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Nearly a month after a pro-Trump mob violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, a clearer picture is emerging of the individuals and groups involved as federal authorities arrest and charge people who allegedly participated in the riot.

Former President Donald Trumps supporters -- 74 million of whom voted to give him a second term in 2020 -- are diverse in background and ideology and come from all corners of the United States, and those who stormed the Capitol represent just a fraction.

But to some experts, the hundreds who took part in the Capitol siege represent some of the most fervent and radical adherents of the Make America Great Again movement and others caught up in the frenzy of the day. They say attempts to unite those extremist elements fell apart after Charlottesville but gained renewed momentum in 2020, with racial unrest, the pandemic and most recently the unfounded controversy over the election.

Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., before a mob stormed the Capitol, breaking windows and clashing with police officers, as congress gathered to certify the election of Joe Biden.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociology professor at American University who studies extremism and far-right movements, said that those who stormed the Capitol are a loose coalition of groups from across the far-right spectrum.

These were people who were radicalized and participated in an insurrection, its just that some did so in a very planned way, and I think others ended up being caught up spontaneously in mob rioting," Miller-Idriss said.

For the experts, the most prominent force that unified hard-right adherent, militias and other Trump supporters and whipped them up into a frenzy behind the idea that the election was stolen -- Trump himself.

And Trump, unlike past presidents, gave these disparate groups a national platform unlike any they'd had in modern American history with the instantaneous recognition and feedback of social media.

Trumps false claims about election fraud and his rhetoric post-election urging his supporters to fight back is at the heart of the former presidents Senate impeachment trial, which is set to begin next week. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump on Jan. 13 after House Democrats filed an article of impeachment, charging him with "incitement of insurrection."

ABC News reached out to the former presidents legal team but representatives declined to comment.

Larry Rosenthal, chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said that the mob was generally made up of two groups: right-wing populists, whom he described as part of Trumps most faithful rally-goers, and right-wing militia groups that represent two overlapping currents of the far-right movement: white nationalism and anti-government.

President Donald Trump is seen on a screen as his supporters cheer during a rally Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election.

Some of these ideologies and beliefs were on display in far-right insignia scattered among the crowd, which included symbols of the Confederacy, Nazism, white supremacy and anarchy.

And some of those arrested have documented their alleged involvement on social media and some have known ties to far-right groups, or are adherents of disproven conspiracy theories.

In addition to a diverse and loose coalition of groups involved, the members of the mob were also not racially and ethnically homogenous.

Although the majority of rioters at the Stop the Steal rally were white, the Trump mob was not a homogenous group of white nationalists," Cristina Beltrn, a professor at New York University who studies race, ethnicity and American politics, said.

Jacob Chansley and other supporters of President Donald Trump are confronted by U.S. Capitol Police officers outside the Senate Chamber inside the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021.

In fact, one of the organizers of Stop the Steal is far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Ali Alexander, who identifies as Arab and Black. Blacks for Trump signs were spotted in the crowd and some Black and Latino participants are now wanted by the FBI for their alleged involvement in the siege.

In order to understand Trumps support, we must think in terms of multiracial whiteness, Beltrn writes in a Washington Post op-ed: Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.

The motivations of the mob

After weeks of hearing false claims from Trump and his allies that the election was stolen, thousands of the former president's most loyal followers disrupted the certification of the 2020 election results by breaching the U.S. Capitol and clashing with law enforcement in a violent siege that resulted in the death of five people.

Supporters listen as US President Donald Trump speaks on The Ellipse outside of the White House, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

This insistence -- and not just Trumps, but other elected officials insistence on that narrative of disinformation and that false conspiracy about the election has played a huge role in mobilizing these people, Miller-Idriss said.

In fact, chants shouted by rioters and signs spotted in the crowd closely mirrored Trumps own words.

For instance, the rally was named Stop the Steal, a phrase the Trump appeared to revel in and tweeted repeatedly before his account was suspended; shortly after Trump urged supporters to march to the Capitol and fight like hell, rioters shouted fight for Trump as they violently breached law enforcement to enter the building; signs reading take back our country and Trump won the legal vote were spotted among rioters, reflecting language Trump has been using for weeks on Twitter as he repeated his false claims that the election was stolen from him.

Member of a pro-Trump mob exit the Capitol Building after teargas is dispersed inside, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

And finally, after Trump continued to falsely claim that Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to ratify President Joe Biden's 2020 win -- but had declined to do so, chants of Hang Mike Pence were heard among rioters and images casting Pence as a traitor were scattered among the crowd.

(Trump) was continuing to propagate and circulate and disseminate this information about the election in ways that posed an existential threat to them and made them feel that their democracy has been stolen, Miller-Idriss said.

"People move from radicalization into mobilization, to really believing that they are not only empowered to act, but compelled to do so.

People shelter in the House gallery as protesters try to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington.

The leader of the mob

According to Rosenthal, far-right groups that subscribe to white nationalist ideologies have always existed in the United States and since the second era of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and 30s they have generally existed on the fringes of society, but Trump gave them a place in national politics.

Trump supporters gather outside the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington.

Suddenly, in 2015 at the level of presidential politics, somebody is talking their language, he added, pointing to Trump's anti-immigrant and racially charged rhetoric.

During his presidency, Trump frequently failed to condemn white supremacists and far-right groups espousing hateful and disproven conspiracy theories. He also often galvanized their causes.

The Stop the Steal movement energized some of the same elements of the far-right movement in the U.S. that shaped the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville when hundreds of so-called alt-right groups took to the streets to violently protest the removal of Confederate monuments.

The Unite the Right [movement] failed. It did not create such a unified militia and the groups that put it together started falling apart among themselves the alt-right kind of went into decline, but 2020 resurrected things, Rosenthal said.

This past year, anti-lockdown and anti-mask demonstrations amid the COVID-19 pandemic inflamed the anti-government right-wing militia groups, while the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted over the summer following the police killing of George Floyd activated the white nationalist side of the far-right movement, Rosenthal added.

Supporters of President Donald Trump gather in the rain for a rally at Freedom Plaza, Jan. 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C., the day before a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol following a rally with Trump.

And Trump, who was outspoken on both issues, elevated these positions to the national stage, experts said.

As president, Trump repeatedly downplayed the pandemic, refused to implement a nationwide mask mandate, mostly refused to wear a mask himself and his administration frequently flouted federal safety guidelines meant to curb the crisis.

Meanwhile, during his 2020 campaign, Trump cast himself as the law and order candidate, slammed the Black Lives Matter movement, dismissed concerns surrounding systemic racism and police brutality and in a message to voters, he claimed that if he is not re-elected, crime and riots will overtake the suburbs.

President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a rally Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington D.C.

During his final weeks in office, the coalition of far-right groups again found a common cause around the baseless cause that the election had been stolen or rigged.

The white nationalist and anti-government currents compounded in "Stop the Steal," along with an important element of "fascist mobilizations," Rosenthal said: "A devotion to a singular leader who can command their attention.

ABC News' Alexander Mallin and John Santucci contributed to this report.

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Anatomy of the pro-Trump mob: How the former president's rhetoric galvanized a far-right coalition - ABC News

Like Emma, Oylers narrator teeters on the border between likable and loathsome and possesses enormous reserves of intellectual and libidinal energy in search of an outlet. Emma is handsome, clever and rich; Oylers narrator is also those things, albeit in somewhat lesser form. And perhaps most significantly, she too is fumbling, a little blindly, around the problem of her privilege, which she is aware of but not yet existentially troubled by.

In the wake of the election, she observes that for her cohort, the incoming administration would not affect them particularly sweepingly and that in fact, being a white woman living in Brooklyn began to feel, very briefly, less repugnant; the white women living in Brooklyn, in the end, were ultimately just annoying, point-missing and distracting, not the biggest problem.

A somewhat retrograde cynic, a toxic presence, the narrator armors herself in wit, continually hedging her position and thus her engagement with the political tumult around her. She hesitates to go to the Womens March not because I was ideologically opposed to the idea necessarily but because it seemed there would be a lot of pink, which in a feminist context signaled to me a lack of rigor. Later, she refers to her story as a typical searching bourgeois-white-person narrative.

But this cynicism blunts her ability to navigate the world, and her own emotions, with catastrophic results. Her friends tell her shes overcompensating for my despair with snark; I didnt have to be so clever all the time. What was the point of making jokes, she wonders, frustrated and teary. The narrator repeatedly gestures at the limitations of her irony, without necessarily being able to see beyond it.

That sense of entrapment of not knowing how to relate to the world is central to the novel. Oyler is such a funny writer that it can be easy to overlook the fact that the underlying tone of her book is extreme disquiet. Irony provides no protection from unease, but is itself a source of it. It becomes clear why the novel takes place in the days after the 2016 election. This period brought the rapid ascent of the alt-right, the proliferation of its language and symbols. Notably, that language was one of plausible deniability, hate expressed under the cover of irony.

At first glance, that particular form of toxic irony seems miles away from the lacerating humor and thrusting intellect of our narrator. But cynicism leaves her vulnerable to misapprehending the world and the people in it including her very online, conspiracy theorist boyfriend. The reader grasps much earlier than she does not only the final layer of Felixs betrayals, but also the grim possibility that she fell in love with Felix not despite his deceptions but because of them that there is an uncomfortable alliance between her lazy nihilism and his reactionary online persona.

How do we relate to irony and cynicism in this new age of the alt-right? Stylish, despairing and very funny, Fake Accounts doesnt necessarily provide an answer to this question. But it adroitly maps the dwindling gap between the individual and the world. However much time the narrator spends alone, in her head and online, she is formed by what is happening outside. Eventually, the realization hits: The entire time, the call has been coming from inside the house.

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Fake Accounts Examines the Alluring Trap of Our Online Personas - The New York Times

Often I am reluctant to acknowledge myself as a former Baptist. No longer a Baptist (a long story), I am nevertheless proud of a basic Baptist tenet separation of church and state.

The First Amendment short but brilliant is, in fact, the foundation of freedom on which our beloved nation stands. It is a grand and bold statement. The First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Civil War of 1861-1865 was fought over states rights to secede, and eventually and inevitably over the issue of slavery. During that war, at Gettysburg, Penn., President Abraham Lincoln said, Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.

Sadly, now we are engaged is a great civil and cultural war. It is an attack upon truth itself. The press is assailed as fake news, the findings of science are debunked (global warming), and the exercise of free speech is taken to allow sedition and insurrection as patriotic.

Most pernicious, to my mind, is the conflating of church and state by the religious alt-right, with undertones of white supremacy, racism, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitism and Christian nationalism. The civil or cultural war of today, in part, is being fought, alas, with sedition and insurrection, over our country being a Christian nation, which it is not now, nor ever was, nor ever should be.

The First Amendment guarantees that the USA is a nation that includes and welcomes peoples of all religious persuasions, and those of no persuasion. Our founders were primarily Enlightenment Deists with a profound faith in reason, upon which the Constitution was based. Thomas Jefferson is famous for the Jefferson Bible, cutting out portions of the Bible with which he disagreed.

We make a grave and grievous mistake conflating our nation with any particular religion to the exclusion of other faiths. The great experiment of our nation, as conceived, is embedded in the First Amendment. One nation, many diverse peoples. One nation, many faiths. It is a bold and grand experiment. Shall it endure?

Conflating nation and religion often results in a distortion of patriotism, which tends toward idolatry of nation. True patriotism is defined by love of ones country indeed, the willingness to fight, and if necessary, to die for the freedoms our country affords, including the freedom of religion, along with free speech, etc.

I love this country and the values and freedoms for which it stands. But I cannot admire nor condone those who strive to undermine the very foundation of freedom that must be afforded to every person. I pray this nation and the foundation on which it stands shall not only long endure, but thrive, with liberty and justice for all.

The Rev. Dr. Lloyd Parrill is a retired United Church of Christ minister. He served the Trinitarian Congregational Church, UCC, in Northfield for 35 years, from 1977 to 2012.

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Faith Matters: Our bold and grand experiment: Shall it endure? - The Recorder

As soon as President Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, political pundits began speculating on what the post-Trump Republican Party would look like. Fresh on the political scene and the newest sweetheart of the Republican Party, Madison Cawthorn just might be a picture of what a future GOP might embody: a concerning picture.

Cawthorn was born and raised in western North Carolina and was sworn in this January as North Carolina District 11s representative at the U.S. House at only 25 years old. Cawthorns politics combine traditional social conservative values, youthful proximity to Gen Z, Trumpism and an utter lack of experience or education. Now, under a guise of charisma and youth, Cawthorn is bringing hard-right conservative values and dangerous rhetoric to Congress as a representative of North Carolina.

Despite many Republicans making a last-ditch effort to put distance between themselves and President Trump after a disastrous and deadly end to his term, Trump has left a lasting impact on the Republican Party (GOP), especially their voters whom Cawthorn skillfully appeals to. Cawthorns Twitter presence, much like Trumps prior to being banned, is peppered with immaturity, including calling his Democratic opponent a simp and infamously tweeting Cry more, lib right after winning his House race.

Fearmongering and conspiracy theories also make appearances. In alignment with Trumps base, Cawthorn has actively promoted debunked allegations of election fraud, objected to the Electoral College votes on the House floor and contributed to the incitement of violence in the events of Jan. 6. Cawthorn also seems unconcerned about COVID-19, rarely mentioning the virus on social media except to ostensibly compare public health restrictions on businesses during the pandemic to oligarchical rule an absurd misuse of the term.

Like former President Trump, Cawthorn is also the focus of multiple sexual misconduct allegations and accusations of white supremacy. Various symbols of the alt-right have been discovered around him including the name of his real estate company, on a gun holster he owns, a flag flown at his home, a picture posted while visiting Hitler's vacation home prompting concern that he is an alt-right Trojan horse.

Perhaps due to his young age, Madison Cawthorn seems aware of the generational rift amongst Republicans. According to Pew Research Center, young Republicans are far more likely than their older counterparts to believe that climate change exists, acknowledge the unfair treatment of Black Americans and say that the government should do more to solve problems. While Cawthorn claims to take an active stance on issues like these that aren't traditionally Republican, the actions he proposes on his website concerning health care and the environment are essentially a doubling down on free-market approaches.

Status quo 2.0. Madison Cawthorn consistently speaks of a big tent New Republican Party that welcomes voters of any identity. Meanwhile, he and his conservative colleagues show absolutely no desire to protect voters of more marginalized identities. Cawthorn simply wants a rebranded Republican Party capable of capturing new voting blocs without any real shift in policy or ideology.

Although Rep. Madison Cawthorn may be an appealing political figure to conservative Gen Z voters who want a party rebrand that is in alignment with the policies that matter most to our generation the environment, health care, being seen as welcoming this rebrand is nothing more than a face-lift. While this slight shift in focus might make the Republican platform more palatable on the surface, figures like Cawthorn could ultimately represent a dangerous shift to the right. As support for a conservative agenda has lapsed amongst younger voters, it is not a surprise that the rising leaders will hail from farther right areas of the party. Meanwhile, Cawthorn claims to speak for the younger generation, but his ultra-conservatism simply doesn't align with the values of young North Carolinians.

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OPINION: Madison Cawthorn shows the troubling future of the GOP - N.C. State University Technician Online

It's been a clarion call of the political right -- "big tech" is biased toward liberals and the political left and advances their agenda, all at the expense of conservatives.

Former President Donald Trump and his allies have long complained about it and suggested conservatives were being censored, allegations social media companies pushed back on.

But the complaints obscure the reality of the social media environment and the right and far-right's deft use of technology over the past several years.

Protesters carring zip ties enter the Senate Chamber on in the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021.

Nowhere was that disconnect more prominently displayed recently than in the failed siege at the Capitol on Jan. 6, some experts who spoke with ABC News said.

The right-wing corners of the internet, which include some of Trump's most ardent supporters, white supremacists and militia members, have harnessed technology to amplify their ideology, these experts said.

Since the days of internet chat rooms and forums like 4chan and 8chan (rebranded as 8kun), the far-right has exploited advances in technology to get around bans from one platform or another.

In the wake of the Capitol siege, Trump and his extreme allies were pushed off mainstream social media networks, one of the principal driving forces behind the Make America Great Again movement. So too were white nationalists and other extremist, violent facets of the right wing. Companies that have banned Trump and right-wing accounts and apps including Facebook, Apple, Google and Reddit, issued some form of the same statement as to the reason for their actions -- their terms of service forbid inciting violence.

But the experts interviewed by ABC News said that these right-wing factions have been able to persist online by staying a step ahead.

They say decentralized platforms, apps and sympathetic hosting providers have become part of the right-wing's technology arsenal. Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey dropped hints about helping to create a decentralized social media platform in a series of recent tweets. In a tweet on Jan. 13, Dorsey said, "We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media."

Trump used Twitter like no president before him, and without technology, the former president, his supporters and allies may not have as successfully carved out a large chunk of cyberspace serving as a platform for Trump's MAGA movement.

The Tea Party emerged in 2009 with an agenda to push back then President Barack Obama's policies and promote its libertarian-conservative agenda of small government and less taxes. "Tea Party patriots" used Facebook, Twitter and online conservative forums like Free Republic to organize rallies around the country. Some political pundits consider the Tea Party to be the genesis of the MAGA movement -- and the start of a fissure between moderate conservatives and hard-liners.

The logo of conservative social media platform Gab on a computer and mobile telephone screen, in Paris, Jan. 12, 2021. Gab CEO Andrew Torba claims his social media platform is registering a surge of nearly 10,000 new users per hour in the wake of Amazon's shutdown of conservative social media application Parler, widely used by conservatives and supporters of Former President Donald Trump who are now flocking to the Gab platform.

Trump, already a TV celebrity, took to those same platforms, ramping up followers in the millions. To date, the official Tea Party Facebook page has 1.3 million followers, and Trump's page has 35 million.

In recent years, the internet and some of its darkest reaches connected mostly older Trump supporters with younger denizens of online right-wing platforms including militia members, white supremacists and those in the tech-oriented "alt-right."

As seen in the harrowing images and video from the Capitol melee, rioters ranged in age from 20-somethings to Baby Boomers -- and these different age groups, which tended to aggregate in different internet circles, have been converging in common online spaces.

"There's a lot of Boomer QAnon supporters," said Emmi Bevensee, data scientist, founder of Rebellious Data LLC and author of the report, "The Decentralized Web of Hate."

But QAnon has "people from the 8kun and 4chan network who are extremely battle-hardened and have been running targeted swarm harassment and psy-ops up for many, many years now," Bevensee said. While there's no hard data on 4chan or 8kun's demographics, those sites are generally associated with younger, male users.

In fact, 4chan and 8chan, which used to be underground communities posting and sharing often toxic and hateful content, have made their way to the highest level of U.S. politics, said Bevensee.

Ron Watkins, the former 8chan administrator and current administrator of its successor, the Watkins-owned 8kun, became involved in the unfounded Dominion voting machine fraud conspiracy after he filed an affidavit with Trump advocate and attorney Sidney Powell in the dismissed Georgia voter fraud lawsuit, baselessly speculating that "it may be 'within the realm of possibility' for a biased poll worker to fraudulently switch votes, the Washington Post reported.

Conspiracy theories about Dominion were embraced by Trump and his allies and helped fuel the "Stop the Steal" campaign that ended in the Capitol siege.

Forums and online communities aren't the only technology the far-right have embraced.

Even with the mass banning from traditional social networks, some of the most-followed podcasts are hosted by right-wing influencers. According to podcastsinsight.com, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has the No. 5 of the Top 100 podcasts listened to on Apple Podcasts, and young conservative activist, Charlie Kirk's podcast is No. 8. as of January 2021.

During the 2020 presidential debates, the conversations with the most user engagement on Facebook about the debates were on conservative Facebook pages: Fox News, Breitbart and Shapiro's page, according to data from social media analyzer CrowdTangle, the New York Times reported. A spokesperson for Shapiro emphasized, however, that Shapiro repeatedly refuted claims of widespread election fraud. Shapiro told his audience that former Vice President Pence was not able to stop the certification process in several instances on Twitter and on his podcast encouraged his followers to accept the electoral college representatives and their votes.

Pro-Trump protesters storm the Capitol during clashes with police in Washington, D.C, Jan. 6, 2021.

Clearly, those on the left side of the political spectrum also use technology to further grassroots movements and to organize rallies. Facebook's official Black Lives Matter page has over 750,000 followers. Meet-ups and events are posted there regularly. The anti-fascist movement referred to as "antifa" gained prominence after white nationalists rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Yet, there's no organized antifa group with clearly defined leadership -- for instance, there is no verified antifa Facebook page, but there are accounts online that describe themselves as antifa-affiliated; who they actually are is unknown. In June, Twitter suspended the ANTIFA_US account saying it was actually tied to a white nationalist group, Axios reported.

But more pressure is being placed on companies who advertise on conservative media, and as traditional social networks throw more of those voices off their platforms, the right wing, and in particular the most fringe elements including white supremacists, are turning to more sophisticated tech platforms including blockchain and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks -- where computers are connected to each other over the internet and share resources. P2P networks allow for decentralized networks and platforms where there is no one controlling or managing entity -- essentially, these networks are unregulated -- open frontiers for all kinds of content including the most base and hateful.

On the cutting edge of tech

David Golumbia, associate professor of digital studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the author of "The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism," said he believes the radical right not only utilizes but helps drive technological innovation.

"Sometimes people say pornography drives technological innovation, which is partly true. But I sometimes think that the radical right is way up there," he said. Golumbia has written on the far-right's adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain -- a type of database where data is stored in blocks and then chained together. It's the underlying platform for Bitcoin and used in a decentralized way -- no one person or group has control of the platform.

"The whole idea of blockchain was to prevent government from being able to have any say whatsoever about technology," said Golumbia.

He said some of the most fervent proponents of blockchain-based cryptocurrency including Bitcoin, have been those who "identified strongly with the far right," a concern also mentioned in a 2019 congressional report.

A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center states that "many on the far-right were early adopters" of digital currency. The SPLC's website features a list "of some of the most prominent white nationalists and other extremists who accept Bitcoin."

In December 2020, Laurent Bachelier, a French computer programmer, donated more than $500,000 in Bitcoin to various right-wing causes, before dying by suicide, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Blockchain is a type of P2P technology, but there are others. Some include decentralized messaging apps like Telegram and Signal; and social networks like Minds, Mastodon and Diaspora. Decentralized messaging apps and social networks allow message exchanges and interaction from user to user without any central authority or server.

Conversely, centralized platforms have one governing authority that holds all the platform's data, transactions and user information. Examples of centralized online platforms include government websites, banking sites and commercial platforms and apps like Facebook, Twitter and Lyft.

Parler, Gab and Discord are not on blockchain but they use bits of some of the same distributed technology, said Golumbia.

Crowds arrive for the "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election.

While many founders of decentralized platforms including blockchain and P2P have said they are dedicated to the idea of a free and democratized internet, experts like Bevensee and others see evidence of decentralized technology's increasing use by the extreme far-right.

Evan Henshaw-Plath is the co-founder and CEO of Planetary described as "a humane decentralized social media platform." Henshaw-Plath, a founding member of Twitter said, "we've seen a lot of interest and people moving over from centralized platforms over the last few weeks." He said the platform has been "overwhelmed by new users."

For him, open networks are an alternative to "Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, et al" which he likens to "a shopping mall."

"[They] feel like a public space but in reality it's a corporate-run space."

But, "we're not all interested in becoming a platform or tool for white supremacists and Trump supporters," Henshaw-Plath said. He said he marched nightly in Portland at Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd was killed, even getting pepper-sprayed.

"I'm not going to spend every night protesting for racial justice and then every day work to build a platform to empower racists."

Planetary's terms of service doesn't allow hate speech or conspiracy theories.

Daryl Davis is an official adviser to decentralized social network Minds. He's been working with the Mind's team on de-radicalization methods through open communication and through hosting a weekly podcast at Change.minds.com where he said he has interviewed white supremacists and extremists to "engage in constructive, productive conversation."

Davis, who is Black, said he thinks banning speech, even hate speech on open internet platforms is problematic.

"A lot of topics are taboo. And there aren't enough platforms that are willing to deal with [that]. And people cannot express their views they tend to build underground, and go to the dark side and [it] becomes a pressure cooker. And then they explode. So we need something where everybody can talk," Davis said.

As to banning racist, hate speech, Davis said, "When you ban those things, for some people, it empowers them, it enables them to think 'I'm being banned because I'm telling the truth.'"

Yet, despite some progressive founders and advocates' support for open, decentralized and more ethical internet platforms, Bevensee said "various organizing attempts of white supremacist attacks have already utilized P2P technology to facilitate white supremacist violence."

For example, the suspect in the 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, posted on 8chan, according to investigative journalism website Bellingcat.

"When I used to track the Atomwaffen Division which is like this Nazi accelerationist group, they were really actively organizing through Gab," Bevensee said.

And leading up to the Capitol siege, Bevensee said online users were flagging law enforcement about violent posts related to the Capitol and the Stop the Steal rally. "All these journalists who study the far-right, just started retweeting them with screenshots from Parler from the Donald.wins [website]," Bevensee said. This included posts "from those of just people explicitly planning, like the exact details down to 'here's where you can buy zip ties.' Very specific, very violent things completely in the open. And we have 99.9% of all that data," said Bevensee.

Countering far-right extremism in technology

Many of the most extreme Trump supporters and the far-right have been silenced by Big Tech. But by no means have they been silenced for good.

Parler has been in the midst of a legal battle with Amazon, which previously provided hosting through Amazon Web Services. After Jan. 6, when evidence came out that Parler users had posted hateful content -- loaded with threats of violence and racial slurs Amazon suspended web hosting services to Parler, essentially forcing it offline.

And a judge recently threw out Parler's plea for reinstatement, finding that Amazon was not obligated to restore its web service, The Associated Press reported.

And these platforms may move more toward P2P technology, according to Bevensee. "It's not impossible, that Parler will move to Mastodon," according to Bevensee.

Mastodon is one of the decentralized social media platforms allowing anyone to set up their own social network and dictate the content and rules for their network. "If they do, that'll be like one of the largest uses of peer-to peer social media technology They'd be federating with Gab" and other like-minded communities, possibly creating a vast online community, Bevensee said.

Such a pivot could exacerbate the far-right's online activities even as they are banned from various platforms.

"These communities are so agile, they just immediately build the same community with a slightly different name, or even the same name. And even though they lose all their channel subscribers, because of the search indexes, it's really easy for the channel subscribers to find the new one," Bevensee said.

How do you stop online activity from promoting propaganda and whipping up the frenzy that resulted in the lawlessness on Capitol Hill? It's not an easy solution, especially when technology is involved.

Getting lawmakers more tech-savvy is one way. "Senators Elizabeth Warren, Mark Warner, quite a few others" recognize that a change is needed overall with social media networks and online communications but should be thoughtful and nuanced, Golumbia said.

For now, the challenge remains: how to work out a balance between allowing diverse voices online while putting reins on extremist content that has far too often been mobilized into violence.

Editors Note: This article has been updated to reflect the views of Ben Shapiro on the results of the 2020 presidential election.

ABC News' Catherine Thorbecke, Katherine Faulders and Libby Cathey contributed to this report.

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How the far-right harnessed tech in the lead-up to the Capitol riot - ABC News