An iFunny user who used his account to spread far-right memes was arrested for threatening a federal officer in Ohio. A raid on the home of 18-year-old Justin Olsen —who posted under the name ArmyofChrist— found 10,000 rounds of ammunition in his bedroom, a gun vault that held 15 rifles and 10 semi-automatic pistols and a machete.
The threat that seemingly led to Olsen's arrest came during a discussion about the Waco siege. Olsen created a Discord chat server to talk with his 5,000 subscribers and after talking about the fiery end of the Branch Davidians cult, he posted “In conclusion, shoot every federal agent on sight.”
When asked about the language, Olsen said it was a joke and that the alleged threat was "a hyperbolic conclusion based on the results of the Waco siege.”
Olsen's iFunny account featured posts railing against feminists, the gay community, liberals, and non-Christians. He regularly advocated for the founding of a white ethnostate and appears to be a Donald Trump supporter. One post to his account shows an edited image of a Christian soldier holding a Trump flag. He also showed support for right-wing dictatorships like the rule of Augusto Pinochet. (The former right-wing dictator of Chile is used as a far-right in-joke, particularly his reputation for tossing dissidents and leftists out of helicopters.)
iFunny seemed wary of the idea that their brand might be associated with extremists like the message board 8Chan. In a statement to Buzzfeed, they argued that the portion of criminals on their platform would line up statistically with criminality in the general population.
"iFunny is the most influential mobile app among young adults in the US... I.E. we have over 10 million unique US users in app per month. It's approximately equal to 25% of the young adults population of the US (from 43 million young adults as per government stats)," they wrote. "We assume that percent of the potential criminals among them has 100% correlation with the percent of the potential criminals among the whole society."
