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How media helps the far-right recruit
Almost every week there’s a news story about white nationalist posters appearing at some college campus or random neighborhood somewhere in the country. Most recently, it was San Jose State University. For their part, university officials did the right thing: They declined to release the name of the group or provide pictures of the flyers, denying them the publicity they sought.
But the group got their message out anyway. Shortly thereafter, the American Identitarian Movement (AmIM)—formerly known as Identity Evropa—took credit for the posters, and the local news couldn’t resist making a story out of it.
The Mercury News and the local ABC affiliate covered the announcement. Incredibly, both used images from AmIM’s own Twitter feed. The Mercury News went one step further and embedded a link to the account.
This is the best possible outcome for AmIM. Instead of being seen by only a handful of people, their posters were broadcast into thousands of households and shared all over the internet. The AmIm account has about 7,000 followers, whereas The Mercury News has nearly 240,000.
