Inside a White Power echo chamber: Why fringe digital spaces are polarizing politics
September 18, 2023
Recent 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, 2023
We 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, 2023
This 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, 2023
In 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 ...
The temporal evolution of a far-right forum
September 18, 2023
The increased threat of right-wing extremist violence necessitates a better understanding of online extremism. Radical message boards, small-scale social media platforms, and other internet fringes have been reported to fuel hatred. The current paper examines data from the right-wing forum Stormfront between 2001 and 2015. We specifically aim to understand the development of user activity ...
Understanding The Collective Identity Of The Radical Right Online: A Mixed-Methods Approach
September 18, 2023
Criminologists have generally agreed that the Internet is not only a tool or resource for right-wing extremists to disseminate ideas and products, but also a site of important identity work, accomplished interactively through the exchange of radical ideas. Online discussion forums, amongst other interactive corners of the Web, have become an essential conduit for the ...