Correspondence on the Agarthan investigation

Letter to the Editor:

This letter has been lightly edited to correct apparent typos, and the Instagram account has been anonymised.

To those involved in the production of your “Agarthan Society” article,

I write to you as the sole admin and account owner of [an Agartha sixth-form Instagram account] - mentioned in your article. As a prefix to what I am about to write, I do not aim or expect you to add to, amend or edit your original article and what follows is written as purely my thoughts alone.

I would first like to say that I found your article very interesting as, although running one of these pages myself, I had never considered the motivations or goals of similar accounts. To see that the account I created was referenced was quite a surprise to me because, as far as I am aware, we are the only major Agartha account to originate from a sixth-form college.

This account was created after seeing a video posted by the Imperial Agartha page - which probably comes across in the similarities of our profile pictures. For me this has never been about any movement, political or social, and is far more focused on local college rivalries and inside jokes among students. I chose to use the Agartha branding as, to me, it seemed to be gaining popularity at universities and was so absurd that nobody would take anything posted too seriously, I see this reflected in the followers of my account, most of whom are students at [the sixth form].

In my view, the success of these accounts is attributed less to rising extremism, and more so the fact that it is incredibly uncanny to see a place you are so familiar with be dressed up in a format that is very similar to accounts on Instagram that are essentially posting propaganda to stoke division. From what I can tell, the vast majority of followers of these accounts are far from extremists and it is my sincere hope that people do not formulate political or social opinions based on sensationalist content they see online.

While I understand the major concerns highlighted in your article, I think it is important to realise that these are fringe cases and most of these Agarthan account and their followers are far more apolitical and a far less serious problem compared to the views that they mock.

I do hope that this did not come across as too critical of your article, I am glad that the issues with these accounts have been brought to light - even if I disagree with the sweeping messaging used.

Yours faithfully,

The admin of [the Agartha sixth-form Instagram account].

Editor's reply:

Dear account admin,

Thank you for your email, I am glad that you found our coverage interesting.

We have found a handful of Agarthan accounts that purport to represent sixth-forms, although most have less than a hundred followers. By running the third-most popular Agarthan account across all universities and sixth-forms in the country, you have considerable reach over a young audience – having said yourself that most of your followers were sixth-form pupils – and should therefore be particularly critical of what you share.

If your account has never had a political or social angle, why does one of your most recent posts refer to “Israel-GPT” and “Netenyahu [sic]”? Criticism of the policies of foreign governments is by no means reprehensible, but remains inherently political.

Among the content shared by your account, one can find: a WW2 German soldier (not only is it recognisable immediately from its Stahlhelm, but a quick Google search will tell you the image comes from a Nazi-era poster), animated sour patch candies marching and performing Nazi salutes, the tag #yakub, a statue from Arno Breker...

All of these belong to the neo-Nazi or alt-right register, and there is a significant overlap with our homegrown Imperial Agartha. You may not be familiar with the meaning of this imagery (although this is surprising for the admin of the “number one college in the country”), but it is your responsibility as account manager to look into these things.

You write that “nobody would take anything posted too seriously”. Had you checked the comment sections on the posts of the many Agarthan accounts you follow, you could not possibly have sounded that confident. Moreover, some of these pages follow explicitly neo-Nazi accounts. The group chat we infiltrated also proved that, even if some of these pages start as jokes, they are quick to attract radicals.

In the last email we received from Imperial Agartha (titled “IMPORTANT: Coming clean”), the page admin told us: “We started this society as a joke for everyone and we now see how far it got out of hand.” Frankly, the page was questionable in the first place, but it entierly possible that the admin did not fully forsee the deluge of slurs and bigotry that came our of their community. You never know who dwells on the Internet and how they might interpret your content.

You add that you have “never considered the motivations or goals of similar accounts”. I argue that this is something you certainly should have done before emulating their content. Willingly or not, you risk becoming a cog in the social media radicalisation machine. I redirect you to our Comment Editor’s “You’re still missing the point about Agartha” on page 11.

Your second-most recent post lists the other Agarthan accounts we had investigated. Among these, you show Imperial Agartha, the now-banned account behind the appalling content we shared last week; Essex Agartha, which a few days ago denounced our “multi-page n(j)ews article” by publishing a video with photographs of the writers of our investigation, portraying them as negatively stereotyped Jews; and UCL Agartha, the most explicitly neo-Nazi account we found (“NS”, “HH-lights”, and a swastika-like symbol can all be seen at glance if you look the account up). If you don’t associate with these, why are they featured in your content?

For a while now, meme pages have been an important part of the student culture of secondary education institutions, and I myself was the admin of my high school’s a few years back. Extremist symbolism need not be featured. I suggest you rebrand your page to remove Agarthan references – Instagram has started taking the other accounts down.

I wish you all the best for the rest, and I hope you come to realise where the problem stands. We all make mistakes, in particular as young people, and the key is knowing how to move on.

Kind regards, 

The Editor