White supremacist projects between virtual communities and networked publics

White supremacists have long used digital communication to produce virtual communities where users can safely transgress normative injunctions against hate, racism, and white supremacy. More recently, they have been active on social media platforms that have a much broader set of users, often with the goal of radicalizing them, legitimising white supremacist ideas, and mainstreaming their narratives by eroding these injunctions. While social media platforms’ governance has provided little more than a light touch on white supremacy, content moderation and ‘deplatforming’ precipitates new dynamics in the process of digitally-mediated white supremacist group making. This paper takes two key concepts in media studies for the description of users connected by sociotechnical systems–virtual community and networked publics–to understand the forms of organization that white supremacists create online and the role that changing regimes of speech governance and technical affordances play in the form and process of group making. This paper looks critically at Stormfront, a long-running and infamous white supremacist web forum, and Twitter to illustrate changing dynamics in white supremacist digital group making. While the former produces a community, the latter offers opportunities for mainstreaming and normalisation of white supremacist ideas and narratives. Through this analysis, the paper proposes the concept of white racial projects, drawing on the sociology of racism, to understand how and why white supremacist users use and navigate different technical and social affordances. Finally, looking at Telegram and alt-tech platforms as sites to which these users have migrated following deplatforming actions, this paper argues that future research on digitally-mediated white supremacy ‘after deplatforming’ must contend more directly with questions of community and collective identity by focusing on boundary making and how virtual communities navigate a stack of platforms and technologies to realise white racial projects as content moderation and governance reconfigures the sociotechnical systems through which these projects unfold.