They tend to be young, at least according to self-reported birth dates. The most common age at which people join the site is nineteen. And four times more nineteen-year-olds sign up than forty-year-olds. Internet and social network users lean young, but not nearly that young.
Profiles do not have a field for gender. But I looked at all the posts and complete profiles of a random sample of American users, and it turns out that you can work out the gender of most of the membership: I estimate that about 30 percent of Stormfront members are female.
The states with the most members per capita are Montana, Alaska, and Idaho. These states tend to be overwhelmingly white. Does this mean that growing up with little diversity fosters hate?
Probably not. Rather, since those states have a higher proportion of non-Jewish white people, they have more potential members for a group that attacks Jews and nonwhites. The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are eighteen and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live.
Among this age group, California, a state with one of the largest minority populations, has a membership rate 25 percent higher than the national average.
One of the most popular social groups on the site is “In Support of Anti-Semitism.” The percentage of members who join this group is positively correlated with a state’s Jewish population. New York, the state with the highest Jewish population, has above-average per capita membership in this group.
In 2001, Dna88 joined Stormfront, describing himself as a “good looking, racially aware” thirty-year-old Internet developer living in “Jew York City.” In the next four months, he wrote more than two hundred posts, like “Jewish Crimes Against Humanity” and “Jewish Blood Money,” and directed people to a website, jewwatch.com, which claims to be a “scholarly library” on “Zionist criminality.”
Stormfront members complain about minorities’ speaking different languages and committing crimes. But what I found most interesting were the complaints about competition in the dating market.
A man calling himself William Lyon Mackenzie King, after a former prime minister of Canada who once suggested that “Canada should remain a white man’s country,” wrote in 2003 that he struggled to “contain” his “rage” after seeing a white woman “carrying around her half black ugly mongrel niglet.” In her profile, Whitepride26, a forty-one-year-old student in Los Angeles, says, “I dislike blacks, Latinos, and sometimes Asians, especially when men find them more attractive” than “a white female.”
Certain political developments play a role. The day that saw the biggest single increase in membership in Stormfront’s history, by far, was November 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama was elected president. There was, however, no increased interest in Stormfront during Donald Trump’s candidacy and only a small rise immediately after he won. Trump rode a wave of white nationalism. There is no evidence here that he created a wave of white nationalism.
Obama’s election led to a surge in the white nationalist movement. Trump’s election seems to be a response to that.
One thing that does not seem to matter: economics. There was no relationship between monthly membership registration and a state’s unemployment rate. States disproportionately affected by the Great Recession saw no comparative increase in Google searches for Stormfront.
But perhaps what was most interesting—and surprising—were some of the topics of conversation Stormfront members have. They are similar to those my friends and I talk about. Maybe it was my own na?veté, but I would have imagined white nationalists inhabiting a different universe from that of my friends and me. Instead they have long threads praising Game of Thrones and discussing the comparative merits of online dating sites, like PlentyOfFish and OkCupid.
And the key fact that shows that Stormfront users are inhabiting similar universes as people like me and my friends: the popularity of the New York Times among Stormfront users. It isn’t just VikingMaiden88 hanging around the Times site. The site is popular among many of its members. In fact, when you compare Stormfront users to people who visit the Yahoo News site, it turns out that the Stormfront crowd is twice as likely to visit nytimes.com.
Members of a hate site perusing the oh-so-liberal nytimes.com? How could this possibly be? If a substantial number of Stormfront members get their news from nytimes.com, it means our conventional wisdom about white nationalists is wrong. It also means our conventional wisdom about how the internet works is wrong.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE INTERNET
The internet, most everybody agrees, is driving Americans apart, causing most people to hole up in sites geared toward people like them. Here’s how Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School described the situation: “Our communications market is rapidly moving [toward a situation where] people restrict themselves to their own points of view—liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; Neo-Nazis, Neo-Nazis.”
This view makes sense. After all, the internet gives us a virtually unlimited number of options from which we can consume the news. I can read whatever I want. You can read whatever you want. VikingMaiden88 can read whatever she wants. And people, if left to their own devices, tend to seek out viewpoints that confirm what they believe. Thus, surely, the internet must be creating extreme political segregation.
There is one problem with this standard view. The data tells us that it is simply not true.
The evidence against this piece of conventional wisdom comes from a 2011 study by Matt Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, two economists whose work we discussed earlier.
Gentzkow and Shapiro collected data on the browsing behavior of a large sample of Americans. Their dataset also included the ideology—self-reported—of their subjects: whether people considered themselves more liberal or conservative. They used this data to measure the political segregation on the internet.
How? They performed an interesting thought experiment.
Suppose you randomly sampled two Americans who happen to both be visiting the same news website. What is the probability one of them will be liberal and the other conservative? How frequently, in other words, do liberals and conservatives “meet” on news sites?