Tracking Hate 2.0 on the Web

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May 20, 2008, 2:54 pm
Tracking Hate 2.0 on the Web
By Brad Stone

The Internet is seeing a stark rise in the number of hate and terror sites and Web postings, according to a Congressional briefing last week entitled “Hate in the Information Age.”

At the briefing, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group based in Los Angeles, presented the organization’s annual study of online terror and hate. He said the group had identified some 8,000 problematic sites in the last 12 months, a 30 percent spike over last year.

Contributing to this precipitous rise was the proliferation of Web 2.0 services, which have made it easy to post videos to sites like YouTube and mint hate groups on services like Facebook and MySpace.

Rabbi Cooper said the threat from hate groups is real, not theoretical. “The Internet is a fantastic marketing tool,” he said.

Rabbi Cooper attributes a third of the 30 percent spike to blogs and discussion groups that support terrorism. The rest is the material of age-old hatreds–40 percent anti-Semitic, 20 percent anti-black, 15 percent anti-immigrant and the rest a hodge-podge of anti-religious, anti-government sentiment.

Rabbi Cooper frets over how easy it is for extremists to leverage Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, video sites and social networks to target young people.

“You can market and train followers while bypassing traditional Web sites. It makes it very, very difficult for law enforcement to follow what’s going on,” he said. “You now have neo-Nazi thugs who want to make sure they capture and memorialize their racist violence on video and then use it as a way to denigrate their enemy online to get recruits.”

But rather than proselytize against those powerful communication tools, the Wiesenthal Center is taking a cue from them and asking Web users to participate in a sort of digital community-watch program. It is asking people who encounter hate sites, videos or groups to email links to a new email address, ireport@wiesenthal.com. It will then work with law enforcement and ISPs to address those sites.