hate sites and vigilantes

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, along with writing about regulatory mechanisms and free speech issues. We'll be adding information about online vigilantism later in the year. In the interim there are pointers in our Security 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.

That's 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's a large although very uneven literature, partularly in the USA, regarding the nature, prevalence and appropriate response to 'hate crime' and 'hate speech'. Three examples are Amnesty International's June 2001 report on Crimes of hate, conspiracy of silence: Torture and ill-treatment based on sexual identity, the 2001 Hatred in the Hallways report from Human Rights Watch 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.

There's 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 95) edited by Steve Jones, Carolyn Penfold's 2001 paper on Nazis, Porn & Politics: Asserting Control Over Internet Content and Evelyn Kallen's December 97 paper Hate on the Net: A Question of Rights, A Question of Power. The short 2001 paper Recruitment by Extremist Groups on the Internet by Beverly Ray & George Marsh suggests the 'cybernazi' threat has been overstated.

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's 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.

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 93) appears to suggest that there's little difference between hate ideas and hate acts, an equivalence that we find unconvincing.

     Monitoring

The quality of online and offline databases tracking hate sites US Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has launched a new 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 00) 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.

     law and regulation

We've discussed questions of regulation in our Censorship and Governance guides.

There is no Australian legislation specific to online hate speech; it has been addressed through Federal and State/Territory antidiscrimination law such as the Racial Hatred Act 1995. That's underpinned action, for example, against an Adelaide-based Holocaust denial site. An overview is provided by Louise Johns' 1995 paper Racial Vilification and ICERD in Australia.

For an international perspective see James Jacobs & Kimberly Potter's Hate Crimes: Criminal Law & Identity Politics (Oxford, Oxford Uni Press 98) and the overview of the 1995 Hate Speech Symposium: Protecting Rights, Protecting Hate? Comparative American, Canadian, and Israeli Approaches.

In the US concern about hate crime (in particular the firebombing of some community organisations) led to several laws during the Clinton presidency. The most important is the 1999 Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

The legislation has been criticised as redundant or overly restrictive and is still working its way through the courts. Among academic studies are Samuel Walker's Hate Speech: The History of an American Controversy (Lincoln, Uni of Nebraska Press 94), Franklyn Haiman's Speech Acts & the First Amendment (Carbondale, Southern Illinois Uni Press 93) and Jonathan Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Chicago, Uni of Chicago Press 94).

There are broader pointers in the discussion of content regulation in the Censorship guide on this site. One example is Susan Hering's concise 1995 comment Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Harassment.

For Canada see Heather De Santis' 1998 Combating Hate on the Internet: An International Comparative Review of Policy Approaches study for the Department of Canadian Heritage, Senaka Suriya's Combatting Hate? A socio-legal discussion on the criminalization of hate in Canada (Ottawa, Carleton Uni Press 98), Michel Racicot's 306 page report The Cyberspace is Not a 'No Law Land': A Study of the Issues of Liability for Content Circulating on the Internet and the 2001 paper Combatting Hate On The Internet by the Hate & New Media Working Group.

Two UK perspectives are David Capitanchik & Michael Whine's policy paper The Governance of Cyberspace: Racism on the Internet and Michael Whine's paper Cyberspace: a new medium for communication, command and control by extremists.

Pointers to Australian and overseas anti-discrimination legislation are here.





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