The 1980s Prehistory of White Supremacist Websites

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Ian Glazman-Schillinger, who focusses in on a particular far-right site, the Liberty Bell BBS. This emerged from the Liberty Bell print magazine, which set up the BBS in the early days of the computer age. It thereby predates by some decades the more recent concerns about the substantial technological innovations made by white supremacist movements in the 2010s.

Such recent studies often do not historicise the much longer digital trajectory of white supremacist activism; much more work needs to be done here. The original Liberty Bell newspapers can actually be found on the Internet Archive, and also trace the emergence, existence, and decline of the Liberty Bell BBS as a platform.

The BBS emerged from the perceived need to develop a digital presence for the publication as well as an understanding that new and less overtly violent and racist forms of white supremacist activism were required in the political environment of the 1980s; a 1983 article called for ‘leaderless resistance’ and identified digital technologies as a means to this end. This was also prompted by increasing state surveillance of conventional white supremacist organisations – the BBS provided a more horizontal approach to organising, and was promoted through the magazine.

The BBS ran on consumer-grade computer technologies of the mid-1980s; after dialling in, it would offer a menu listing various typical white supremacist themes that provided access to collections of articles. In response to requests from users, the BBS also soon introduced pseudonymic user names. Subsequent far-right sites like Storm Front built very directly on the lessons learnt from this experience.