The network, which largely operates on Telegram, has been linked to a series of violent attacks, officials say.

United States officials have imposed sanctions on an online network known as the Terrorgram Collective, designating it a “terrorist group” over its promotion of violent white supremacy around the world.

The Department of State said in a statement on Monday that it had designated the group, which primarily operates on the Telegram social media site, and three of its leaders as “specially designated global terrorists”.

“The group promotes violent white supremacism, solicits attacks on perceived adversaries, and provides guidance and instructional materials on tactics, methods, and targets,” the State Department explained.

“The group also glorifies those who have conducted such attacks.”

The State Department accused the group of facilitating attacks and attempted violence, including a 2022 shooting outside an LGBTQ bar in Slovakia, a planned attack in 2024 on energy facilities in New Jersey and an August knife attack at a mosque in Turkiye.

“The United States remains deeply concerned about the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist (REMVE) threat worldwide and committed to countering transnational components of violent white supremacism,” the department said.

The designation freezes any US-based assets held by the group and bars Americans from having financial dealings with those sanctioned.

The three individuals sanctioned on Monday are alleged leaders on the Terrorgram channel: Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira from Brazil, Noah Licul from Croatia and Hendrik-Wahl Muller from South Africa.

In September, US officials arrested two Americans they also identified as leaders of the group: Dallas Erin Humber of California and Matthew Robert Allison of Idaho.

Officials charged them with leading a “transnational terrorist group” as well as with distributing bomb-making instructions, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and soliciting hate crimes and the murder of federal officials.

Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, has written about Terrorgram for years.

She wrote in an analysis after the 2024 arrests that the online group has become “a hub for an increasingly decentralized wing of the white power movement”.

“Its members tended to dissuade others from joining IRL [in real life] groups,” she explained in a separate post on social media.

Terrorgram’s aim was to push for “accelerationism” as an alternative to political avenues for advancing their beliefs, according to Gais.

“White power accelerationists seek to usher in the collapse of the supposedly anti-white ‘System’ through violence and other means, including attacks on infrastructure, with the hope that doing so will usher in a national socialist state,” Gais wrote.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies