Words & analysis by Andrew Thompson
The rise of right-wing hate in the United States has left no shortage of bloody outbursts. This month, Rolling Stone published the story of four young men drawn to neo-nazi terrorism through internet forums, progressing from anti-semitic memes on 4chan/pol to violence in South Florida—they joined the right-wing terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, which advocates the replacement of the state with a “Fourth Reich”, by means nuclear or otherwise. By 2017, the quartet disintegrated after one member murdered two others.
But the ascent of extremism has also left a surfeit of data. In partnership with Rolling Stone, Ceros Originals sifted through 20-gigabytes of 4chan archives maintained by the site 4plebs, a voluntary operation of 4chan community members interested in preserving the site’s disappearing posts. Searching the archive for key terms shows upward trends of the right-wing extremism that radicalized the story’s subjects. Those trends include not just the growing discussion around Atomwaffen, but also the stream of outlinks to the website of Iron March—a now-defunct neo-nazi organization—and of terms like “Read Siege”, something of a white supremacist slogan referring to a text called “Siege” that prophecies a looming Charles Manson-like race war. Racial slurs in general have steadily ticked upward.
The results, while hardly comprehensive, chart a broader shift on the fringe of political dialogue, one for which the Atomwaffen is only a single, extreme example.
We partnered with Rolling Stone to chart the growth of fascism and racism on one of the internet's most notorious forums.
4chan and the Rise of White Supremacy
