ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how online extremist communities come to form their understanding of the world and why these spaces become such fertile soil for misinformation and conspiratorial worldviews. While existing theories have emphasized one-sided critical-rational arguments as the driver of extremist ideology, we build on the Durkheimian understanding of rituals and community formation to emphasize the inextricable interlinkage between storytelling and collective identity-making. As an empirical case, we examine how the Stormfront community made sense of the 2008 election of Barack Obama and the 2016 election of Donald Trump. We find that while Obama's election was initially framed as a threat, it was later reframed as a “victory in disguise”, creating new opportunities for political action through extraparliamentary methods. Conversely, Trump's ascendancy was seen as creating possibilities for radical change through the established political system. In these tribalized online communities, information is evaluated not based on its conformity to common standards of evidence or rational arguments but on whether it supports the community values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. The result is that the worldview becomes part of the community identity – suggesting a form of “tribal epistemology”.
