Stormfront
White supremacists anonymous: how digital media emotionally energize far-right movements
December 4, 2024Digital media platforms have been implicated in the recent rise of far-right extremism. This study proposes that these platforms afford emotional processes that lie at the core of far-right movements. Drawing on Randall Collins’ interactional framework and the literature on cultural trauma, we investigate the emotional processes triggered by traumatic experiences within far-right online communities. ...
Grooming for Terror: The Internet and Young People
October 20, 2024The use of the Internet to spawn hate sites and recruit advocates for hate began as early as the mid-1980s in bulletin boards, and the first acknowledged hate site was Stormfront, in the early 1990s. Since then hundreds of hate sites and other websites advocating terror have been developed, some with stated aims of recruiting ...
Eco-Fascism Online: Conceptualizing Far-Right Actors’ Response to Climate Change on Stormfront
August 29, 2024Expressions of ‘eco-fascism’ are said to entail ethnonationalist actors advocating extreme population control measures, and accelerationists hastening the collapse of societies worldwide. These expressions emerge from political-ideological environments in which Global North actors have erroneously assigned blame for climate change with the Global South, through rhetoric about migration, population control and fossil fuel usage. To ...
Comparing the Online Posting Behaviors of Violent and Non-Violent Right-Wing Extremists
August 8, 2024VOX-Pol Blog Post. ...
Don’t (Just) Blame Echo Chambers. Conspiracy Theorists Actively Seek Out Their Online Communities
August 7, 2024VOX-Pol Blog Post. ...
Adversarial Shifts and the Availability of Extremist Content Online
July 25, 2024VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
Inside a White Power echo chamber: Why fringe digital spaces are polarizing politics
September 18, 2023Recent decades have seen a blurring of the line between extremist movements and mainstream politics, driven by rising sectarian polarization. This development has been linked to digital media, with suggestions that so-called echo chambers may drive political radicalization. To understand the social processes taking place inside such digital spaces, this article draws on Randall Collins ...
More than a Joke: White Supremacist Humor as a Daily Form of Resistance
September 18, 2023We conduct an ethnographic content analysis to examine the social interaction and racial identity constructed through the exchange of white supremacist humor shared on three Stormfront discussion subforums. Overall, white supremacist joke sharing functioned multidimensionally as it simultaneously fostered cohesion and contention among users. By mocking political correctness and non-Whites through the circulation of humorous ...
Whiteness feels good here: interrogating white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront
September 18, 2023This essay adopts a critical rhetorical perspective attuned to affect to investigate white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, a popular white nationalist message board. My analysis illuminates how Stormfront attempts to appeal to mainstream white audiences by resisting normative expectations and affects articulated with white supremacy and (re)constructing white nationalism as a formation of white racial ...
Exploring “Stormfront”: A Virtual Community of the Radical Right
September 18, 2023In considering how terrorist movements use the Internet, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we must move beyond predominantly descriptive overviews of the contents of websites to examine in more detail the notion of virtual communities of support and the functions of these for their members. Virtual communities in support of terrorist movements are real ...