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hate sites
This page looks at hate sites.
It covers -
It
is supplemented by more detailed information on censorship
& free speech, cyberbullying
and online vigilantes.
Some readers have asked why hate sites - and more broadly
hate speech - are discussed here as part of the site's
treatment of politics, rather than as censorship. The
rationale is that hate speech (from a rancid novel by
Celine to a bully's homophobic epithet) is political,
both in terms of the intent to wound or terrorise and
in the response (or lack of response) by regulators and
bystanders.
Others have questioned the differentiation between hate
sites and speech. The differentiation is based on convenience,
with -
- sites
(whether the equivalent of graffiti or a poster or a
more comprehensive corporate presence) having some notion
of permanency and preparation - considered on this page
- online
speech (email, SMS, chat) often being just as injurious
but often more 'spontaneous' (or merely excused as such)
- considered in the following page of this guide
introduction
Some observers would reject the notion of 'hate sites'
("the latest manifestation of political correctness")
or merely minimise their significance, arguing that free
speech is of paramount importance. Others are concerned
about use of the web to promote violence or discrimination.
Information - or misinformation - can have real consequences.
Disagreements about responses to hate sites are exacerbated
by the nature of the web. So far borders in cyberspace
have proved to be largely nonexistent. Promoters have
accordingly hosted their publications in friendly jurisdictions
from which they can readily reach a global audience.
This page looks at some studies about the prevalence and
use of hate sites. It is complemented by pointers in the
Security & Infocrime guide.
Pointers to particular sites are given below.
One example is the Front14
hate portal, that boasts "Only Front 14 offers free
webhosting and email exclusively to Racialists" and
explains that
Many
White people don't have the time and energy to put into
hosting their own domain, so they join Geocities, Angelfire,
etc, in an attempt to get their voices heard. But these
"free" services (who bombard you with ads) have adopted
an aggressive anti-White policy. We decided to provide
an alternative to proud White men and women, one that
would be for our White interests only.
Competitor
Private Web Hosting boasts that it is "a private
membership organization for straight, white, non-jews"
When
the internet was young, people could put up web sites
to express just about any opinion, without fear of reprisal.
Those days have changed. Today, Internet Service Providers
(ISP's) and Web Hosting Companies have cumbersome "Acceptable
Use Policies (AUP)" and nasty "Terms Of Service
(TOS)." These policies have been perverted into
tools to stifle the free and open exchange of ideas
and of opinions. Often, sites are routinely shut off
by web hosts as "hate speech" or because
they are deemed "offensive" or "racist."
We're changing that! We will pretty-much take web sites
covering ANY (lawful) topic! Private Web Hosting.org
is a private membership club. We do not do business
with the general public. As such, we can pick and choose
with whom we associate. In order to have your web site
hosted by us, you need to be a straight, white, non-jew.
That
is in line with the comment in Kenneth Stern's Hate
& the Internet report
that
For
ten or twenty dollars a month, you can have a potential
audience of tens of millions of people. There was a
time when these folks were stuck surreptitiously putting
fliers under your windshield wiper. Now they are taking
the same material and putting it on the Internet.
general studies
There is a large although very uneven literature, particularly
in the USA, regarding the nature, prevalence and appropriate
response to 'hate crime' and 'hate speech'.
Five examples are Amnesty International's June 2001 report
on Crimes of Hate, Conspiracy of Silence: Torture &
ill-treatment based on sexual identity, the 2001 Hatred
in the Hallways
report from Human Rights Watch, by Frederick Lawrence's
Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes under American law
(Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2002), the 2006 report from
Victim Support in the UK (PDF)
and the US Department of Justice's 1997 A Policymaker's
Guide to Hate Crimes (PDF).
Our main interest in this part of the guide is use of
the net by radical groups to disseminate views, recruit
members and organise activities; we accordingly don't
examine documents such as the US federal government 2005
Report
on Global Anti-Semitism.
There is a useful introduction in Susan Zickmund's 'Approaching
the Radical Others: The Discursive Culture of Cyberhate'
in Virtual Culture: Identity & Communication in
Cybersociety (London: Sage 1995) edited by Steve Jones.
Matthew Zook's 1996 paper
The Unorganized Militia Network: Conspiracies, Computers
& Community, Carolyn Penfold's 2001 paper
on Nazis, Porn & Politics: Asserting Control Over
Internet Content and Evelyn Kallen's December 1997
paper
Hate on the Net: A Question of Rights, A Question of
Power are also of particular value.
The short 2001 paper
Recruitment by Extremist Groups on the Internet by
Beverly Ray & George Marsh suggests the 'cybernazi'
threat has been overstated, in contrast to the Digital
Representation: Racism on the World Wide Web paper
by Indhu Rajagopal & Nis Bojin. A perspective is provided
by the comparison in the 2003 paper
Hate and peace in a connected world: Comparing MoveOn
and Stormfront by Noriko Hara & Zilia Estrada
and in Albert Benschop's 2005 Chronicle of a Political
Murder Foretold: Jihad in the Netherlands paper.
The Anti-Defamation League's 1999 A Parent's Guide
To Hate On the Internet document
and Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online report
are both important. Crawford Killian's 1995 article
The Virtual Reich offers a succinct but dated overview
of radical right groups online. There is a more recent
overview
in Hate on the Internet by Karen Mock & Lisa
Armony.
For an account by a former member of one group see Milton
Kleim's brief 1995 document
On Tactics and Strategy for Usenet.
For Italy see Luca Tateo's 2005 paper
The Italian Extreme Right On-line Network: An Exploratory
Study Using an Integrated Social Network Analysis and
Content Analysis Approach.
A 2001 report (PDF)
from global civil liberties watchdog Freedom House (FH)
argues that online freedom in most countries exceeds the
freedom of the traditional press. Catharine MacKinnon's
strange Only Words (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press
1993) appears to suggest that there is little difference
between hate ideas (expressed or otherwise) and hate acts,
an equivalence that we find unconvincing. There is a broader
- and, for us, more persuasive - analysis in Freedom
of Speech & Incitement against Democracy (London:
Kluwer 2000) by David Kretzmer & Francine Kershman.
Jean-François Gaudreault-DesBiens paper (PDF)
From Sisyphus's Dilemma to Sisyphus's Duty? A Meditation
on the Regulation of Hate Propaganda in Relation to Hate
Crimes and Genocide suggests that
to
avoid undue limitations to freedom of expression ...
only extreme hate expression should be regulated, that
is, abusive expression, which is distinct from offensive
expresssion in that it targets persons rather than ideas.
There is no optimal way to balance equality and freedom
of expression, nor to address the challenges that the
enforcement of hate speech regulation entails. [T]he
dilemma of the "Sisyphus state" [is] a duty to regulate
against abusive forms of expression, because a constitutional
democracy cannot tolerate radical denials of the humanity
of some of its citizens.
That
is reflected in Luke McNamara's detailed Regulating
Racism: Racial Vilification Laws in Australia (Sydney:
Federation Press 2002) and Jonathan Cohen's More Censorship
or Less Discrimination? Sexual Orientation Hate Propaganda
in Multiple Perspectives (PDF).
monitoring
The quality of online and offline databases tracking hate
sites varies considerably.
The US Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
has a site
to track hate groups and assist understanding by community
groups and law enforcement agencies. The Nizkor
Organisation is particularly strong on Holocaust denial
sites.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC)
released a Digital Hate 2001: Internet Report and Analysis
CD-ROM in 2001, superseding past online reports. The excellent
HateWatch
and HateMonitor
sites are more accessible. The Encyclopedia of White
Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right (Walnut
Creek: Altamira Press 2000) edited by Jeffrey Kaplan offers
useful background about US developments.
Other include the Tolerance site,
PartnersAgainstHate site,
Paul Ekran's site
and official bodies such as Australia's federal Human
Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC)
or the US National Center for HateCrime Prevention (NCHCP)
which features a large bibliography.
how much hate?
The number of hate sites, the size of their audience and
their impact is contentious.
Disagreement reflects uncertainties about basic enumeration
- highlighted in the Metrics & Statistics guide
elsewhere on this site - and the interpretation of content.
Different monitors use varying mechanisms in identifying
and classifying sites that encompass explicit incitements
to violence, Holocaust denial, recruitment for fringe
political parties or terrorist organisations and 'ethnic
humour'.
Institutional imperatives mean that some advocacy groups
- and hate groups - have an interest in emphasising the
growth of hate sites. That appears to have resulted in
some 'double-counting' sites that feature content from
several entities.
Disagreement also reflects questions about causation,
with claims that particular sites drive recruitment, validate
radicalism, foster 'lone wolf' activists or instead preach
only to the converted. One observer thus warns against
confusing access with action, commenting that "just
because someone has access to questionable material doesn't
mean they're going to act on it".
Most western estimates of the number of discrete sites
range from 400 to 1,500. The Simon Wiesenthal Center claimed
in 2000 that there were over 2,000 sites. Hatewatch.org
identified roughly 400 "hardcore hate sites"
that year. The Canadian Media Awareness organisation reported
in 2004 suggestions by the Southern Poverty Law Centre
that the number of such sites was around 400, with between
1,500 and 1,750 "problematic" sites for a total
of 660, 000 problematic pages.
The audience for those sites is unknown. Major commercial
and academic online audience metrics organisations have
not highlighted racist or other hate traffic; 'special
interest' sites in essence do not appear on the radar.
One of the more challenging comments
has been that 'cyber-extremism' now centres on discussion
groups, rather than discrete sites. That is of concern,
because identification is more difficult.
cases
Landmark cases include -
Zundel
- the 2002 ruling
by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal under the Canadian
Human Rights Act that the Holocaust denial site hosted
in the US but maintained in Canada by Ernst Zundel is
unlawful
Toben - the 2000 ruling by the Australian Human
Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission that Frederick
Toben breached the Racial Discrimination Act and should
remove
Holocaust denial content from his site
Yahoo France - action by anti-racist groups under
French vilification law against Yahoo and French ISPs
for alleged "complicity in making available" Nazi propaganda
from US sites such as
Front14 and enabling online auctions of Nazi memorabilia.
In addition to the Penfold paper noted above Yaman Akdeniz's
Case Analysis of the League Against Racism &
Antisemitism (LICRA), French Union of Jewish Students,
v Yahoo! Inc. (USA), Yahoo France (PDF),
Joel Reidenberg's 2001 The Yahoo Case & the International
Democratization of the Internet (here),
Benoît Frydman & Isabelle Rorive's 2002 keynote
Fighting Nazi and Anti-Semitic Material on the Internet:
the Yahoo! Case & its Global Implications and
the snappy 'iBrief'
on the Duke University Law Journal site offer
an introduction.
Nuremberg Files - litigation over a stridently
anti-abortion site
that has been seen by some as inciting violence against
doctors, health workers and others offering services
not the liking of the site's owners. The site operator
is appealing against a damages ruling of around US$107
million.
There is a useful introduction in Jason Schlosberg's
Judgment on 'Nuremberg': An Analysis of Free Speech
and Anti-Abortion Threats Made on the Internet (PDF).
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