The World's Most Visited Alt-Right Web Site

The extreme limit of how journalistic format and trust language can be co-opted. Included to demonstrate the language travels - not to lend the platform any standing.

Editorial note. This entry is in the annex to demonstrate how the formats and language of journalism travel across the spectrum, including to places they do not belong. The point is the language. There is no endorsement of the platform’s ideology, claims, or operations.

The Daily Stormer was founded in 2013 by Andrew Anglin. It is an explicitly neo-Nazi, white-supremacist platform that takes its name directly from the historical Nazi propaganda sheet Der Stürmer. The choice was self-conscious. It is the entry to read after every other entry in this annex, because it strips the question to its starkest form: if the format of news, the cadence of news, the architecture of news can be deployed in service of any content whatsoever, what is the format actually doing?

Anglin stated the strategy explicitly to his followers: using the daily news is a means to propagandize people. He formatted hate speech, racist memes, and coordinated harassment campaigns as breaking news updates and commentary, parasitically borrowing the authority inherent in the news format. The category labels were news, opinion, video - the same category labels used by every newspaper website on the planet.

He also weaponized traditional media against itself. He repeatedly orchestrated media hoaxes - notably fabricating fake White Student Union groups on US university campuses across 2015 - specifically to bait local and national news outlets into covering the controversy. The strategy forced legitimate newsrooms to amplify his underlying message in the act of debunking it. The format functioned for him whether his targets ran the story or refused to.

The platform was deplatformed by major hosting providers and registrars after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and has since cycled through dark-web mirrors and fringe hosting. The brand survives, diminished.

What this entry establishes for the visitor: the aesthetic of news delivery can be severed entirely from factual reporting and used purely for psychological manipulation, trolling, and radicalization. The aesthetic is not the practice. The format is not the work. The trust the format borrows is borrowed from elsewhere - from every newsroom that built it through methodological labor. That is the whole question of this room.

Sources: commons.wikimedia.org ↗www.splcenter.org ↗datasociety.net ↗datasociety.net ↗