Stormfront.org is a white supremacist website with 268,000 registered users. According to a new study from the SPLC, nine of their members have a combined 100 murders between them in the last five years.
One of those nine is Anders Breivik, who killed 77people in Norway back in 2011. Another, Wade Michael Page, killed six at a Milwaukee Sikh temple; and Richard Poplawski killed three Pittsburgh police officers. These murderers were frequent posters on the site. "It is a myth that racist killers hide in the shadows. Investigators find that most offenders openly advocated their ideology online, often posting on racist forums and blogs for hours every day," says Heidi Beirich, who studied the website for two years. She calls Stormfront “the murder capital of the racist Internet."
Beirich explains that the killers here all had a few things in common, like getting into fights on the site, talking about violence as a solution to problems, and posting a lot less or more often before committing their crime. Check out the full report here.
Stormfront became the first hate site on the Internet back in 1995, just a month before the Oklahoma City bombings. Membership for the site ballooned in 2009 once Barack Obama took office.
[via SPLC]
