I have no idea

From The Data of Hate by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. I'd like to know more about his methodology and I am alarmed by an author who cites the Southern Poverty Law Center as if it were a reliable source. With those caveats though, I am guessing that Stephens-Davidowitz's analysis is reasonably accurate. The positive news is that perhaps only 0.1% of Americans visit such a hate site.

But still, what hate. Yikes. You almost feel unclean reading of these views. Stephens-Davidowitz provides a good service to remind everyone that there is a lot of diversity of opinions and far out on the distribution tails, there are some pretty shocking opinions. Rare they might be but not rare enough.

I found several things interesting in the author's analysis.

The youth of the stormfront registrants.

Stormfront members tend to be young, at least according to self-reported birth dates. The most common age at which people join the site is 19. And four times more 19-year-olds sign up than 40-year-olds. Internet and social network users lean young, but not nearly that young.

Does this imply that people become more tolerant and worldly-wise as they age or does it mean that older cohorts were always more tolerant. I don't know but I would suspect more the former than the latter.

The map of registrants doesn't fit much of any stereotypical pattern either.

Does this mean that growing up with little diversity fosters hate?

Probably not. Since those states have a higher proportion of non-Jewish white people, they have more potential members for a group that attacks Jews and nonwhites. The percentage of Stormfront’s target audience that joins is actually higher in areas with more minorities. This is particularly true when you look at Stormfront’s members who are 18 and younger and therefore do not themselves choose where they live.

Among this age group, California, a state with one of the largest minority populations, has a membership rate 25 percent higher than the national average.

There are all sorts of counterintuitive mysteries in the analysis.

The top reported interest of Stormfront members is “reading.” Most notably, Stormfront users are news and political junkies. One interesting data point here is the popularity of The New York Times among Stormfront users. According to the economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, when you compare Stormfront users to people who go to the Yahoo News site, it turns out that the Stormfront crowd is twice as likely to visit nytimes.com.

Perhaps it was my own naïveté, but I would have imagined white nationalists’ inhabiting a different universe from that of my friends and me. Instead, they have long threads praising “Breaking Bad” and discussing the comparative merits of online dating sites, like Plenty of Fish and OkCupid.

There was also no relationship between monthly membership registration and a state’s unemployment rate. States disproportionately affected by the Great Recession saw no comparative increase in Google searches for Stormfront.

Well-read bigots who love the New York Times? My old brain cells are creaking trying to accommodate the idea.

Its intriguing information but Stephens-Davidowitz asks the right questions.

Why do some people feel this way? And what is to be done about it? I have pored over data of an unprecedented breadth and depth, thanks to our new digital era. And I can honestly offer the following answer: I have no idea.