February 12, 2025

Australia Day Arrest Drives Far-Right Telegram Activity

Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell’s arrest drove far-right activity on Telegram, often originating from The Noticer.

TLDR

Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell was arrested at an Australia Day celebration on January 26, 2025.
News of Sewell’s arrest traveled within white supremacist Telegram communities.
Many of the Telegram messages shared about Sewell’s arrest were forwarded directly from a channel maintained by Australian new outlet The Noticer.

Background

In Australia, January 26 marks Australia Day, commemorating the arrival of the country’s First Fleet and thus the start of British colonization. Australia Day is a widely celebrated holiday and is not exclusively nationalist or extremist, despite carrying some colonial implications. Because of its sensitive historical implications, some Australians believe the date of the holiday should move in consideration for indigenous Australians.¹ ²

This year, at an Australia Day demonstration in the city of Adelaide, neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell, leader of the National Socialist Network (NSN), was arrested along with over a dozen other members for offenses such as failure to cease loitering and displaying Nazi symbols.³ ⁴

NSN Activity

Researchers of online extremism consider the NSN the most prominent Australian neo-Nazi organization.⁵ The group explicitly calls for Australia to become a white ethnostate and promotes hate speech targeting Jewish people, indigenous populations, and the LGBTQ+ community, among others.

The NSN carries out several in-person actions per year, and has a history of inflammatory actions, such as brandishing an “Australia for the White Man” sign at a December 2023 march in Ballarat.⁶

*Image shared on various Telegram channels spreading the news of Sewell’s arrest: a screenshot of a headline and accompanying pictures featured on* The Noticer **(accessed using Open Measures’ Media Application).**

Open Measures researchers investigated how news of Sewell’s arrest spread among white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups on Telegram. Telegram is an encrypted messaging app supporting both individual and group chats as well as larger channels. Throughout their research, researchers identified various Telegram channels associated with the NSN, as well as other channels promoting racist ideologies in Australia.

Analysis

News of Sewell’s arrest was disseminated quickly across white supremacist Telegram channels. To understand the spread of this news, we started our investigation by looking for messages mentioning both Thomas Sewell and Australia Day from Jan. 19, 2025 to Feb. 2, 2025. This period of time encompasses the week before and the week after the Australia Day arrest. For this investigation, we used the following query within Open Measures’ Telegram dataset:

message:”thomas sewell” AND message:”australia day”

Unsurprisingly, mentions of the two terms used together spiked on January 26, 2025, with interest in the topic decreasing over the following days.

*Graph showing mentions of “Thomas Sewell” and “Australia Day” in the same message within Open Measures’ Telegram dataset. Each dot on the graph represents mentions for one day.*

News Origins on Telegram

In Open Measures’ dataset, news of Sewell’s arrest was first shared by The Noticer through its channel Noticer News (@noticernews).

*Message shared by @noticernews about the incident, linking to* The Noticer. It was accompanied by the image shown in the Background section above.

The Noticer is an Australian news outlet whose website has the tagline: “We notice what other news sites don’t.” The site’s “About Us” section claims self-funding, with “no wealthy backers or links to political parties.” It also includes an editorial policy of misgendering trans people and using English names over indigenous ones for places and events.

After The Noticer’s initial message, news of Sewell’s arrest spread on Telegram. Many of the messages about Sewell’s arrest that were forwarded on Telegram originated from The Noticer. It is common for Telegram channels to forward messages from other channels to their own audiences, often amplifying their reach.

Methodology

Open Researchers were interested in each message’s channel of origin and the impact of The Noticer’s reporting. To quantify the impact, researchers used the following search query (previously mentioned above) for the timeframe in question:

message:”thomas sewell” AND message:”australia day”

After the search resulted in 81 messages, researchers looked for where those messages originated using the following fields:

date: The exact date and time a message was published (to help construct a timeline of sharing activity).

channeltitle: The stylized name of the channel as it appears on Telegram. For instance, the channel @noticernews has the channeltitle Noticer News.

fwdfrom.from_id.channel_id: If a Telegram message was forwarded from another channel, this provides us with a unique identifier (a channel ID number) that allows us to determine the channel a message originated from.

Example Search Result

This data displays as follows:

date	channeltitle	fwdfrom.from_id.channel_id
Jan 26, 2025 @ 07:35:59.000	Aus News Alerts	2049317988

The information above shows that on Jan. 26, 2025 at 07:35 GMT, the Telegram channel Aus News Alerts forwarded a message from another channel (channel ID 2049317988) to its own audience. In this case, the channel ID belongs to The Noticer’s Telegram channel (@noticernews). This means that a message from Noticer News was forwarded into the Aus News Alerts Telegram channel.

Using channel IDs, researchers examined the 81 messages mentioning both “Thomas Sewell” and “Australia Day” within two weeks of the holiday. The goal was to determine which channels were the origins of the most forwarded messages.

Influence of The Noticer

Messages from The Noticer’s Telegram channel were shared significantly more than messages originating from any other channel. Of all 81 messages noted above, 43 were forwarded from The Noticer. Further, those 43 forwarded messages represent only four original messages authored by The Noticer.

In other words, four messages from The Noticer’s channel were forwarded 43 times to other sources. These accounted for 47 out of the 81 total messages mentioning both “Thomas Sewell” and “Australia Day.”

*A pie chart showing the channel IDs of content forwarded about the Australia Day arrest.* The Noticer accounts for the green slice of the pie (note that the above represents only forwarded information).

Researchers observed thatThe Noticer seemed to have outsized influence among channels in Open Measures’ Telegram dataset. For context, however, this dataset focuses exclusively on extremist and criminal channels.

Other mainstream outlets reported on Sewell’s arrest in Adelaide as well, though Open Measures’ dataset does not monitor these channels. As such, the research above does not capture their potential influence over any social media activity.

Conclusion

Many mainstream media outlets reported on Thomas Sewell’s arrest, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). However, reporting by certain lesser known outlets—The Noticer, in particular—gained the attention of white supremacist circles on Telegram.

Open Measures found that many white supremacist Telegram channels forwarded messages originally shared by The Noticer to their own audiences. These results offer insight into how news spreads in Australia’s far-right media ecosystem. While The Noticer appeared to have outsized influence in the results above, more research is needed on this topic.

Open Measures will continue to monitor extremism online. If you have any information about groups of interest on Telegram or other alt-tech platforms, feel free to reach out to our team or submit a Telegram crawl request.

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