The rise of social media platforms like Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit, meant that white nationalists had many places to go online besides Stormfront. For ideologically committed white supremacists, the affordances of Twitter pointed to new mechanisms for the furtive spread of propaganda and for vicious harassment with little accountability. Twitter gained a reputation among some users for its use of hashtags for breaking news and for organizing, as in the Arab Spring in 2010 and Black Lives Matter in 2013. Social media experts like to talk about the “design affordances” of a platform, meaning the built-in clues that suggest how a platform is meant to be used. When Twitter launched in 2006, it unwittingly gave white supremacists an ideal venue for their hatred.
as a “haven for hate” online as early as 2002. It’s this constellation of factors that prompted legal scholar Peter Breckheimer to refer to the U.S.
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Then, both of these synced up with the peculiarly American anything-goes-approach to free speech. Their opportunistic agenda converged with tech companies’ approach to all content as value-neutral. While Derek would leave the movement behind as an adult, his father’s quest to make Stormfront into the gathering place for racial grievance-sharing and conspiracy-theory-spinning forged a set of connections among white nationalists that positioned them well to make the most of social media. “When I was a little kid, I would get on chat rooms in the evening … and I had friends in Australia who I would talk to at a certain hour … I had friends in Serbia I would talk to at a certain hour, ” Derek said. “We had the latest computers, we were the first people in the neighborhood to have broadband because we had to keep Stormfront running, and so technology and connecting people on the website, long before social media.” Stormfront provided a hub for connections among white supremacists globally, even for children. That was what drove him from the early ’90s, from beginning of the web,” Don Black’s son, Derek (and Duke’s godson) explained in a recent interview. “Pioneering white nationalism on the web was my dad’s goal. White supremacists like Duke and Don Black, who started Stormfront-the largest and longest running portal for white supremacy online-saw the potential of the internet for spreading their message early on. “I believe that the internet will begin a chain reaction of racial enlightenment that will shake the world by the speed of its intellectual conquest,” former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke wrote on his website in 1998. The internet has been the biggest advance for white supremacy since the end of Jim Crow.
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