American Hate Online: The Anatomy of Stormfront.org in 1996

Online white hate has a history as old as the internet itself. The American public has most recently seen virtual hate manifest in physical violence in numerous mass shootings and even in the January 6^th assault on the United States Capitol Building. Understanding the nature and lineage of groups such as the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers is a matter of urgent public necessity. While organized digital hate campaigns are often understood as having coalesced with the rise of the Alt-Right in the early 2010s, hate sites constitute some of the oldest forums on the internet. The oldest surviving hate site on the internet, Tom Metzger’s, Resist.org was founded in 1984 and is still in operation today.

This poster presentation will analyze the earliest recorded instance of the self-proclaimed “largest hate site on the internet,” Stormfront.org, taken in 1996. Analyzing this virtual webpage on a physical poster offers several interesting benefits. It allows the rudimentary, though still very impactful, hyperlink structure of the webpage to be displayed. This poster session will place the homepage for Stormfront.org, as archived by the Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org/web/19961230152643/http://www.stormfront.org/) as the center of a panel of academic annotations which describe the methodology for conducting historical research with digital primary materials, as well as the salient conclusions that can be drawn from such research. Removing the webpage from its digital home and displaying it physically with scholarly annotation places historical webpages alongside archival documents as legitimate artefacts of historical analysis. The poster therefore visually represents both the processes and methodologies involved in identifying and recovering the material, as well as the conclusions to be drawn from the hate material itself.

The 1996 capture of Storfront.org’s front page provides a necessary bridge between the 1980s operations of its founder, former Klansman Don Black, and present forms of virulent, pervasive digital hate. Analyzing early digital hate sites, generally, from the 1980s and 1990s firmly demonstrates that much of the white power rhetoric found online today is not disconnected from the organization of earlier white power groups such as the Klu Klux Klan or Aryan Nation. The early period, and its surviving digital primary sources, function as a bridge between these two eras of white power organization.