The Contemporary Structure of Canadian Racial Supremacism: Networks, Strategies and New Technologies.

In the past five years, public debate has increasingly centered on racial supremacists who use the internet for advertising and recruitment. Yet, to date, this phenomenon has attracted little sociological attention. As such, the present paper seeks to accommodate for this curious silence in the literature by drawing on data gathered from an investigation of the Freedom-Site, a racial supremacist Web site run out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In addition to updating the body of literature concerned with Canada's racial supremacists, three arguments are presented: first, there exists a considerable gap between the public images that racial supremacist groups attempt to present on the internet and a far less benign image that emerges upon closer analysis; second, exemplified by the Freedom-Site, the internet has facilitated a greater degree of solidarity between racial supremacist organizations; and third, given the impersonal nature of the internet, there exists a certain degree of danger that otherwise ordinary citizens will become more susceptible to the ideology of racial supremacism. These arguments are incorporated into an examination of why racial supremacist groups have appeared on the internet and what the implications of this presence are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]