Assessing the Role of Forums in Facilitating Technological Skill in the White Supremacist Movement
No ratings
Presented at JISIC 2014 by
Research surrounding radicalization to and use of violence among extremist and terror groups has expanded over the last decade. Examinations of both the far right and Islamic extremist movements have improved, utilizing open source data to measure various behavioral and organizational dynamics. Though this has improved our understanding of the nature of lethal violence among extremist groups, there are still many fundamental questions that must be addressed. Specifically, there is a need for greater research on the role of the Internet in radicalization and recruitment as well as creating a venue for cyberattacks against computers and electronic targets generally. Few studies have considered the technical capabilities of extremist groups with limited research indicating that Islamic terror groups espouse the use of hacking techniques but lack the ability to successfully perform attacks on a large scale. Even less research has examined the technical capacity of Far Right groups operating in the United States. Studies demonstrate the importance of websites and newsgroups in the spread and promotion of militia groups and white nationalists in the 1980s and 1990s. Few, however, have examined the ways that technological information is shared within this community and the role of on-line communications in knowledge generation. It is unclear if the far right acquires information on technology use from internal or external sources. Furthermore, there is generally little information on the ways that the information sharing process mirrors that of sophisticated technological subcultures, such as computer hackers. This exploratory study addresses these issues using a qualitative analysis of a sample of threads from a technology-specific subforum of a widely used web forum in the Far Right movement. The findings demonstrate that the process of information sharing is distinct from that of more sophisticated communities, though it utilizes similar resources as the hacker subculture. In addition, the exchanges between users demonstrate that a white nationalist identity links participants, while the main posters serve as a sort of technical support community for the larger forum population. The implications of this study for future research on the technical capacities of extremists and the integration of a hacker and far right subculture are examined in depth.