Abstract

All over the world, extreme right activists and neo-nazis are using the Internet as a tool for communication and recruitment in order to avoid national laws and police investigations. The last 10 years have seen both the diffusion of CMC environments and the rise of extreme right movements in several European countries. This study investigates the structure of the Italian extreme right network, taking into account the latest trends in the social psychology of CMC to describe the nature of ties among Italian extreme right websites.

Introduction

All over the world anyone with access to the Internet can find a full range of information regarding the National Front at the touch of a button… New friends from around the world have been made and important contacts have been established, particularly in the United States, where we regularly liaise via e-mail with a major nationalist organization, with a possible view to future long-term co-operation. The Internet will be the main political campaigning tool of the next decade and beyond. (Ashcroft, 1998)

Ideology, prejudice, racism, and extreme right groups are important research themes in social psychology. An exhaustive bibliography would include thousands of books and articles. As Michael Billig stated, the extreme right provides a kind of "ideological laboratory" for studying the production and transmission of ideas and rhetoric (Billig, 1991, 2001).

The last ten years have seen an increase in the political activity and media visibility of extreme right political movements on the stage of Western politics. This activity has been rewarded with electoral success in several European countries, as in the cases of Le Pen's Front National in France, Heider's Freedom Party (FPOE) in Austria, Pym Fortuyn's Party in Holland, and that of Zhirinosky in Russia (Evans, Arzheimer, Baldini, Bjoklund, Carter, Fisher, & Evaldi, 2001). In addition, the European social and political scene has seen the political rise of groups which locate themselves in the ideological area of the Far Right, as well as the spread of episodes of political violence (Schmidt, 1993). Such phenomena have special relevance to the researcher because the traditional tools of political consensus-seeking are supported by the technologies known as computer-mediated communication environments (Hoffman, 1996; Karmasyn, Panczer, & Fingerhut, 2000; Mininni, 2002; Tadmor-Shimony, 1995).

New research problems arise from the ideological evolution of the extreme right (ER) and the construction of a communication network facilitated by the adoption of information and communication technology tools (van Dijk, 1986; Whine, 2000). However, social psychology has not yet systematically studied the issue of the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) by ER groups. In order to propose some research themes related to the activity of ER groups via the Internet, it is necessary to look for literature produced outside the psychological field. The majority of the studies come from political science (Whine, 2000), and studies commissioned by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) fighting anti-Semitism and racism (Karmasyn et al., 2000; Stern, 1999; Tadmor-Shimony, 1995).

Theoretical Objectives and Research Questions

The present study aims to explore the structure and the nature of the Italian extreme right network on the World Wide Web. It is methodologically based on Burris, Smith, and Strahm's (2000) social network analysis (SNA) of the organizational structure of white supremacist groups in the USA through their web sites' related links.

The same methodology is used in this study to analyze the network of web sites belonging to the Italian ER, and to build a model of a specific region of the Internet "treating these links as ties of affinity, paths of communication, tokens of mutual aid in achieving public recognition, and/or potential avenues of coordination" (Burris, et al., 2000, p. 215).¹

The theoretical goal of this study is to combine SNA (a methodology developed by structuralist ethnology) with content analysis (a more functionalist approach) to give a more comprehensive picture of on-line interaction in a political group, treating the websites as a community based on common interests and mutual legitimation (cf. Wetherall, Taylor, & Yates, 2001).

This study is exploratory and is a preliminary effort in researching the online network of the Italian ER. The first step is to investigate the existence of ties among ER sites in order to verify that a networked structure of ER groups is present in Italy. After demonstrating the presence of a structured network, the next step is to examine the types of relationships that exist among Italian ER sites. In effect, does the analysis of links and content provide objective indicators of an affinity between an organization and an ideological system? Also, can the resulting indicators be used to explain similarities and differences among Italian ER groups? The third step is to note if particular web sites occupy a prominent position in the ER network and to identify their characteristics.

Social Network Analysis and CMC Research

Initially, SNA was an analytical tool developed by structural anthropology and Lewinian sociology to describe relationships among the members of a community (Piselli, 1995; Scott, 1991). The idea underlying the SNA approach is that interactions and communication flows are the constitutive elements of social groups. In this way "group" and "network" become synonymous. The beginnings of SNA can be found in the work of anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss, who found that village planning was complexly related to the family and social relationships of the communities he studied. By reconstructing the village plan of populations like Keraja and Bororo (see Figure 1), it was possible to draw the "complicated weaving of privileges, of traditions, of hierarchical degrees, of rights and obligations" (Lévy-Strauss, 1960, p. 208).

Later, the observational procedure was combined with graph theory. Graph theory is a way to represent relational data by using a combination of points and lines, along with mathematical axioms and formulas, to represent individuals and their relationships (Scott, 1991). While the quantitative and modeling aspects of SNA are now widely used, the qualitative and ethnographic aspects are still present (Scott, 1991; Park & Thelwall, 2003).

SNA methodology involves several steps. First, the researcher identifies a population of actors, defined as "nodes," then he or she collects data on the ties (or links) among the nodes. Data can include: transfer of resources, common memberships, joint participation in events, interpersonal connections, positive or negative evaluations, likes or dislikes, etc. The resulting data are arranged in a N x N matrix with one row and one column for each node. The matrix is then analyzed with software like UCINET (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002) to reveal the attributes of the network. In the SNA framework, social actors and their actions constitute a whole entity, and the unit of analysis is not the individual, but rather the community. It seems relatively straightforward to apply this model of social interactions to a communication environment where multiple social actors are linked by hypertextual links.

The idea of applying the SNA approach to the study of CMC is not new. There are examples in several research areas (Park, 2003; Park & Thelwall, 2003; Snow, Zurcher, & Ekland-Olson, 1980; Wellman, 2001), both from quantitative (Krebs, 2000) and ethnographic (Burris et al., 2000) perspectives. In the study of social movements and organizations, Adamic (1999) investigated the network of sites about abortion, finding that different positions on the issue corresponded to specific link configurations. Rogers and Marres (2000) studied NGO web sites, and, more recently, Garrido and Halavais (2003) analyzed web sites referring to the Zapatista movement, observing how link structures correspond to a system of alliances and affinities. Bae and Choi (2000) similarly found that the organizational structures of networks of NGOs were based more on ideological affinity than geographical proximity and that specific link structures emerge from such configurations. Burris et al. (2000) used SNA methodology to study the inter-organizational structure of groups belonging to the white supremacist movement in the U.S. Their study calls for the use of more powerful theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of CMC. Rosen, Woelfel, Krikorian, and Barnett (2003) seem to respond to this call by attempting to integrate semantic network analysis with a qualitative and discursive analysis of a community in the Active Worlds Educational Universe.

The Ideological Framework of the Extreme Right

At an abstract level, ER groups can be conceptualized as social movements defined as (1) social practice networks, based on (2) shared beliefs and solidarity, that mobilize on (3) controversial issues, through (4) various forms of protest (Della Porta & Diani, 1999; Fairclough, 2001; Jaffe, 1994). ER groups, which sometimes walk a fine line between legal, political, and associative activity and the diffusion of violent and illegal content, have found the Internet to be a useful tool for worldwide communication and recruiting activity (Burris et al., 2000; Hoffman, 1996; Karmasyn et al., 2000). This is considered a growing phenomenon in Italy, but there is minimal attention to it in the Italian socio-psychological literature.

Some common themes and linguistic usages allow us to assign the label of "extreme right" to certain web sites:

• White supremacy: An ideology of the existence of different human races with different biological natures, different individual attributes, and different social characteristics is invoked in order to justify the legal and social subordination of non-white races to the white race, and the spatial segregation of whites from non-whites (Spencer, 2002).
• Explicit racism: Overt prejudice or discrimination is typically based on race. Some forms of racism resemble white supremacy. A social and ideological system know as "Jim Crow" racism developed after the American Civil War and is characterized by three main traits:
1. Racialism: the belief that blacks are biologically inferior to whites;
2. Social distance or segregation: the belief that blacks should occupy a separate and subordinate position, along with the associated pattern of physical separation of the races including public facilities, marriage, friendships, etc.;
3. Legal discrimination: the use of the legal system to establish separate educational systems along with political and employment discrimination (Sears, Hetts, Sidanius & Bobo, 2000).
• Symbolic Racism: Under social pressure, traditional forms of racist ideology have been replaced by new versions of racial attitudes variously referred to as "modern racism," "new racism," "aversive racism," "laissez-faire racism," "social dominance theory," "ambivalent racism," or "differential racism." The main tenets of this ideology are:
1. Non-whites are no longer disadvantaged by racial discrimination; however,
2. Non-whites still do not conform to dominant norms, such as the work ethic and obedience to authority (to teachers, to employers, or to law enforcement officials), and exhibit poor impulse control (with respect to alcohol, drugs, sexuality, and expenditures of money). Nevertheless,
3. Non-whites ask the government for special treatment, and obtain resources and subventions that they do not deserve (Spencer, 2002).
• Negationism: The negationist ideology denies the systematic and massive genocide of the Jewish community in Europe; the use of gas chambers for extermination of Jews by the Third Reich is denied, and it is claimed that the number of victims was lower than six million. This ideology is closely related to that of "historical revisionism," which aims to re-write twentieth century history from a perspective more favorable to the ER (Igounet, 2000).
• Conspiracy theory: In its general formulation, this ideology posits the existence of an agreement among members of a secret economic power whose aim is to dominate the world. The goal of the conspiracy is to create an undifferentiated, consumerist, global society, with just one race, free from the contamination of other races. The members of the conspiracy are generally considered to be American capitalists, Jews, or Masons. Nevertheless, the specific list of conspirators can change according to the argument being made. Both opponents of the ER and competing ER groups can be included among the representatives of the secret power. By paranoid argumentation, they can be charged with being manipulated by the conspiracy's hidden powers (Billig, 1991).

Other common themes of ER discourse include: xenophobia; nostalgia for a past prior to immigration; anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism; anti-Americanism; mental corruption of youth by an educational system dominated by the liberal left; a view of politics as direct action rather than debate; the issue of a third position with respect to capitalism and communism; support of independence and nationalist movements; and continual reference to national identity.

The ER's use of CMC started in the U.S. in 1984, when Tom Metzger, founder of the White Aryan Resistance, opened the first bulletin board system (BBS) for a racist organization. During the second half of the 1980s, Louis Beam, representing the Aryan Nation, organized the first network of racist BBS. In 1991, Banished CPU, the first public negationist BBS, was created by Portland-based Dan Gannon. The neo-nazi BBS ThuleNetz became active in Germany in 1992 (Lewis, 1996). The first neo-nazi web site appeared in 1995: Stormfront, founded by Don Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan (Karmasyn et al., 2000).

The first Nazi society, called "Thule," was founded by Hess and Hitler, who probably had relationships with British freemasonry and with representatives of the British Royal Family, some of whose members were masons. Nazism seemed to be related to esoteric cults through the idea of an ancient race who had supernatural powers (Goodrick-Clark, 1992). According to this belief, Aryans and Jews should be the depositors of an ancient wisdom and this should generate a conflict between the two races to control the world. In Nazi iconography there also are many references to the Holy Roman Empire and to the Templar Knights. These cults talk about a "king of the world" and about "unknown masters" who lived in hidden caves located in Tibet or in the Gobi desert. The names given to these places are Agharti, Atlantis, and Paradesha. The Nazi SS (Secret Service) troops were also called "the guardians of the dark order," and there was a special SS unit called "Amenerbhe" with the particular task of looking for signs of the occult. These cultural references to the occult, conspiracy, and a dubious "historical" tradition are present in many of the ER web sites; they can help us to analyze the rhetorical structure of the messages, and to recognize ER discourse when it is masked in order to avoid social rejection of ER ideology. Figure 2 is an example of one ER web site—the home page of Sodalizio del Cerchio Antico (Society of the Ancient Society)—that presents itself as a cultural association to protect "the traditional idea."

This site can be contrasted with the site for the group Fascismo Oggi (Fascism Today), presented in Figure 3, which explicitly recalls fascist iconography and rhetoric. The linguistic register of these sites is that of propaganda; the argumentation demonstrates antiSemitism, the exaltation of Fascism and Nazism, and resistance to foreign immigration.

ER web sites have variable characteristics. They range from single web pages with minimal text and graphics, to sites with multiple pages rich in content, including graphics, IRC links and other discussion forums, as well as documents and files available for download.

The majority of sites include links to other ER web sites. These may indicate explicit affiliation among the groups or individuals who manage the various ER web pages, "an indication of ideological affinity or common goals and interests" (Burris et al., 2000, p. 216). This cannot be assumed, since the links also could "be based on hostile relations rather than cooperative alliances among Web site producers" (Park & Thelwall, 2003, quoting Sunstein, 2001). Nonetheless, it is reasonable to argue that the webmasters/mistresses of such sites are more likely to link their pages to other sites to which they feel somehow "similar" and with which they share ideological traits. As a result, it may be possible to deduce that the links among web sites correspond to a form of organization of the ER groups. However, as "Internet links are a 'cheaper' form of affiliation than those that are maintained through other lines of communication or association" (Burris et al., 2000, p. 216), the ties among groups will probably be less "thick" than in real life.

While the analysis of ER web sites as social networks can not aim to establish the relations among Italian ER groups in the offline world, the analysis can highlight an area of "virtual" activity and social exchange among ER groups who use the Internet as an additional channel through which to build their common ideological framework. The use of content analysis can help to disambiguate the cooperative or competitive nature of these ties.

The Extreme Right in Italy

The universe of ER web sites is complex (Tateo, 2002), including different categories of groups and a wide range of personal web pages that lend to the ER ideology greater visibility than the numerical weight of the groups themselves. Figure 4 schematically represents the composition of the ER groups on the Internet, ranging from the neo-nazis to the revisionists to the radical Catholic Right (Cingolani, 1996; Galleni, 1981; Karmasyn et al., 2000; Schmidt, 1993).

During 1997, the European Research and Action Centre against Racism and anti-Semitism identified three Right Wing political parties with parliamentary representation in Italy: the Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), the Movimento Sociale Italiano-Destra Tricolore (Italian Social Movement), and the Lega Nord (Northern League). The extraparliamentary Italian ER groups that are politically active are shown in Table 1 (Goldstaub, 1998).

There are also several local Italian ER groups, not listed by the European Research and Action Centre, which are active on the Internet with their own web sites, BBS, and mailing lists.

Methodology and Corpus of Data

The web directory Portale della destra in Italia (Portal of the Right Wing in Italy), was chosen for building the corpus of data. This site describes itself as the ultimate directory of the Italian ER and seems to be the only such portal that is active. Three web sites from the portal were randomly chosen as starting points. Additional sites from the link pages of the initial three sites were added using the reputational approach (as defined in the network analysis literature, cf. Scott, 1991). According to this approach, some members of a population to be studied are first asked to indicate other members who are considered to be representative of that community. Then a list of these subjects is composed, combining the choices of the interviewed members, and is used as a final corpus for the SNA. We adapted this approach to the web by considering the citation of sites in link pages as reputational choices. The link pages of the reputational sites were also checked, until a total of 77 web sites had been identified, after removal of dead links. (For a list of sites included in the corpus, see the Appendix.)

Two independent judges categorized the sites into sub-groups based on common content. The nine categories initially proposed by Burris et al. (2000) were adapted to the characteristics of the present research corpus during the categorization process, with the following 11 categories emerging from the analysis:

1. Music groups, labels, fanzines, and music portals (9 sites): The ER culture, especially that of skinheads, often utilizes music as a tool for the diffusion of ideas and messages. The main genres are punk and heavy metal music, Celtic and medieval music, and dark rock music. Also associated with the musical groups are recording labels and e-zines. Generally, the ER music culture defines itself as "antagonist music" or "traditionalist rock."
2. Italian Social Republic (ISR) nostalgics (13 sites): These are groups which refer to the Fascist National Party of the 1920s and 1930s, to the ISR of Salò, or to Benito Mussolini's apologists. The main difference from neo-fascists groups is that these sites do not refer to contemporary political intervention. The nostalgic sites can be linked to ISR World War II survivor soldiers, and they often contain revisionist arguments.
3. Skinhead groups (1 site): These groups claim music or football fandom as their main interests, and their sites are often full of Nazi, fascist, or Celtic mythological symbols. In most cases, they talk about demonstrations, violence, and disorders with police and immigrants.
4. Revisionists and negationists (4 sites): These are sites which have as their main issue historical revisionism and holocaust denial. The main themes are the rewriting of history and documentation of the communists' crimes. Sometimes they present themselves as reviewers of history or institutions of historical study. They refer to David Irving and Ernst Zundel as the lead revisionist historians.
5. Cultural, traditionalist Catholics, new age and neo-mystical groups (10 sites): Some ER groups refer to Celtic mythology or to a sort of new spiritualism challenging the official Christian religion, which is considered to be a product of capitalism. There is also an extreme right Catholic current which address issues like abortion, the growth of Islamic religion in Western society, and moral decadence. The traits that these groups seem to have in common are anti-Semitism and references to transcendence.
6. Neo-nazis (1 site): These groups refer, in a more or less explicit way, to German National Socialist ideology, to the Third Reich, and to the personage of Adolf Hitler. The sites contain Nazi symbols in original or modified forms, talk about the purity of the Aryan race, racial hatred, and sometimes negationism and political violence. They recruit members in a paramilitary fashion.
7. Publishers, reviews, commercial sites selling books or merchandising (12 sites): There are several publishers who produce and sell only ER books, classical nazi-fascist texts, or objects and gadgets. This category is characterized by the commercial nature of the sites.
8. Political parties or movements (10 sites): This category includes the sites of the groups that define themselves as political parties or movements and openly partake in political activities (e.g., elections, political debates, policy issues). Also included in this category are youth associations relating to political parties.
9. Militaria (5 sites): These sites are involved in collecting military relics, histories of military corps, and war history. Such sites could be assimilated into revisionist and nostalgic sites, but they are different because their main activity is the collection and display of World War II facts and military uniforms.
10. National revolutionaries, nationalitarians, and communists (10 sites): These groups refer to the neo-fascist movement that started during the 1960s and to the "black subversion," including groups like Ordine Nuovo and Terza posizione. These include extra parliamentary political groups not legally recognized.
11. Others (2 sites): This category includes all sites not included in previous categories.

During the sub-net analysis (see below), categories 3, 6, and 11 were grouped together, because together they represent only four cases. Nevertheless, when the global analysis was conducted, it was decided not to entirely eliminate the categories, in order to preserve useful information. We took into account that the distribution among categories in the sample does not necessarily reflect their representativeness in the universe of the ER Italian sites as a whole. The social network analysis was conducted using the UCINET software in its 6.0 version (Borgatti et al., 2002).

Results

Network Structure and Actor Attributes

The analyzed network was composed of 77 web sites grouped into 11 categories, with a total number of 214 links. The global network density was 0.037 (i.e., active links represent 3.7% of all the potential links). Forty-three sites have no outgoing links to other sites, while 17 have more than five outgoing links. Twelve sites have no incoming links, while another 12 have more than five incoming links.

One of the first questions network analysis considers is whether there is any specific node or nodes occupying a central position within the network. Degree centrality gives some information about the network structure. If a site has a high degree centrality, the network structure is centralized and the site is a crucial one for information flow (Freeman, 1979). Otherwise, the network structure is considered to be more distributed. In the cases studied, the average degree centrality is 2.779, which means the Italian ER is not a highly centralized network, instead the central position is occupied by more than one node.

Following Burris et al.'s (2000) methodology, indegree, the number of incoming links from other nodes, is assumed to be a measure of an actor's centrality within the network. In network analysis this measure is also called prestige or popularity (Burris et al., 2000). The following four sites possess a high indegree within the Italian ER network:

1. Associazione storico-culturale ITALIA-RSI (Historical cultural Association Italy-ISR) (10 incoming links): The site contains an anthology and some information about ISR and is associated with the revisionist sites' network "Noi e la storia. raccontare il '900? Raccontiamolo tutto!" (We and the History. Tell the '900? Tell it all!). The site is rich in documents concerning the history of ISR and links to similar sites, the associations of ISR military corps, and some revisionist reviews. There is an agenda of the association's activities with respect to commemorative places and war memorials; reviews of ISR books; an initiative called "cyberamanuense," which collects transcriptions of witnesses to the ISR. The intention to narrate history from the opposite point of view with respect to the "vulgata of Resistance" is stated in the presentation page. The site is detailed in its content but simple from the technical point of view. Various colors are used, but there is no fascist iconography.
2. Federazione Nazionale Combattenti della Repubblica Sociale Italiana (National Federation of Italian Social Republic's Veterans) (9 incoming links): The site is maintained by the Federation of the ISR Veterans and it contains nostalgic material about the fascist era-such as leaflets, armed forces symbols of the Salò period, documents concerning the so-called "Italian civil war," and a magazine entitled Fogli di orientamento. The association regularly celebrates the anniversaries of the most important fascist historical events through parades and the distribution of leaflets.
3. Carpe diem: periodico dell'associazione "il Cervo Bianco" (Carpe diem: newsmagazine of the association "the White Deer") (9 incoming links): This site hosts the association's magazine in Italian and Spanish. It also hosts some pages maintained by the Amigos de Leon Degrelle cultural association, some other ER magazines (La legione, Nothus, Offensiva, Otto) and listings of ISR veterans' associations. The site's sections contain mainly documents concerning the Salò period. The site has simple graphics; documents are reachable by drop-down menus, which suggests that the contents are organized in a database. The most frequently-used colors are black, orange, and blue. The site's structure is quite extensive, with multiple branches, but is easily navigable.
4. Aurora Mensile del Movimento Antagonista Sinistra Nazionale (Aurora Monthly Review of the Antagonist National Left Movement) (8 incoming links): This site is the e-version of the magazine of the populist movement Sinistra Nazionale (National Left), which presents itself as national socialist. Included in the site's pages are the archives of the print review Aurora, which is no longer published on paper. Aurora addresses a wide range of topics, from conspiracy theory to anti-Americanism to anti-Semitism to European and Aryan culture.

The site for the Associazione storico-culturale ITALIA-RSI shows the highest betweenness degree (551.6) within the network (Freeman, 1979). A high betweenness measure indicates that the actor is situated in a strategic position among nodes, linking different areas of the network, and its incoming and outgoing links are largely distributed to the entire network. Such an actor is called a "broker" (Krebs, 2000).

Sub-group Analysis

The first step of this analysis was to verify the efficacy of the categorization of the sub-groups, in order to validate the changes from the Burris et al. (2000) categorization. As an indicator of the existence of sub-groups with common attributes, the local density degree was calculated for the groups from each category. The hypothesis was that if the categories used to group the sites represent real similarities, the local density degree for each sub-group would be higher than the global density degree. As stated above, for this analysis the categories were reduced to nine, grouping together categories 3, 6, and 11. Results are presented in Table 2.

Table 2 shows that, overall, the sites classified in the same category have, as predicted, a higher local density degree than the global network density. The one exception is category 5, "Cultural, traditionalist Catholics, new age and neo-mystical groups" (10 sites), which was very heterogeneous in terms of focus and coverage.

The higher density degree of sub-group 11, a residual category, is not readily explainable. The four sites of this sub-group are: Ultra' della Lazio (Ultras of Lazio F.C.), Movimento nazionale risorgista (Risorgista National Movement), Associazione Eleuteros Trento (Eleuteros Association Trento), and Nazionalismo italiano (Italian nationalism).² Perhaps they represent another area of the ER network, or else the density degree could be a simple coincidence.

To analyze the relationships within the network, Burris et al. (2000)'s methodology was used to calculate the link density within and across sub-groups. This procedure permits the exploration of the exchange of ties among the members of the same area with respect to other sub-groups. Following Burris et al. (2000, p. 225), only those paths whose density was 1.5 times higher than the network average of 0.037 were considered. Table 3 shows the matrix of density degrees and highlights the differences among the subgroups in terms of internal cohesion.

The higher ingroup density can be found in the categories "Militaria" (0.3) and "Revisionists" (0.25). In the first case, the higher density can be explained by the fact that these are sites belonging both to collectors and amateurs, so there is an activity of information exchange to find rarities and relics. In the case of revisionists' sites, as Karmasyn, Panczer, and Fingerhut (2000) suggest, the revisionist authors tend to justify their statements using a system of reciprocal quotations, to create the impression of being part of a "scientific community" that shares their revisionist thesis.

The lowest ingroup link density was for the category "Publishers, reviews, commercial sites selling books or merchandising" (0.008). This result confirms the findings of Burris et al. (2000), who suggest that commercial sites seek to avoid giving visibility to their potential competitors.

Concerning the intergroup link density, which is graphically represented in Figure 5, the "Revisionists" sites show a large link exchange with "Militaria" sites (0.25 in the direction "revisionists" --> "militaria" and 0.15 in the opposite direction). This result can be explained by the fact that the sites in both categories talk about history from a revisionist and nostalgic point of view and address a common audience. Furthermore, as stated above, the major concern of revisionists is to present their ideas as being historically accurate. The attention focused on the "Militaria" sites that collect documents on World War II could be part of an argumentative strategy towards this end.

The least selective group in the choice of which sites to link to is that of "ISR-nostalgics." This group shows significant density degree in relation to six other sub-groups, meaning that the sites of this category adopt an "ecumenical" communicative style (Burris et al., 2000, p. 226) with respect to other ER groups.

Summary and Conclusion

The aim of this study was to identify the boundaries of a growing phenomenon: the use of the World Wide Web by Italian ER groups. The first research question: "Is it possible to speak of a network of Italian ER sites?" is answered in the affirmative: Results show the presence of a coherent network among sites. Future research plans to map in detail the entire Italian ER network.

We can also answer the second question regarding the nature of ties among Italian ER groups. By using both social network analysis and content analysis approaches, we were able to illustrate some characteristics of the relationships among the ER sites. However, a complete explanation of these relationships and the nature of agreements and disagreements among ideological sub-systems of the ER network will require additional qualitative analysis of the sites' contents.

As for the presence of central sites in the network, the four most prominent sites belong to four different categories: the "Associazione storico-culturale ITALIA-RSI" is a revisionist site, the "Federazione Nazionale Combattenti della Repubblica Sociale Italian" is a ISR-nostalgic and veterans' site, "Carpe diem, periodico dell'associazione culturale il Cervo Bianco" is a cultural group, while "Aurora, Mensile del Movimento Antagonista Sinistra Nazionale" belongs to the national revolutionary category. This result might represent what we could call an "offer of differentiated Internet content" by the ER, which exists as a loosely structured and interacting galaxy of groups under the label of Extreme Right.

We also tried to verify the methods of Burris et al. (2000), who argue that the network analysis approach could be a "simple and useful tool" to study the Internet (Burris et al., 2000, p. 230). We think that in an exploratory phase, this approach can yield useful information-especially for determining the presence and quantity of intergroup ties via CMC. Nevertheless, it is not possible to claim from social network analysis alone that there is a correspondence between link data and the ER movement's interorganizational structure, or that links are "empirical indicators of affinity between movement organizations and ideological viewpoints" (Burris et al., 2000, p. 230).

The results raise new research questions: How can we adapt the methodology utilized here to study CMC use by political groups? What role do the parliamentary right wing parties' web sites play in the network, and what are their relationships with other extremist groups? How can we analyze ties among groups from an evolutionary point of view? Another interesting issue that deserves more study is how the network facilitates recruitment of new members, and what we can learn about how an individual moves from a marginal to an active role within these groups.

In CMC today, it is trivial to say that the structure of hyperlinks is as important as the content of the communication (Mininni, 2002). CMC thus challenges the duality between structuralism and functionalism. CMC also challenges the traditional rift between quantitative and qualitative approaches, in the sense that research into a very complex subject, such as mediated human communication, requires a nuanced theoretical framework and set of methodological approaches. This does not mean that we need more complex methodologies; we have tried to show how one can work with different approaches and methodologies in a synergistic way.

Notes

1. Some adjustments to the Burris et al. (2000) study have been made to adapt the model, the data collection, and the analysis techniques to the Italian political and cultural context. Points where the two studies differ will be underlined.
2. Some of the group names are difficult to translate because they contain words not found in English; in such cases the author has chosen to leave the words in Italian. The site "Nazionalismo italiano" was active during data collection, but was not available at the time this article was written.

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Appendix: Web Sites Included in the Corpus

About the Author

Luca Tateo received his Ph.D. in Psychology of Communication at the University of Bari (Italy). He has been a Marie Curie Fellow at the Instituto Superior de Ciéncias do Trabaho e da Empresa in Lisbon (Portugal), and stagiare "Schuman" at the European Parliament, where he worked as webmaster and content editor for Direction Generale III, Luxembourg. His research interests include the social impacts of new media, the digital divide, intergroup relations in CMC, and role of CMC in local communities and job market development. He is currently Coordinator of the Center for Documentation of Job Market and Southern Italian Policies and the Employment Center of the municipality of Salerno.
Address: Department of Psychology, University of Bari, via C. Pisacane, I-84100 Salerno, Italy