Stormfront.org is a white supremacist/neo-nazi internet forum. This week, several people visited my website from a stormfront forum post that linked to my blog’s white privilege tag. Apparently, a white guy (that’s me) with Swiss-German ancestry who blogs about social justice caused several of their servers to melt.
I watched as more than 50 unique visits poured into my blog via the stormfront posting. By the way, the stormfront site is not a website to which people randomly surf. It’s not Amazon.com. The people who visited my blog were, in my opinion, frequent readers of stormfront postings.
Here are just a few of the places in the world that showed up in my web statistics…
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Brampton Ontario Canada
Lawrenceville, Georgia, United States
Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Keene, New Hampshire, United States
Roanoke, Virginia, United States
Unknown City, Unknown Region, Sweden
Schenectady, New York, United States
Oslo, Norway
Milford, Massachusetts, United States
Stratford, Connecticut, United States
Miami, Florida, United States
Corona, New York, United States
Santa Barbara, California, United States
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Alexandria, Virginia, United States
Vancouver, Washington, United States
Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Malaysia
Pasadena, California, United States
New York, New York, United States
Jersey City, New Jersey, United States
Los Angeles, California, United States
Reston, Virginia, United States
Buffalo, New York, United States
Houston, Texas, United States
Staten Island, New York, United States
Winchester, Virginia, United States
Huntington Beach, California, United States
[…] « White supremacists White privilege […]
Eric,
At least you did not name names, though I think you might have if you could based on my previous observations. I am not defending white supremacists, but you have no idea who was reading that site and linked to it. I have visited sites at times in the past of which I completely disagreed. Simply visiting the site does not make one a white supremacist nor does it make even a white supremacist sympathizer. It could well be someone like yourself who wants to get insight into what the other side is thinking or someone doing research. In fact, given your topic of interest and your familiarity with the site (I seem to have heard of it, but I could not have named it off the top of my head), I would venture to guess you might have visited it at one point in the past to recon the opposition. Should “Corvallis, Oregon” appear in someone else’s list of had visited stormfront.org.
I am not defending white supremacists. No, I do not think that that comprises the bulk of those locations in your list, but if it included one and you implied that they were a white supremacist simply for visiting a website, that is wrong. Like I said, you did not name names but based on my experience and Radar’s experience with you as people who are hardy white supremacist but simply people who disagreed with you, I ask would you have if you had had names? If so, does it concern you that your brush might paint too broadly for people that might fit as I described above?
Derek - I feel that you are correct that some of the visitors to my site who entered via links from the stormfront site could have been non-members, however, like I said, this is not a site that people just happen to find while surfing the web. And furthermore, the stormfront thread that linked to my site was not indexed by Google when people started flowing into my site. They had to have either visited the stormfront site and surfed to that particular thread or been a member who followed threads on that site.
I read a lot of news stories and had heard of Stormfront.org in the past. A bunch of commenters who said that they were from stormfront, posted comments on a site that I frequently read (Diverse Podium, the blog of Diverse Issues in Higher Education.). I noted that the Diverse Podium admins had removed their comments as they were full of epithets and bile. Then, my webstats started showing (on the same day) a bunch of inbound visits from the stormfront site. I then took a look at the site thread where I was being called all sorts of names and made the decision not to link back to the stormfront site and give them any “link juice.”
My familiarity with stormfront has definitely increased in the past week as I looked them up on wikipedia and saw that at least one of their frequent commenters had left a not so subtle, racist comment on my site.
I’m sure that Corvallis, Oregon did indeed appear on the stormfront.org server stats. However, I’m talking about inbound visitors who clicked from the stormfront thread to my site.
One thing that always amused me is the large amount of bad grammar used by the members of those types of sites. Must be an indication…
Not that I’m some shining example of grammar, but even simple grammar rules are failed by most of the posters :p
[…] I was sifting through my web site statistics when I found yet another inbound link from a hate-spewing, neo-nazi, white supremacist website. It’s the type of thing that happens when word gets out that yet another Swiss-German, anti-racist, feminist, ally, man is blogging about social justice issues. The white supremacists link to your site and visit in droves. Jim S., who graciously nominated me for the award, has commented on my site a couple times and has left hundreds of bigoted comments on the aforementioned (not directly linked as I refuse to send link juice in their direction) site. […]
[…] Once again, my site has been mentioned on a white supremacist internet forum… I think if I ever start a rock band, it will have to be called “Leftwing Fever Swamp.” […]