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  Much of Rudolph's life had not been so carefree. His father died of cancer when he was fifteen. Because his mother was only an occasional presence, Rudolph and his two brothers largely raised themselves in a remote area in the mountains of western North Carolina. He dropped out of school as a teenager, sometimes working as a carpenter. Though Rudolph later earned a GED, he only lasted a few semesters at Western Carolina University. He then enrolled in the army but was disappointed that he couldn't make it into the Special Forces and was subsequently discharged for smoking pot.

  Rudolph had a familiar looking series of personal inhibitors and destabilizers—absent parents, limited social network, no career or future prospects, despite his intelligence—ones that left him adrift and vulnerable to radicalization.26 But, although Rudolph's extremist attacks took place in the late 1990s, after McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing, his radicalization still appears to have been exclusively offline.

  Rudolph was exposed to extreme right-wing politics early on. In ninth grade, he wrote an essay explaining why the Holocaust never happened. Pressed for sources by his teachers, Rudolph produced an anti-Semitic pamphlet. His house was filled with similar materials, including Thunderbolt, a magazine produced by Georgia-based white supremacist minister Ed Fields.

  Rudolph also had regular exposure to people with extremist beliefs, including Christian Identity minister Nord Davis, Jr.,27 and a survivalist neighbor who lived in the mountains of North Carolina in a steel and cinderblock fortress stocked with guns, canned food, water, and gasoline. When Rudolph was eighteen, his mom briefly moved the family to a Christian Identity compound in Schell City, Missouri.28

  After dropping out of college and then washing out of the army in eighteen months, Rudolph spent most of the next six years in an off-the-grid trailer in North Carolina's Appalachians, an unlikely spot for internet access. But, by 1996, with no known help from online materials, Rudolph was fully committed to violence directed by extremist ideologies.

  He began his two-year campaign of violence with a bomb at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta that killed two and wounded over a hundred people. He would later bomb a gay nightclub outside Atlanta and two abortion clinics in Georgia and Alabama. Despite a growing amount of hate online, the most famous perpetrators of 1990s right-wing terrorism were slow-cooked and homegrown.

  But if extremist websites were relatively unsuccessful at bringing new members into the fold, they did continue to grow in popularity among the already committed. In the 2000s, Don Black's Stormfront became the number one hate site on the web. It was modern, highly accessible, and indexed by search engines like Google.29 Stormfront wasn't just popular compared to other hate sites. By 2005, it ranked in the top one percent of all sites by use.

  This was a remarkable, and frightening, accomplishment. Virtually all of the other sites in that top tier provided services like shopping, early social networking, entertainment, or mainstream news. For a white supremacist website to have the reach of these massive corporations was shocking. Though Stormfront had nowhere near the same number of total unique visits as, say, ABC.com, the site was certainly leveraging the relative advantages of the internet as a medium for marginalized messages.

  With Stormfront's success, the dream of pioneers like Louis Beam and Tom Metzger was partially realized. White supremacists—along with other extremists—were utilizing the web to communicate with each other across great distances anonymously and very cheaply. But, in the 2000s, as the internet continued to expand and more Americans spent an increased amount of time online, the problem that had dogged extremists throughout the 1990s remained. Online hate sites were invitations and gathering spaces for the already radicalized; during the first decade of the 2000s, they still weren't any more important to radicalization than they had been to Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolf in the 1990s.

  Like countless mainstream businesses, extremists were still searching for some way to increase online engagement. Fortunately for them, the enormous amount of talent and money bouncing around Silicon Valley would soon offer hate groups an irresistible solution.

  By 2009, the internet was still disappointing as a force for radicalization, but its imprint on everyday life did at least begin showing up in the details around extremist attacks. For example, the two young American men who left the country to commit themselves to jihad, Daniel Maldonado and Omar Hammami, met in Egypt via an online forum before traveling on to Somalia to join Al Shabaab, a militant Islamic group. But the external forces of their radicalization still appeared to be non-web based.

  After the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, in which army psychologist Nidal Hasan killed thirteen people, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki claimed to have exchanged emails with Hasan. But it is far from clear whether this communication had any impact on Nidal's actions, or whether the contact occurred at all.

  During the investigation following the 2010 Times Square car bombing, it came out that perpetrator Faisal Shahzad had bought the car he used for the bombing on Craigslist. He had also emailed his friends complaining about mujahideen being labeled “extremists.” All of his training, however, had come while abroad in Pakistan.

  By the end of the decade, extremists were using the internet in their daily lives just like everyone else, but they still weren't being radicalized by it in a meaningful way. How is it, then, that by 2015, the internet seemed to play such a large role in the radicalization of Muhammad Abdulazeez and Dylann Roof and, just a year later, in that of Micah Johnson?

  In fact, according to one report, the internet suddenly became an important radicalizing force just a few years into the 2010s. A 2013 RAND corporation study of fifteen cases of terrorism and extremism underscored how central the internet is to the process of radicalization. “[T]he internet,” the study found, “is clearly the running theme between most of the plots included in this dataset and it appears to be a very effective tool: it provides a locus in which they can obtain [radicalizing] material…. It provides them with direct access to a community of like-minded individuals around the world with whom they can connect and in some cases can provide them with further instigation and direction to carry out activities.”1

  But the study goes further: “There are a number of high-profile cases in which extremists have been radicalized through exposure to this content alone, without the presence of meaningful socialization with members of extreme groups.”2

  So, in just a few short years, the internet went from playing no role in the radicalization of the actors behind major extremist attacks to influencing every one of them. What transformed the internet into such an effective hate machine by 2013?

  Jump back a decade earlier, the year when Google offered a Canadian tech entrepreneur named Jonathan Abrams $30 million for his year-old social networking company, Friendster. Social networking sites like SixDegrees, Mixi, and Makeoutclub had been around since 1997, but were never able to gain the traction and reach of Friendster. Part of this was plain numbers. In 1995, just 14 percent of American adults said they used the internet.3 By 2000, 46 percent did, and in 2005 that number was 66 percent. But this change in internet participation was starker than these numbers suggest: the experience of “going online” meant something radically different in 1995.

  In the mid-1990s, most people used slower dial-up technology, and many had more limited access—only going online from work, say, or just once a week. By 2000, even as connection speeds and the proliferation of computers were expanding rapidly, 46 percent said they went online, but just 29 percent of respondents used the internet daily. However, in the first decade of the new millennium, the internet reached a kind of critical mass—more people online more regularly for longer amounts of time. This confluence made social networking more viable. Friendster was the right idea at the right time.

  In 2003, Abrams knew he had hit on something huge. So, dreaming of even bigger fame and fortune, he turned down Google's offer. Soon thereafter, Friendster became a case study on how to ruin a good idea.
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br />   But the networking site's rapid demise was also a measure of how competitive the space had become. A 2006 New York Times article describing Friendster's collapse detailed how market leader Myspace had fifty times the number of monthly domestic visitors—but doesn't even mention Facebook among Friendster's competitors.4 By early the following year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being offered millions to sell Facebook. An Associated Press article described the frenzy around Facebook as a manifestation of “the latest Internet craze, a communal concept of content-sharing that has been dubbed ‘Web 2.0.’”5 The rest of the story is well known: Facebook became a media behemoth and, to date, the only website whose origin story was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film.

  At around the same time, growth in video sharing and other consumer-driven multimedia platforms like YouTube exploded. In 2006, only 32 percent of people were watching video clips online. By 2008, 83 percent were, making it “the quickest-growing platform in history.”6 With the right technology and platforms in place, mainstream America became familiar with the idea of using social networking not just to “stay in touch” but to create online communities. Both Facebook and YouTube would become critical for extremists to inject the poison of extremism into mainstream America.

  This sense of community was exactly what would make Stormfront so successful. The site was a safe haven for an increasing number of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and others, according to interviews conducted with eleven Stormfront members. Most of the interviewees said that they felt stigmatized and ostracized for their extremist beliefs in the offline world, be it by teachers, employers, or family.

  In contrast, “Stormfront was like a second home to me,”7 claimed one user. Another said that it was a place “where I have many comrades.”8 On one thread, members wished each other happy birthday, with beer mugs and other celebratory icons. Though many of the members never or only very occasionally met offline,9 they had a place that offered them community. And one of the people who gathered there was Dylann Roof, who posted multiple times on the site before the 2015 shooting.

  Compare these armchair racists with another scene from the 1993 documentary Skinheads USA. In this footage, Riccio's teenage skinheads, having been dispatched to downtown Birmingham, Alabama, to pass out white nationalist literature, are met with a range of negative responses.

  Polite: “I don't want to be a skinhead,” responds preppily dressed young white man. “Sorry y'all.”

  Dismissive: “Business investors do not like a climate like you are trying to create,” says a middle-aged white man in response to their arguments about immigrants stealing jobs.

  Insulting: “You're an asshole!” yells a young white kid after his friends argue with the skins.

  What they don't get are positive responses. So while the flyering effort may be successful as a trial-by-fire bonding event, they've ultimately spent three hours without even getting a nibble on recruitment. A member of a different far-right group describes a similar scenario: canvassing, putting notices in mailboxes, “and having dogs chasing after you!”10 In both instances, far-right extremists must face up to the reality that the vast majority of people they encounter either don't care about or actively dislike their ideology. Worse, they are confronted by people with a diversity of opinions and, frequently, better articulated arguments.

  By 2008, in a country that was increasingly online and familiar with social networking, Stormfront offered a much more convenient and fun way to hang out with compatriots in the racist extreme right. So, even as he sat in a lousy motel room at the white supremacist convention in Memphis, the future still looked very bright for Don Black. He was working full time on his site, assisted by forty moderators.

  If Don Black did have a problem, it was keeping up with demand. His servers had crashed the day after Obama's election as thousands of new members registered. Black was energized to use his network to fight back against the sort of globalizing multiculturalism that Obama represented. And in the coming years, as both the internet and right-wing extremism grew, Stormfront would expand from tens of thousands of members to 300,000 global members in 2016.

  But, for all his success in the online world up to that point, Black couldn't have known exactly how the massive creative and economic resources poured into social media would change the way Americans communicated, related, and relaxed in the coming years. It's unlikely he realized how much the new platforms would advance David Duke's dream of the internet as the primary tool of white revolution. And Black certainly didn't see how, within a few years, these rapid transformations would leave Stormfront behind.

  In 2009, the actor Ashton Kutcher went on Oprah Winfrey's show to introduce the masses to a new social media app called Twitter. On her show, Oprah sent out her first tweet: “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.”11

  Kutcher had reached his own milestone, becoming the first user to collect a million followers. The race to a million had been promoted as a friendly contest between Kutcher and CNN's breaking news feed, with the winner promising to donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to a charity dedicated to wiping out malaria in the third world. Kutcher won—by thirty minutes—but CNN donated 10,000 nets anyway, followed by Winfrey herself, who donated another 20,000.

  The whole event gleamed positivity, good will, and an enormous faith in the power of social media. A CNN spokesperson said that, with Twitter, “the consumer is in the driver's seat.” The CEO of Malaria No More, Scott Case, cited the contest as a way of “how we can leverage new technology to battle an ancient disease.” Kutcher, he added, was “galvanizing his Twitter army to help end malaria deaths.” A few days later, Kutcher claimed that Twitter wasn't about celebrity but “everyday people having a voice.”

  In 2010, this belief was reinforced by the role that social media, including Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter,12 played in the Arab Spring uprisings that began in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and other parts of the Arab world. A 2011 report found that almost 90 percent of Egyptians and Tunisians surveyed in March of that year were using Facebook to organize or publicize protests.13

  What's more, online advocacy and organizing was effective in driving events in the offline world, with all but one of the Facebook-initiated protests “coming to life on the streets.” Largely because of the importance of Facebook in organizing offline events, the number of Facebook users jumped massively, 30 percent across the entire Arab world in the months between January and April. In some countries, usage more than doubled. In the United States and elsewhere, social media was viewed as playing an “idealized transformative role, bringing democracy and civil rights to the dark corners of the internet.”14

  American tech companies were also the most profitable sector of the economy, driving the stock market to record highs. Tech and social media CEOs like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos were the geniuses of the day. But just as with every advance made since the 1980s in dispersed, decentralized communications, the new technology had a negative mirror.

  Bulletin Board Systems and, later, sites like Stormfront had long exploited the primary architecture of the internet—the “lower participation barriers and the ease of content management and creation.”15 But as basic human interaction and socialization “increasingly moved into the online space across the Western world,”16 the capacities of extremism on the web also changed dramatically.

  Previous advances had allowed extremists to digitize many of their radicalization and operational activities. After 2008, they were able to plug their whole agenda into some of the most powerful and wealthiest corporations on earth. In fact, the social media-driven expansion of the internet universe “facilitated a second explosion in radical-right internet use,”17 which allowed groups to organize “and recruit on a scale previously unimaginable.”18 It was social media, with its promise of merging online and offline identities, which finally allowed extremists to radicalize individuals remotely, primarily through the internet.

 
ISIS leaders, who call for the return of a seventh-century legal system, speak dismissively of “moderns”19 but, like the white supremacists before, they effectively hijacked the web to spread violent anti-western rhetoric. From July 2014 to July 2016, ISIS's slickly produced online magazine, Dabiq, promised “photo reports, current events, and informative articles on matters related to the Islamic State.” Dabiq was primarily available through the dark web, although, for two weeks in May and June of 2015, print versions of all nine editions could be ordered for $22 from Amazon and shipped within forty-eight hours.20

  It was not Dabiq, however, but social media that allowed the radical Islamist group to gain adherents. The combination of social media's reach and video sharing proved a massively effective tool for radicalization. In a 2016 study tracking the behavior of 154,000 Twitter users in Europe, researchers discovered a strong link between recruitment efforts and the posting of graphic videos. The vast majority of pro-ISIS behavior, tweets or retweets, were activated “during the summer of 2014 when ISIS shared many beheading videos online.”21 By the summer of 2015, ISIS had 90,000 supporters on Twitter.

  In fact, Twitter became such an effective recruiting platform for the group that the US State Department created an account called “Think Again, Turn Away”22 to engage potential ISIS recruits. The account, which was often used to drag the US moderator into unwinnable debates about, say, American abuses of prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib, was a short-lived effort.

  Another way in which online extremists were able to plug into the massive machine constructed around social networking was through very sophisticated user-tracking and behavior-tracking analytics. User information, not products, is what drives social media revenue. Originally, this information may have just been used to target ads, but these analytics are increasingly used to push targeted content—articles, videos, etc.—to users in order to increase clicks and page views. So, for example, if a user watches a Katy Perry video, YouTube will immediately suggest additional Katy Perry videos or related artists.