algorithms was clear when the influential Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed in 2014 that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. After huge online engagement, it led to offline harassment of the families of victims for years afterwards. One parent, Leonard Pozner, went into hiding.

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Male Bombs

Misogyny is an ideological fulcrum of the incel (involuntary celibate) communities, within which all women are held to be misandrists. In this sphere, men are the dominant perpetrators of stochastic violence on and offline, says Dr Allchorn.

Influencers like Andrew Tate speak to – and monetise – these demographics by preaching hierarchies of gender control. With violence embedded in these warped concepts of ‘masculinity’, the academic found that his followers are more likely to take gender-based violence offline.

Tate’s rhetoric, initially viralised and rewarded by TikTok and YouTube before platform bans, dehumanises female-kind. Yet his content has billions of views.

In 2021, Plymouth incel Jake Davison killed five people, including his mother. His online history later showed an obsession with Tate-like figures and so-called “blackpill” forums – places where the most extreme incels gather as a place of last resort before, well, who can accurately say what?

Last year, British Crown Prosecutors brought 10 charges of rape, actual bodily harm, human trafficking and controlling prostitution for gain, relating to three complainants against 38-year-old Tate, while his brother Tristan Tate faces 11 similar charges relating to one woman. (Both will be extradited to the UK once separate criminal matters in their adopted Romania – from where Andrew paid for “golden passport” citizenship of the Pacific nation of Vanuatu in the same month as his arrest – have been resolved.)

Platforms like 4chan, 8chan, Gab and Telegram are particular havens for hate, where violent fantasies can be shared anonymously and normalised.

Gamer culture often intersects with incel culture, and can be another Petri dish for harmful behaviour, in which shooter massacres are gamified in live-streams on Twitch and the generalised degradation of women is standard.

In 2014, the so-called ‘GamerGate’ incident saw women in the gaming industry stalked, doxed, and receive death and rape threats in a coordinated campaign of harassment.

People of colour, trans people, Muslims, and Jews are all disproportionately targeted, but women in public-facing roles have it toughest. In just one example, in 2013, journalist Caroline Criado Perez received more than 50 rape threats an hour on Twitter/ X after she advocated for a woman on a British banknote.

At the height of the abuse, Criado Perez “lost half a stone in two days” and “couldn’t eat or sleep”. She commented later: “I don’t know if I had a kind of breakdown. I was unable to function, unable to have normal interactions.”

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The Who, When, Where problem

In 2022, Payton Gendron, from Conklin, New York, walked into a supermarket in Buffalo and gunned down 13 people. Eleven were black, two were white, and three survived.

Gendron, 18, had been raised left-wing by civil engineer parents but was radicalised into far-right white supremacist dogma online. He chose Buffalo because the city was nearest to his home. And he chose the Tops Friendly Market in the East Side because its ZIP code had Buffalo’s highest black population.

What, if anything, could have been done to prevent something so calculated yet simultaneously random?

For while the precursors for stochastic violence can be observed and generally measured with web-traffic tracking and ‘topic modelling’ software, that mainly addresses the question of ‘why’. It is the ‘who, when and where’ that pose risk-mitigation problems.

It is a tricky security curveball. Whether a target is an unfortunate member of the general public or someone in public life, it is an almost unquantifiable threat potential that is suddenly everywhere – and nowhere – all at once.

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Protecting Westminster

Few understand the practical reality of managing the threat landscape facing Britain’s politicians better than former Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Coordinator Philip Grindell.

After the murder of Batley and Spen Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 in a Brexit-related targeted terror attack, Grindell was hand-selected to set up a new Specialised Threat Management Team to help protect the front line of politics.

His first job was to collect data and sift through the granular levels of information his new Specialised Threat Management Team requires to be effective.

Speaking to Byline Times, he explains: “After Jo Cox, we increased reporting by MPs [of threat events] by about 400%. We would get daily reports and got into the habit of contacting every single MP who ever reported anything to the media. So we had a far greater understanding of what the issue was.

“You can define violence in different ways,” says Grindell. “Online hate speech is violence. It doesn’t necessarily mean physical violence – harassment, bullying and stalking are all forms. You could argue that any behaviour that’s intent is to cause harm, be it physical, reputational, psychological or otherwise, is an act of violence.

“I created a national system so that every force around the country was plugged into what their MPs were experiencing, and also to my team, so that we could pick up any trends or particular issues and circulate them.”

In 2017, this work prevented tragedy when the team prevented a far-right terrorist attack on the Labour MP Rosie Cooper, which saw its would-be perpetrator, Jack Renshaw, jailed for 20 years.

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Behavioural Threat Analysis

Renshaw was identified as an escalating threat by looking for specific linguistic and behavioural red flags. “We stopped the next attack by identifying one message that was clearly an indicator of an actual threat, as opposed to 99% which are just noise,” Grindell said.

The team’s methods are based on years of experience in Royal and close protection, reliable information, and solid methodology.

“We use Behavioural Threat Analysis,” Grindell, who has authored a bestselling book called Personal Threat Management, explains. “There is a series of proven indicators and proven behaviours that will illustrate when someone is escalating towards violence. It’s a preventative rather than a predictive process.

“Simple things such as, we don’t follow the noise. It’s not so much who’s made a death threat as looking at people’s behaviours; what the language actually says, and picking out some of the indicators that we know are indicative of someone who actually poses a threat.

“In the Rosie Cooper case, he was talking about killing Rosie and a police officer. But he’s also talking about ‘suicide by cop’. And so again, when someone is talking about suicide, it infers that they don’t feel there’s any point in living.

“They’re feeling desperate, and so they’re going to do something desperate. And there’s a whole package of indicators – about eight or nine.”

In Grindell’s view, incidences of ‘true’ stochastic terrorism in UK politics are mercifully extremely rare. In the examples of Cox and the murder of Conservative MP for Southend West, Sir David Amess, at a constituency surgery in 2021, both assailants had premeditated their actions with prior knowledge of the movements of their targets – not technically random acts.

Says Grindell: “We have had five MPs attacked in 25 years. Statistically, it’s quite low. What we have seen is a huge rise in the verbal abuse of politicians, partly because of social media.”

As a witness to the impact of coarsening public discourse on the world’s oldest democracy, Grindell points to political short-termism and clickbait journalism as part of the problem.

“Politicians have to be more responsible, but they’re not because they are only interested in the next four years.

“We’ve also lost the art of disagreeing with each other. People just read a headline on TikTok and we’ve got this black and white world where I’m right, you’re wrong. And that is a problem for democracy.”

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