Share
share
tweet
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
Words and analysis by Andrew Thompson
Design by Ceros Originals