Back in the bad old days before the internet, guys like me who wanted to research the radical right had to do the nitty-gritty work of collecting far-right published materials at gun shows and political meetups, and later militia recruitment meetings. Nowadays, thanks to Amazon, we can obtain all the same material with the click of a button.
This is not a good thing. As a recent investigation by ProPublica demonstrated in living color, Amazon’s relentless greed has created a whole new realm of recruitment for hateful fascist ideologies by letting any hatemonger publish anything he wants through Kindle Publishing, which will publish anyone or anything as an e-book and then market its paperback edition, too. Functionally speaking, Amazon has opened a portal to hell, and appears to have only a passing interest in closing it.
The investigation reveals how one of the country’s most notorious racists, Billy Roper—the erstwhile leader of White Revolution, a neo-Nazi group based in Arkansas—has managed to build a profitable career as a prolific (17 books uploaded since 2014) Kindle author, so much so that he now boasts he is “the most widely read living fiction author in the white nationalist movement.”
“My existence there has been beneficial in reaching people with my message and growing my organization,” Roper told ProPublica. “People can go to Amazon — which is mainstream and acceptable, there’s nothing radical about that — order a book, and in the privacy of their own home they can read the book without ever having to visit a white-nationalist website.”
“There is a lot of extremist content on Amazon,” J. M. Berger, a terrorism expert with the VOX-Pol research network, told ProPublica. “The platform has gone largely overlooked because, understandably, we think of books differently than other content. But these products are for sale and they’re being algorithmically pushed.”
As a researcher, I was struck early on, even during the 1990s, by how easy it was to use Amazon to access white supremacist and other extremist literature. For most of my years as a reporter, obtaining these materials entailed attending extremist events and gun shows, and scouring out-of-the-way bookstores’ shelves in order to be able to buy these books.
This included such urtexts for the radical right as The Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion, the 1920s-era anti-Semitic hoax that helped inspire the Holocaust; and The Turner Diaries, the 1970s-penned blueprint for a white-supremacist race war that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing. Difficult to obtain except in far-right circles before Amazon, I was able to purchase my first copies of them in the late 1990s through the online bookseller. And literally anyone can do exactly the same, even today.
When I was conducting research for a recent report involving the hateful World Church of the Creator, I was able to turn to Amazon to obtain a number texts by its founder, Ben Klassen, which featured some of the most vile and hateful screeds ever committed to print. At the same time, I was able to pick up a formative text from the alt-right “black pill” contingent entitled Day of the Rope (inspired by The Turner Diaries) that was all about the need to kill race traitors and Jews.
The report explores how Amazon’s site algorithms can create an extremist feedback loop, one that leads someone curious about one extremist text even deeper down the hatemongering rabbit hole. The striking aspect of this algorithm is how closely it resembles the same tools used by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in creating a feedback loop that becomes a whole universe of online radicalization.
Like these platforms, Amazon typically has trotted out a libertarian laissez-faire argument for allowing any and all books to be sold on its website. And like these platforms, it’s been slow to recognize that such an approach opens the door wide for extremist hate and its attendant violence, as ProPublica found:
“As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “That includes books that some may find objectionable, though we have policies governing which books can be listed for sale. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove products that do not adhere to our guidelines. We also promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised.”
However, the company at least appears to be making baby steps. As the report notes, it has made some extremist texts, such as James Mason’s Siege—a Turner Diaries for the 21st century, extremely popular with the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen set—no longer available. But a search for the book nonetheless takes a reader to a full page of books by seemingly acceptable fascist writers, mainly Julius Evola, a mid-century Italian “philosopher.”
Meanwhile, both of the books I obtained in late 2018 during my research are now no longer available. So there are signs, at least, that Amazon might finally ratchet the portal it opened a little bit tighter. Maybe someday, it will close it tight.