Almost a decade ago, Souvannarath was a regular DeviantArt visitor who posted under the account snoopyfemme, something in particular caught her eye. Interested by the artwork, Souvannarath messaged the artist and they started chatting. She soon learned he was a neo-Nazi. Souvannarath found him fascinating, and the two continued to talk as her journey into darkness went deeper.

Lindsay Souvannarath, a young woman from Illinois, likely didn't expect a trip to DeviantArt would end with her plotting a mass killing. But thanks in part to some neo-Nazi artwork she spotted on the site, that's exactly what happened.

DeviantArt, founded in 2000, is home to millions of users and hundreds of millions of pieces of art. It’s offered a home for marginalized artists and communities to create and share work. If you can visualize it, odds are DeviantArt has it.

The pair were obsessed with death, and eventually the two planned to shoot up a mall in Halifax, Canada. Somehow, a plot to commit one of the worst mass killings in Canadian history had its beginnings on the website mostly known for hosting subversive artwork like drawings of a pregnant Sonic the Hedgehog .

She met other neo-Nazis online, started exploring other morbid subcultures, and became a part of their community. She started submitting her own Nazi artwork, and eventually grew that into a Tumblr page called Cock-Swastika. She became obsessed with mass killers, especially the Columbine shooters. Then, one day in late 2014, she was taken by another piece of art, this time a meme about Columbine, and, once again, messaged the creator.

“[The neo-Nazi beliefs] just started by chance on this art website when I came across this one painting and thought, whoa, that’s a really cool painting. So I decided to like and comment on it and talk to the artist a little,” Souvannarath would later say on a podcast . “The artist just happened to be a national socialist and later on through him I started to meet more national socialists and started networking through them.”

But like many large social media platforms, there exists a small but thriving hive of extremists on DeviantArt, similar to the ones Souvannarath came across. These extremists have created a network of far-right user groups where they create and share far-right propaganda, talk and write about fascism, and recruit vulnerable users.

The far-right propaganda posted on DeviantArt is then disseminated across the web, which experts say works as a gateway drug to recruitment to neo-Nazi groups.

Jeremy Blackburn, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, studies memes and the online spaces of the far-right. Blackburn said that in the far-right ecosystem like 4Chan’s /pol/ board or Gab, images like the ones created and stored on DeviantArt are immensely important.

"Essentially what is happening is that people's brains are being hacked, especially in terms of imagery—it's very digestible, it's super-duper easy to share,” said Blackburn. “It takes like 15 to 20 seconds, at most, to look at a meme and that's where I think the danger is. You can become inundated with them and basically read the equivalent of reams of propaganda.”

When VICE provided spokespeople for DeviantArt with evidence of neo-Nazi content on the site, they referenced the site's commitment to freedom of artistic expression and its zero tolerance policy for "hate propaganda."