Desperately Seeking Digital Salvation

Our love affair with the internet is ending. It is as if we have discovered a long standing lover has  hidden being arrested numerous times for DWI and then says "it's nothing to worry about."

The US only woke up to the cultural infidelities of the internet when it threatened democracy. It seems abusing blacks, women, Jews, Muslims, LBGTQ or the physically challenged for the past 10 years wasn't really considered much of a problem. The companies were glad to let it go and the US public defended the digital industry's free speech assertion. But the Europeans were far less sympathetic and, it seems, basically correct.

Abuse and exploitation by hate groups, extremists, foreign antagonists and a variety of malcontents has certainly taken the shine off the internet. When you add toxic online social and gaming environments, over-reaching data mining and user activity tracking, the entire picture looks bad. While testifying in Europe and Washington D.C. everyone from ISP, hosts, game developers to corporate giants are left with the task of trying to paint a friendly face on an ugly canvas.

Being realistic, the internet is not entirely evil or bad, but where it has been bad, it has been awful. Some of those bad places have been very large, very influential and have done some serious damage. It is no longer practical or possible to ignore the downside of an unregulated, unmoderated internet.

Companies are not ignorant of the problem or the business implications. Users can be fickle, ask MySpace. The same goes for advertisers. Politicians are always looking for issues to build or support careers. Companies know all this and are now scrambling to make corrections that are long overdue.

Users and communities have been told numerous times about wonderful new adjustments that will greatly improve the livability of the internet. Yet old issues left dormant and unattended emerge unexpectedly to unleash new daunting problems.

Some things take allot of effort to reverse. It's hard to change the recipe once the cake has been baked. In those cases, it is important to make the recipe sound good and make the icing attractive.  You really want to get it right the next time. Meanwhile, all your guests are asking if there's ice cream or fruit or something else because everybody knows bad cake when they taste it.

The Internet is Gone

The Internet you think exists, or thought exists, is gone. Been gone awhile. It was damaged beyond repair while you watched. Most people did not notice. This was not done by the right-wing, the left-wing, the media, the politicians or users alone. The ultimate attack against the internet was led by the very people who created it.

Yes, the internet has helped many people, but when it started helping the worst of people with the most malicious agendas Jack, Mark, Sergey, Jerry, Jeff  and most others, did as little as possible. At the same time racists, misogynists, extremists, elitists, abusers and malefactors of every stripe did as much as possible to erode the foundation of higher principals it aspired to foster.

There was plenty of warning.

Under the thinly veiled disguise of anonymous rumors, alternative news, suppressed facts and conspiracies an increasingly subjective definition of what are facts and truth emerged. Much of this activity centered on targeting religious groups, minorities, women or immigrants and , as such, was not widely decried. Many people did call out the companies for enabling the abuse which desensitized us to corrosive behavior. Anyone within the industry knew/knows the watchdogs who called for more aggressive action by the platforms.  Both at the companies and in society. Anyone within the industry also knows that most of these people left in frustration, disgust or disappointment when it became clear that the executives of the companies were going to let hate persist unchallenged.

This was years ago.

Now the moral fabric of the internet is in tatters and the intellectual landscape is not looking much better.

Companies prioritized evolving profitability over evolving safety and sacrificed the core of the internet's true value in the process.

Now that users are pushing back, abandoning platforms and apps which fail to protect them, the scramble is on to find a cure. But hate is like a cancer. Surgery is not always the best approach, but true solutions take time, creativity and investment and hate has a tremendous lead in that race.

The New Slave Economy

It's just like the old movie Soylent Green. Just like the slave trade. You are the product. You are what is being consumed, and you have no control, no say and in some cases, you don't even know it's happening.

The internet economy is made of people. It is consuming us as data. Without our permission, explanation or compensation.

Prevailing wisdom by the companies is that the data is aggregate, each person's data is indistinguishable in the larger structure. True and not true.  In a stew you don't know if, at any moment, you are eating the first carrot you put in or last.  The untruth is that the stew you are included in is also used to target you, because the stew always needs more carrots.. "Oh, you're a carrot? How about joining our nice stew? Many carrots here."

We have all experienced doing a web-search for a vacation, or a product, and then being bombarded with ads for those very same places or products. Or how about a major online vendor who offers product suggestions that "other people who viewed cerulean blue sneakers also liked..."  The most innocuous apps and internet connected products collect your information and whenever they can, sell it, and you. Even if you tell FB or Google not to collect or sell your information, that does not apply to third party ads, surveys and forms that you fill out while on Facebook, Google or anywhere else. There is also nothing stopping platforms, which you have asked not to gather info on you, from buying it elsewhere.

There are other services which collect information about you and many others. Some even scrape data about you from websites without the website's permission (see Cambridge Analytica for example). That data is then used to categorize society into neat little stacks for consumerization.  The data can even be bought back by the platforms you have asked not to track you in the first place.

With wearables, mobile computing, cloud systems and Internet of Things, it all gets worse.

Although the plaforms and companies are guilty of exploiting the situation, the root
problem is two fold; users lack of control of  information about them and the question of Terms of Service as a legally binding agreement between companies, users and community.

User data is a Commodity. Customized packaged and sold. Yet, consumers derive little benefit from the product crafted from information about their online activity. Companies will say the internet is the benefit. But when that benefit is used to target, sell and gather more data about you, is that true?

A more equitable system would offer specific services for users who explicitly authorized data collection for/by that service and that service only. Straight up value for value.

This would empower users in how, when and where their data is used. It would also assist in converting website's Terms of Service (TOS) into the contractually binding user protection document it should have always been.

Most companies treat their  ToS seriously. More so since the EU starting enacting strict community protection laws. The reality is that, in their current form, ToS are not binding on the company for most situations. Especially in areas not covered by law.

It may be harsh and extreme to call all this slavery, but loss of control of personal data collection can't be called freedom.

Keeping One of Hitler’s Promises

Seems insane to be writing that something Hitler said has value. The historic value in the totality of what he said is about how deep the darkness of humanity can actually become and how seductive it can be. The single thing Hitler said that has true value ultimately has nothing to do with what he meant. Delusional rantings often work that way. 

The promise of a Thousand Year Reich (Thousand Year Realm, Kingdom) was uplifting to his followers and chilling to his enemies. It was Hitler’s attempt to usurp the legacy and legitimacy of the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806 AD) which has been called “The First Realm” or First Reich.   Now, mere decades after Hitler's promise of the Thousand Year Reich has been destroyed, we are faced with the sad reality that most of the world has forgotten how close we came to seeing that promise fulfilled. And so the problem – to ultimately defeat Hitler’s Reich and insure its like never returns, we must keep the truth, the reality, the nightmare alive - however long it is necessary.

According to an April article in the New York Times, over 40% of adults in the U.S. could not identify the significance of Auschwitz. In 70 years we have lost major pieces of important, tragic, instructive history.

 For a generation children have learned about Nazis from The Sound of Music. Bad Nazis, not the murderous, genocidal reality; so Nazis become less true to fact. Recently a generation has learned about Nazis form video games, where Nazis are just like any other game enemy; less real.  To the current generation, the historic videos on YouTube have no more gravity than cat videos. They are not seriously taught that Hitler drove the pageantry and adulation they see into horror.

Jews are often criticized for not "getting over" the Holocaust. History is not meant  to be gotten over. It is a learning tool, a way to benefit from our successes and our failures. Andersonville, Guernica, Ottoman genocides against the Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks and the treatment of Native Americans are all defining moments in their own time, but have historic value beyond their era. The difficulty in facing the facts of all those events is testimony to how important they are. The Holocaust stands out, but does not stand alone.

It is not hard to understand how some people cannot get their heads around these things. The rational mind wants to reject the implications of the horror unleashed during World War 2 by the Nazis.  In the age of computer generated images though, they let themselves believe these are just images, somehow other, unreal or manipulated.

My astoundingly unfair obligation is fostering this history into the future in whatever way I can.  If it takes a thousand year reich of teaching and memory, so be it. If it takes a  thousand years of nightmares for future generations, better that than anyone, anywhere actually living through such things again. 

Would You Stop Hate Online If You Could?

If you could stop most of the hate on the web, why wouldn't you? I know who you can ask.

Most hate online does not start on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, but that is where it finds its legs. I am not just talking about sexism, racism, ableism or other hates, but instead the ability to casually create and stigmatize any "other".

If the major platforms had put as much effort into user safety as they did into revenue streams, things might be very different.

I have seen the worst of online hate over the last decade in the Western World. It's my job. The calls for an uprising against the enemies of "civilization" (e.g. the world of white European descent) is nothing new. That a critical rhetorical mass has been reached which emboldens such things to action, that is new. It was also inevitable.

The platforms were well aware of the phenomenon of hate speech, but elected to let it remain in order to spur dynamic and heated exchanges on their services. Safety of users was not totally disregarded, but there was a gamble. All of us now know that bet was a bad one. Hate won.

The companies chose to err on the side of allowing more instead of  action that might over limit content. Hateful protagonists were quick to exploit the opportunity. Normalizing hate, camouflaging hate and encouraging hate became the order of the day.  That sliver of hate, allowed by the platforms in an earnest attempt to accommodate free speech,  was used to wedge open  the internet for seeds of  malicious content that are now a vast root network of evil.

Many argue that good and creative content would have suffered from more stringent policies. There is no question that innocent content might have been removed under such a policy. However, now that we are suffering seemingly endless online abuse, more content, innocent and otherwise, is being removed. When good content is removed people appeal to the platform. That's what they do now, that is what they would have had to do 10 years ago. The companies bought time, not progress.

It can also be said that the progress we have seen in controlling online hate, advance algorithms, fledgling A.I.s and armies of moderators, could have begun long before now. Improving the internet environment sooner was possible. In the time we waited, we lost ground to hate and incivility.

If you could stop hate online, why wouldn't you? I don't know. 

Cyberhate - An endless fight that must never be lost

There was a time Cyberhate manifest itself almost exclusively on a limited number of marginal websites, a laughably small number by today’s standards. Largely insignificant websites, even in their own time.  None-the-less, it was there from the first days of the internet.

Extremists and malcontents realized immediately that the new medium was like a fertile plot of soil waiting for weeds to take hold. They invested the time and energy to explore all of the possible ways they could make the best of an unregulated and unsupervised communication channel. 

In that way, little has changed, but everything else has.

There have always been dedicated haters. There always will be racists and xenophobes who reflexively hate what they don’t understand. They permeate human history. Their raw, unbridled hate may be easy to recognize for the desperate destructive thrashing about it is, but that does not mean it is easy to control.

More and more we are seeing agenda based hate. Where, for example  someone expressing a desire for gun control is abused on the basis of their assumed religion, political affiliation, possible ethnicity or anything but the issue that has triggered the abuse. Jews attacked for the actions of the distant Israeli government, all blacks criticized for crime, all Muslims berated for terrorists activity and on and on. It is as if, for many people, speaking their true hate is not acceptable. This is perhaps, because on examination, the true hateful sentiments are the old hates.  

Worst of all is when hate is accepted as dialogue. Normalization of hateful language is surely the soundtrack to the story of civilizations collapse. This is certainly what happened in World War II. In language, losing our ability to coherently express our hopes, fears, aspirations and anxieties is like physically evolving away from having thumbs.

Compounding the problem is the pace of technology. Our tools have advanced faster than we have. With each new development the potential for exploitation and abuse is reborn. We have not yet seen hateful messages appear randomly on Smart TVs, Fitbits or Smart Refrigerators, but the Internet of Things, and whatever comes next will surely bring new abuses. One of those abuses will surely be Cyberhate.

We have fallen too far down the rabbit hole to simply climb out. Our current position is generations in the making. The internet has only made it obvious where we are.  Enduring tools, programs and havens for policy and philosophy are needed. The real fight against hate online may take as long to undo as it has taken to get us here.  We may never completely defeat cyberhate, but we can never stop trying. 

 

Anything online, left alone long enough, will be abused.

Mark Zuckerberg is not the devil. I don't believe he has a malicious bone in his body. That is his problem.

If he had even the slightest inclination to abuse people with his creation,  he wouldn't have his current problem, and we wouldn't have ours. The same goes for Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and most of the other apps and platforms. All were convinced in the blissful ignorance that a grand idea empowering people would allow the best in society to prevail. They didn't see that the deck was stacked against them from the start.

There was internet before Facebook. It was all founded on the same boundless optimism. That electronic Garden of Eden started growing weeds on day one.  In 1995, when the commercial internet was launched, we got Amazon, eBay and Craigslist. It also brought us websites from the Klu Klux Klan and Stormfront (the grand daddy of all hate websites), followed soon after by the National Socialist Movement, white supremacist and violent extremist groups. Hate websites also emerged appealing to white women with recipes and family tips as well as targeting their children with printable racist coloring books. All before Facebook, Twitter and even Google.

 By 2005-2006 when web 2.0, user generated content, Facebook, Twitter and others emerged, it was already too late. The roots of hate had already grown deep in the internet. With each new development; email, mobile technology, interactive gaming, instant messaging, video chat, podcasts and blogging, optimism sprung anew.  We resisted looking at these wonderful advancements through the darkest lenses of possible abuse. However, malice waded in with glee.

History has shown us that every major advance has been subject to abuse - the printing press, the radio, television, phone and fax machine.  The internet is no different. All their inventors felt they were making a wonderful contribution. I envy and respect those who retain their boundless optimism and blissful ignorance. We need them. And they need those of us who credibly and professionally work to see it all... realistically.

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The Justified Banning of Klan Ken

Lessons of hate just keep on giving.

Ken is currently dressed in full KKK regalia and locked in storage closet. He is named Ken because that is what is molded into the back of his plastic head. He is a six foot tall mannequin.  His job is to model one of the ADL's civil rights artifacts, a full set of KKK robes. It is an important thing for people to see.  We knew using Ken to present the Klan robes would be powerful.

We had no idea.

Ken's Klan robes are the real deal, not some costume or idealized Hollywood version. Despite Ken's blank expression, the malice he emits is palpable. There is horror in the history of those robes which transcends my experience. Although perfectly clean, the robes are unmistakably stained with history.

I have no direct experience with the Klan. I have certainly had interactions with other extremists and I am fairly thick skinned in my own right.  I expected to have no problem managing my feelings about Ken. Sorry Ken, you are awful and shocking.

Everyone who meets Ken gasps, groans or curses. And if I am so shaken by him, what about those people whose families were directly impacted by that history he embodies.

Symbols of hate are plentiful. We've all seen the pictures of burning crosses in front of homes and swastikas sprayed on Jewish grave stones. Ken showed me and many others that pictures don't come close to the real thing. That is why he has been appropriately banned from public view, for now. 

Six Months Later: White Supremacists After Charlottesville

https://www.adl.org/blog/six-months-later-white-supremacists-after-charlottesville

On August 11, 2017, the world watched in horror as hundreds of torch-wielding white supremacists descended on the University of Virginia’s bucolic campus, chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” The next day, the streets of Charlottesville exploded in violence, ringing with the hateful, racist shouts of the neo-Nazis, Klan members and alt right agitators who put aside their internecine differences to gather in an unprecedented show of unity. Their stated common cause: To protest the removal of a 

Confederate statue from a local park. Their true purpose: The preservation and celebration of the white race, at any cost.

The promise of Unite the Right brought white supremacists of all stripes together for a weekend of protest that turned to deadly violence, and left counter-protester Heather Heyer dead. The rally itself, which was organized primarily by Jason Kessler, an alt right activist with ties to notorious racist Richard Spencer, never actually happened. Instead, local and state police converged on the chaotic scene, urging everyone off the streets and away from the parks. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, and white supremacist leaders, from Richard Spencer to David Duke, while bemoaning the lost opportunity to address the crowd, declared the event an overall victory.

But was it a victory? Six months later, what’s happened to the far-flung and disparate groups that make up America’s white supremacist movement?

It’s been a period marked by seismic structural shifts and more than a few power struggles. Divisions have deepened, and the spirit of solidarity that animated the racist crowds in Charlottesville has long since dissipated. And yet, by some measures, evidence of white supremacist activism and engagement is more conspicuous than ever before.

1. The Great Divide

Unite the Right was a highly unusual event, in that it brought together white supremacist groups that historically have avoided one another – people who belong to racist skinhead gangs like the Hammerskins don’t tend to hang out with clean-cut, khaki-wearing alt right types, or with members of the Klan (who showed up in Charlottesville without their robes).

Any harmony was short-lived: In the days immediately after Unite the Right, those divisions re-emerged, stronger than ever.

Today, there is a pointed division between “hard right” National Socialists and the American Nationalist contingent. It is worth noting that the groups share an identical goal – a white ethno-state – but disagree on the best path forward. For the foreseeable future, however, the differences will likely keep anything on the scale of Unite the Right from happening again.

The National Socialist segment of the movement, which includes the Traditionalist Worker Party, the National Socialist Movement and Vanguard America, wants to secede from the United States to form a National Socialist ethno-state. Optics are important; they frown on swastikas and Klan robes, and encourage members to wear black military-style gear. Events tend to feature Confederate flags, as well as the flags of the various contingents. These groups are allied with The League of the South, a southern nationalist group whose members want to establish an all-white South.

The American Nationalists, including Patriot Front, Identity Evropa, Daily Stormer followers and the Rise Above Movement (RAM), are not interested in seceding, and instead want to reclaim the American government for their own purposes – the eventual creation of a white ethno-state. They make an effort to dress in a clean-cut way that appeals to mainstream America, often wearing polo shirts and khakis.

You could refer to these two groups as the hard right and the alt right, respectively, but it’s not quite that neat and tidy. There is some crossover, and some have demonstrated a willingness to work with the “other side.”

A few examples of this type of cooperative effort between disparate factions:

·         The single event organized by Operation Homeland, a new group created in December by Richard Spencer and Eli Mosley, aka Elliot Kline, was attended by Matthew Heimbach, the founder of the hard right Traditionalist Worker Party.

·         Matthew Heimbach is a scheduled speaker at the March alt right conference in Detroit.

·         Mike Enoch and Sacco Vandal, both active on the alt right, spoke at Nationalist Front rallies this year.

2. The Fallout

Unite the Right showed America – and the world – that hundreds of white men were willing to show their faces in broad daylight as they chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans. And in the days and weeks that followed, a number of white supremacists who were on the ground in Charlottesville learned that actions have consequences.  This was the inevitable fallout of a movement moving from the virtual world to the real world, but it seems that some Unite the Right participants were unprepared for the blowback.

Some lost their jobs or were ostracized at school after they were identified in photographs of angry tiki torch marchers, or other photos from the event. Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which posted a derogatory story about murdered counter-protester Heather Heyer, was dropped by web hosting company GoDaddy.

White supremacists were doxxed, their identifying information shared with the world. A Twitter account called @YesYoureRacist called on members of the public to help “out” Unite the Right attendees, with some success.

3. Modest Goals

Despite the discord that emerged in its wake, Unite the Right did establish common ground among participants, and six months later, white supremacists of all types not only organize their own events, they also show up at protests and marches organized by other groups. These gatherings tend to be small, attracting less than two dozen people.

Among the issues that inspire them to collective action:

·         The removal of Confederate monuments, which they claim is an attack on “white” culture.

·         Pro-choice legislation and court rulings, as well as other issues affecting women’s health.

·         Feminism, or any iteration of a women’s march.

·         LGBTQ rights (civil or otherwise).

·         Anything other than hardline anti-immigration policies.

·         Muslims.

·         The perceived mistreatment or murder of white people, especially by minorities.

4. Increased Violence

The violence at Unite the Right followed an unusually violent spring and early summer, marked by the proliferation of “street fighting” tactics – and a variety of offensive and defensive gear. A significant number of white supremacists and militia members came to the Unite the Right rally openly carrying firearms.

But in the months following Unite the Right, some white supremacist groups have embraced the “fight club” mentality, most notably the Rise Above Movement (RAM). Patriot Front and Atomwaffen Division also demonstrate an escalating propensity for street fighting and other forms of violence. Violent language continues to be a mainstay of white supremacist message boards. Atomwaffen Division, in particular, is using Charlottesville as a rallying cry for an all-out race war and has since issued a propaganda video of members firing guns and screaming “gas the kikes” and “race war now.” 

  Among the violent incidents in the six months following Unite the Right:

·         Florida League of the South member Christopher Rey Monzon was arrested in late August for allegedly charging into a crowd of demonstrators with a flag pole. The attack took place outside a Broward County Commissioners’ meeting, where officials were considering renaming streets named for Confederate generals.

·         In September, several dozen Patriot Front associates organized a “flash mob” demonstration outside Houston’s Anarchist Book Fair, unfurling a “Blood and Soil” banner, detonating smoke bombs and chanting phrases like “Blood and Soil,” “F**k you, faggots,” and “anti-White.” They repeatedly challenged people at the book fair to come out and fight.

·         Following an October “White Lives Matter” rally in Shelbyville, Tennessee, a group of white supremacists attacked an interracial couple at a restaurant in Brentwood, Tennessee.

·         Three white supremacists were arrested after a shooting incident in Gainesville, Florida. No one was injured in the incident, which followed Richard Spencer’s October speech at the University of Florida.

·         Seventeen-year-old Nicolas Giampa shot himself in Reston, Virginia, after allegedly killing his girlfriend’s parents, who had warned their daughter of Giampa’s white supremacist social media postings.  Prior to the December murders, Giampa reportedly praised Siege, a book linked to Atomwaffen Division.

·         In December, white supremacist David Atchison disguised himself as a student, took a gun into a high school in Aztec, New Mexico, and killed two students before killing himself.

·         Sam Woodward, who is accused in the January 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein, appears to have been influenced by Atomwaffen Division’s hyper-violent rhetoric.

While public displays of violence – and violent language – has increased in some segments of the white supremacist population, a number of groups are making a concerted effort to tone down their public messaging, avoiding physical confrontations and any identifiably “white supremacist” logos or symbols. They’re planning “under the radar” events – making unannounced appearances in the form of flash mobs or torch marches.  This dramatically limits white supremacists’ interactions with counter-protesters, undercutting the potential for violence.

Meanwhile, infighting within the white supremacist movement has diminished the potential for large rallies and events – the types of gatherings that typically attract counter-protesters who may be more prone to violence.

And finally, since Unite the Right, law enforcement departments across the country have gotten much better at planning for potentially violent events and controlling opposing crowds.

5. On Campus

While the public fallout from Unite the Right may have dissuaded many white supremacists from attending major public gatherings, it seems to have energized the contingent that distributes racist literature on college campuses. These are target-rich environments for white supremacists, who are always trying to recruit new members, and who view increasingly diverse and inclusive campuses as anathema to their racist goals.

Since September 2016, the Center on Extremism has recorded at least 354 cases of white supremacist fliering on college campuses nationwide.  More than 160 of those incidents took place after the Unite the Right rally.

Matthew Heimbach launches his “National Socialism or Death” college speaking tour in mid-February at the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus.

Meanwhile, Richard Spencer continues his speaking tour at public universities. After an October 2017 speech at the University of Florida, Spencer booked an appearance at Michigan State University in March. He’s also hoping to hold an event at Kent State University on May 4, the 48th anniversary of the murder of four students there by National Guardsmen.

Each of Spencer’s proposed on-campus appearances has sparked arguments between his supporters, who say any attempt to stop the speech violates their First Amendment rights, and those who believe Spencer’s presence increases the risk of violence on campus. Spencer, predictably, seems delighted by the uproar, and uses the publicity to promote his favorite cause – himself.

6. Online Migration

After Unite the Right, tech companies launched a concerted effort to remove white supremacist individuals and groups from widely used social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook) and crowdfunding sites (GoFundMe). In many cases, this meant the companies only had to enforce their existing terms of service, but in others, those terms needed to be tweaked. Some tech companies, wary of charges of censorship, had previously resisted removing problematic content. 

Among the high-profile sites and platforms that reacted swiftly to the events in Charlottesville:

·         Bumble announced it would suspend accounts associated in any way with the alt right.

·         GoDaddy (among many other companies, including CloudFlare) refused to provide hosting services to the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website.

·         WordPress, in an unusual move, suspended service to Vanguard America, one of the groups that helped organize Unite the Right.

·         PayPal reaffirmed plans to cut off services to hate groups, and to disrupt any efforts to solicit donations that will be used to promote violence and/or racial intolerance.

·         Kickstarter and Indiegogo announced they were taking a stand against right-wing extremists using their services.

This expulsion resulted in a mass migration of white supremacist activity from “mainstream” websites to less rigorously monitored platforms like GAB and Voat.  These sites were already popular with fringe groups before August 12, and increased scrutiny from Twitter and others made the less regulated platforms even more attractive.

Drivers of hate in the US have distinct regional differences

sciencecodex.com/drivers-hate-us-have-distinct-regional-differences-618920

In a new study, University of Utah geographers sought to understand the factors fueling hate across space. Their findings paint a rather grim reality of America; hate is a national phenomenon, and more complicated than they imagined.

The researchers mapped the patterns of active hate groups in every U.S. county in the year 2014, and analyzed their potential socioeconomic and ideological drivers.

They found that in all U.S. regions, less education, population change, and ethnic diversity correlated with more hate groups, as did areas with higher poverty rates and more conservative political affiliation. The magnitude of the drivers had regional differences, however. The regional variation of the proposed drivers of hate may be a result of diverse ethnic and cultural histories. One surprising finding is that the geographical region seemed to determine whether religion has a positive or negative relative effect on the number of hate groups for the county.

The U geographers assert that organized hate is motivated by the desire to protect a place from the perceived threats that 'outsiders' pose to identity and socioeconomic security. The contemporary expression, 'hate,' is shaped by the intermingling histories and present-day conditions of a place.

"There is a lot of uncertainty in the country today, and a lot of change. For those involved in hate group activities, they see their actions as a way to secure the future of their people. Unfortunately, that fear turns to hate, and in the worst case, violence," said Richard Medina, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the U, and senior author of the study.

"Hate is a geographic problem. The ways people hate are based on the cultures, histories, ethnicities and many other factors dependent on place and place perception."

The study published online in the Annals of the American Association of Geographerson Feb. 9, 2018.

A grim reality

"When thinking about hate and place, it really boils down to thinking about identity," said Emily Nicolosi, co-author and doctoral student at the U. "Some people have strong feelings about who belongs, and who doesn't belong in 'their' place. When they see people coming in that they think don't belong, their very identity feels threatened."

A hate group is an organized group or ideology with beliefs or practices that malign an entire class of people due to their immutable characteristics, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Whether it be their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation, a hate group expresses prejudice against people with a particular identity. Though hate has always existed, 2016 saw a near-high in the number of hate groups in the United States, according to the SPLC. There is still much to learn about how Americans hate, and why.

The researchers mapped active hate groups for every U.S. county using the SPLC database from 2014. They compared the relationships between these groups with the county's socioeconomic factors, meant to represent diversity, poverty, education level and population stability, and ideological factors, represented as religion and degree of conservativism.

"People hate for different reasons because U.S. regions have different situations and histories. For example, the Northeast is a place of power that may be seen as elitist and well-educated. Is there still hate? Yes. Some of the reasons people hate there are different than in the South, where there's a different history of the Confederacy, of discrimination, and so on," said Nicolosi.

While this is not the first study to quantify hate groups at the county level, it is one of the first to look more regionally and analyze variations in space explicitly. Previous research has focused on why people hate, but all populations are typically analyzed together in a national model. Until now, the drivers of hate have never been differentiated for specific places.

What's next?

Medina and Nicolosi want to analyze the differences between different types of hate groups, and whether hate groups are linked to violent behavior.

"First and foremost, I want our paper to help people understand how much we don't know about hate--hate is not a uniform phenomenon. Hopefully this study motivates people to start asking more questions, especially right now," said Medina. "We have a long way to go before we really understand the drivers and patterns of hate in this country."

Internet History Reviewed - We Screwed Up

I'm from New York, but I have lived online since dial-up networks, and continuously and deeply for over 15 years. I know my neighborhood. I know where to get good pizza and bad sushi. I know the internet that way too.

In the early days of the internet, and especially Web 2.0, we were optimistic, energized, enthused, and mostly wrong.

We were convinced we had ideas that would revolutionize the world and allow the best, strongest and most inspired human ideas and aspirations to become the predominant ethos of our world. 

Everyone was desperately protective of their products, ideas and companies. Each company built barriers, supremely convinced their idea was unique and needed to be secured. But we also built isolation.

In our optimism we forgot basic philosophy, that inescapable yin and yang of reality; good cannot exist without evil.  Within all good resides some bad.

With the lurking evil summarily ignored, we happily moved on.  More than 10 years later, the mantra that the best will rise to the surface and good voices will prevail over bad, was still being uttered in the corner offices  of the major companies.

This despite mounting evidence that disruptive, caustic, malicious players had established a long lived, strong foothold on the internet in major places. In the isolated company environments,  the shared industry-wide nature of the problem went undetected. Perhaps even ignored. And in quiet, fertile ground of the ignored digital places, the problem grew. Even the groups who had dedicated themselves to monitoring hate online questioned themselves about the extent and impact of hate online.

We were wrong.

Government and law enforcement were largely ignorant of the problem.

Victims struggled to cope with a system which offered few substantive, reasonable channels for recourse to their problems.

It was as if  we were hearing completely different things with no one translating.

Fortunately, the disciples of hate, bias and discord were not smart or patient. When President Trump was elected in an atmosphere of social divisiveness, they took that as their signal. Over the years they had interpreted society's lack of serious response to their movement as an indication of tacit approval. They miscalculated and badly overplayed their hand.

In 2017 the hate movement managed to demonstrate what the social movement watch-dogs had been saying for years, violent words lead the to violent action. Although not all keyboard racists are violent, Charlottesville and other events have proved that they truly act as the cheerleaders for a deeply malevolent and viscious segment of society. 

This is now clear, for anyone brave enough to look. The tools for exploring the depths of the internet are available as never before. Identities can still be hidden, but the nature, extent and vectors of malice are now easily documented.

Yes, there is much good online. The benefits we have derived are beyond knowing. We  have discovered that good does not flourish without help, but evil does. However, good grows quickly with the slightest attention while hate and bias stagnate and struggle under the same conditions. The number of dark unobserved places online is shrinking, not because of censorship or control, but because people, companies and governments have seen the true cost of hate and finally agree it is unacceptable.