Investigators stated that the October 7 massacre has radicalized more people and inspired them to join terror groups such as ISIS, CNN reported on Sunday.
In an interview with CNN, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism Rebecca Weiner warned that more people were becoming “self-radicalized” as a result of social media and the terror group’s international outreach.
She stressed that since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks, “we’ve been contending with renewed interest in joining ISIS among inspired people here across the West, but also an increase in ISIS operational tempo overseas."
“This isn’t as simple as there is an entity called ISIS that’s operating overseas that’s reaching into our homeland, recruiting and radicalizing people,” Weiner explained.
“This is a much more nuanced dynamic, where people are finding each other online, doing that mutually reinforcing self-radicalization, finding like-minded people overseas, some of whom may have connections to the actual terrorist organization. So it’s much more muddy, but it is also much more dangerous than a simple model that we’ve dealt with before.”
Weiner noted that there has been a “sustained focus on ISIS-inspired plotting,” highlighting the attack on New Year’s Day in New Orleans and a foiled ISIS plot in November of 2024.
Six individuals living in New Jersey, Michigan, and Washington state were arrested several weeks ago and charged with allegedly planning an ISIS-inspired terror attack.
The suspects are said to have shared extremist and ISIS-related materials encouraging attacks in the US, including on the Jewish and LGBTQ+ community, by using encrypted messages and social media, according to a criminal complaint.
Terror cells on US soil planned attacks against LGBTQ+ communities, Jewish groups
"You name it, you had it amongst these two networks," Weiner said, noting the scale of the targets and types of attacks the terror cells had planned.
The group had allegedly planned to carry out the attack on Halloween. Authorities said that, if the plan had succeeded, it could have reached the same scale as the 2015 Paris terror attacks.
The group in Michigan was “amassing weapons, ammunition, had done training, talked about a number of different potential outlets for this plot – targets of an imminent potential attack in Michigan,” Weiner said.
Radicalized individuals travel out of US to join ISIS in Syria
“At the same time, you have an ongoing investigation, a network of individuals in New Jersey, in Seattle, overseas, who were planning allegedly to travel overseas to Syria to join ISIS. Of course, the imminence of the potential attack in Michigan being the impetus to bring the whole network down.”
Weiner noted that her unit had noticed a "resurgence of potential increase in travel overseas," to join terror organizations in Syria and Somalia.
Weiner went on to say that social media has created echo chambers for extremists, which has enabled terror worldwide.
“This is a classic case of what terrorism looks like in 2025, when you have social media enabling not just the radicalization, the consuming of propaganda, the echo chamber of driving people toward more and more extremist content and discussion, but active planning and coordination,” she said.
“But that wasn’t all you had, as outlined in the complaint against one of the defendants in New Jersey. Travel, real-life engagement, and interaction between these groups of people. So these weren’t just aspirants talking about notional plans; they were actively coordinating.”
Young people drawn to ISIS after pandemic isolation
Noting the rise of 16-20-year-olds joining terrorist groups, Weiner explained that the reason is partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic, “and the ongoing hangover from forced social isolation and a lot of time spent online.”
“Partly it’s young people and their young brains just marinating in these online ecosystems where you’re subjected to, drawn to, consuming and then animated by extreme content,” she continued. “But one through line across all of our cases, regardless of ideology, is younger and younger people being drawn into these webs.”
Weiner added that although terror had faded from public interest, it remained a threat worldwide.
"That’s a good wakeup call, that conventional terrorism is unfortunately alive and well, and over the last year, we’ve been swept up in other threats, the rise in political violence, and individual acts of really high-profile targeted violence with no clear ideological underpinning. That is a threat unto itself, but meanwhile, ISIS support, terrorism as we’ve understood and combated it for the last 24 years, remains a threat that we have to contend with."