By Michelle Lynn Kahn
Publication Date: 2025-12-05 13:16:00
How can society control the global spread of right-wing extremism online while protecting freedom of expression? This question was already on the minds of policymakers and watchdog organizations in the 1980s and 1990s – and it has not gone away.
Decades before artificial intelligence, Telegram and the livestreams of white nationalist Nick Fuentes, right-wing extremists embraced the beginnings of the home computer and the Internet. These new technologies gave them a bastion of free expression and a global platform. They could spread propaganda, sow hatred, incite violence and gain international followers like never before.
Before the digital age, right-wing extremists radicalized each other primarily through print propaganda. They wrote their own newsletters and published far-right tracts such as “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler and “The Turner Diaries” by American neo-Nazi William Pierce, a dystopian work of fiction describing a race war. Then they mailed this propaganda to…
