BBS bulletin bd

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Far-right extremists have been organizing online since before the internet – and AI is their next frontier

How can society police the global spread of online far-right extremism while still protecting free speech? That’s a question policymakers and watchdog organizations confronted as early as the 1980s and ’90s – and it hasn’t gone away.

Decades before artificial intelligence, Telegram and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ livestreams, far-right extremists embraced the early days of home computing and the internet. These new technologies offered them a bastion of free speech and a global platform. They could share propaganda, spew hatred, incite violence and gain international followers like never before.

Before the digital era, far-right extremists radicalized each other primarily using print propaganda. They wrote their own newsletters and reprinted far-right tracts such as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and American neo-Nazi William Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian work of fiction describing a race war. Then, they mailed this propaganda to supporters at home and abroad.

I’m a historian who studies neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. As my research shows, most of the neo-Nazi propaganda confiscated in Germany from the 1970s through the 1990s came from the United States. American neo-Nazis exploited their free speech under the First Amendment to bypass German censorship laws. German neo-Nazis then picked up this print propaganda and distributed it throughout the country.

This strategy wasn’t foolproof, however. Print propaganda could get lost in the mail or be confiscated, especially when crossing into Germany. Producing and shipping it was also expensive and time-consuming, and far-right organizations were chronically understaffed and strapped for cash.

Going digital

Computers, which entered the mass market in 1977, promised to help resolve these problems. In 1981, Matt Koehl, head of the National Socialist White People’s Party in the United States, solicited donations to “Help the Party Enter The Computer Age.” The American neo-Nazi Harold Covington begged for a printer, scanner and “serious PC” that could run WordPerfect word processing software. “Our multifarious enemies already possess this technology,” he noted, referring to Jews and government officials.

Soon, far-right extremists figured out how to connect their computers to one another. They did so by using online bulletin board systems, or BBSes, a precursor to the internet. A BBS was hosted on a personal computer, and other computers could dial in to the BBS using a modem and a terminal software program, allowing users to exchange messages, documents and software.

With BBSes, anyone interested in accessing far-right propaganda could simply turn on their computer and dial in to an organization’s advertised phone number. Once connected, they could read the organization’s public posts, exchange messages and upload and download files.

The first far-right bulletin board system, the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, was established in 1984 by Louis Beam, a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. Beam explained: “Imagine, if you can, a single computer to which all leaders and strategists of the patriotic movement are connected. Imagine further that any patriot in the country is able to tap into this computer at will in order to reap the benefit of all accumulative knowledge and wisdom of the leaders. ‘Someday,’ you may say? How about today?”

Then came violent neo-Nazi computer games. Neo-Nazis in the United States and elsewhere could upload and download these games via bulletin board systems, copy them onto disks and distribute them widely, especially to schoolchildren.

In the German computer game KZ Manager, players role-played as a commandant in a Nazi concentration camp that murdered Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Turkish immigrants. An early 1990s poll revealed that 39% of Austrian high schoolers knew of such games and 22% had seen them.

Arrival of the web

By the mid-1990s, with the introduction of the more user-friendly World Wide Web, bulletin boards fell out of favor. The first major racial hate website on the internet, Stormfront, was founded in 1995 by the American white supremacist Don Black. The civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center found that almost 100 murders were linked to Stormfront.

By 2000, the German government had discovered, and banned, over 300 German websites with right-wing content – a tenfold increase within just four years.

In response, American white supremacists again exploited their free speech rights to bypass German censorship bans. They gave international far-right extremists the opportunity to host their websites safely and anonymously on unregulated American servers – a strategy that continues today.

Up next: AI

The next frontier for far-right extremists is AI. They are using AI tools to create targeted propaganda, manipulate images, audio and videos, and evade detection. The far-right social network Gab created a Hitler chatbot that users can talk to.

AI chatbots are also adopting the far-right views of social media users. Grok, the chatbot on Elon Musk’s X, recently called itself “MechaHitler,” spewed antisemitic hate speech and denied the Holocaust.

Countering extremism

Combating online hate is a global imperative. It requires comprehensive international cooperation among governments, nongovernmental organizations, watchdog organizations, communities and tech corporations.

Far-right extremists have long pioneered innovative ways to exploit technological progress and free speech. Efforts to counter this radicalization are challenged to stay one step ahead of the far right’s technological advances.

Michelle Lynn Kahn, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through email, public message boards, and sometimes via direct chatting. Many BBSes also offer on-line games in which users can compete with each other, and BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks, and other aspects of the Internet. Low-cost, high-performance modems drove the use of online services and BBSes through the early 1990s. Infoworld estimated that there were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994, a collective market much larger than major online services such as CompuServe.

The introduction of inexpensive dial-up internet service and the Mosaic web browser offered ease of use and global access that BBS and online systems did not provide, and led to a rapid crash in the market starting in 1994. Over the next year, many of the leading BBS software providers went bankrupt and tens of thousands of BBSes disappeared. Today, BBSing survives largely as a nostalgic hobby in most parts of the world, but it is still an extremely popular form of communication for Taiwanese youth (see PTT Bulletin Board System) and in China.^[1] Most BBSes are now accessible over Telnet and typically offer free email accounts, FTP services, IRC and all of the protocols commonly used on the Internet. Some offer access through packet switched networks or packet radio connections.

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History

Precursors

A precursor to the public bulletin board system was Community Memory, started in August 1973 in Berkeley, California. Useful microcomputers did not exist at that time, and modems were both expensive and slow. Community Memory therefore ran on a mainframe computer and was accessed through terminals located in several San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods.^[2] The poor quality of the original modem connecting the terminals to the mainframe prompted a user to invent the Pennywhistle modem, whose design was highly influential in the mid-1970s.

Community Memory allowed the user to type messages into a computer terminal after inserting a coin, and offered a "pure" bulletin board experience with public messages only (no email or other features). It did offer the ability to tag messages with keywords, which the user could use in searches. The system acted primarily in the form of a buy and sell system with the tags taking the place of the more traditional classifications. But users found ways to express themselves outside these bounds, and the system spontaneously created stories, poetry and other forms of communications. Unfortunately, the system was expensive to operate, and when their host machine became unavailable and a new one could not be found, the system closed in January 1975.

Similar functionality was available to most mainframe users, which might be considered a sort of ultra-local BBS when used in this fashion. Commercial systems, expressly intended to offer these features to the public, became available in the late 1970s and formed the online service market that lasted into the 1990s. One particularly influential example was PLATO, which had thousands of users by the late 1970s, many of whom used the messaging and chat room features of the system in the same way that would become common on BBSes.

The first BBSes

With the introduction of microcomputers with expansion slots, like the S-100 bus machines and Apple II, it became possible for the modem to communicate instructions and data on separate lines. A number of modems of this sort were available by the late 1970s. This made the BBS possible for the first time, as it allowed software on the computer to pick up an incoming call, communicate with the user, and then hang up the call when the user logged off.Early modems were generally very simple devices using acoustic couplers to handle telephone operation. The user would first pick up the phone, dial a number, then press the handset into rubber cups on the top of the modem. Disconnecting at the end of a call required the user to pick up the handset and return it to the phone. Examples of direct-connecting modems did exist, and these often allowed the host computer to send it commands to answer or hang up calls, but these were very expensive devices used by large banks and similar companies.

The first public dial-up BBS was developed by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. According to an early interview, when Chicago was snowed under during the Great Blizzard of 1978, the two began preliminary work on the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS. The system came into existence largely through a fortuitous combination of Christensen having a spare S-100 bus computer and an early Hayes internal modem, and Suess's insistence that the machine be placed at his house in Chicago where it would be a local phone call to millions of users. Christensen patterned the system after the cork board his local computer club used to post information like "need a ride". CBBS officially went online on 16 February 1978.^[3] CBBS, which kept a count of callers, reportedly connected 253,301 callers before it was finally retired.^[citation ^needed]

Smartmodem

The 300 baud Smartmodem led to an initial wave of early BBS systems.

A key innovation required for the popularization of the BBS was the Hayes Smartmodem. Internal modems like the ones used by CBBS and similar early systems were usable, but generally expensive due to the manufacturer having to make a different modem for every computer platform they wanted to target

BBS bulletin bd

Contents

History

Precursors

The first BBSes

Smartmodem