Background
The Stormfront White Nationalist Community is a white nationalist, supremacist neo-Nazi Internet forum. It is considered the Internet’s first major hate site.
In the early 1990s, Stormfront began as a simple bulletin board system. By 1995 it become a functioning website.
The website’s logo is a Celtic cross, common to neo-Fascit iconography, surrounded by the motto “White Pride World Wide.”
Themes
The website is organized thematically with boards on topics such as self-defense, science, home schooling, revisionism and ideology. The site also hosts news stories, content for children, links to racist organizations, and a merchandise store.
Ownership
Stormfront was founded and is maintained by Stephen Donald Black. He was a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and was a member of the American Nazi party in the 1970s.
Scope
Stormfront gained considerable publicity in 2000 after its feature in the US documentary Hate.com, which focused on the threat of white nationalist organizations on the Internet.
In 2001, journalist Tara McKelvey called the site “the most visited white supremacist site on the net.” Between January 2002 and June 2005, the number of registered users on the site rose from 5,000 to 52,566 making it the 338th largest Internet forum.
By 2008 the site was attracting over 40,000 users daily.
In 2006 the Southern Poverty Law Center published a report that said discussions on Stormfront instructed white nationalists to join the U.S. Military to learn skills to win a race war.
