The main thrust of this article isn’t that no one should ever write about these groups or show pictures of their posters; it’s that media should seriously consider the positive or negative impact of their coverage, and try to minimize the latter while increasing the former.

The posters aren’t magic. Merely showing them in my blog isn’t going to spellbind ordinary people into joining. They only have an effect by being distributed widely in places where people are likely accept their message.

The ADL and the SPLC show pictures of the propaganda on their websites for the purposes of discussing its content, and they should, but local media shouldn’t write a story every time a white nationalist poster shows up on a traffic light.

That might seem like a contradiction, but it really isn’t. I weighed the good against the bad. I have 800 followers on Medium (a platform that skews liberal generally) and about 400 followers on Twitter (most of whom are socialists, journalists who cover extremism, friends and antifascist activists).

It’s hard to argue that anything I write about IE/AmIM is signal boosting them or helping them reach new potential recruits, as they have seven times as many followers as I do (if you add the two platforms together.)

As I mentioned, The Mercury News has 240,000 followers, many of whom live in the area where AmIM was founded and where its presence is strongest. Its readership is much more diverse politically than mine, so they’re also more likely to be conservatives who are more susceptible to the group’s message.

Using the group’s imagery has some degree of value in terms of describing their tactics, and that’s weighed against the minimal harm of showing it in a blog that has a small readership of mostly leftists who are actively hostile to them.

Also, unlike local news, which feels compelled to hew toward the group’s own euphemistic self-descriptions, i.e. “identitarian,” I’m free to call them what they are: genocidal neo-Nazis.

So in the end, the value of having a conversation about the group’s strategy and tactics as well as the media’s coverage outweighs the risk that my writing about them will benefit them in any way.