THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF E-HATRED

The Economist
Jul 24th 2008

Social networks and video-sharing sites don’t always bring people
closer together

Illustration by David Simonds "NATION shall speak peace unto
nation." Eighty years ago, Britain’s state broadcasters adopted that
motto to signal their hope that modern communications would establish
new bonds of friendship between people divided by culture, political
boundaries and distance.

For those who still cling to that ideal, the latest trends on the
internet are depressing. Of course, as anyone would expect, governments
use their official websites to boast about their achievements and
to argue their corner–usually rather clunkily–in disputes about
territory, symbols or historical rights and wrongs.

What is much more disturbing is the way in which skilled young
surfers–the very people whom the internet might have liberated
from the shackles of state-sponsored ideologies–are using the
wonders of electronics to stoke hatred between countries, races
or religions. Sometimes these cyber-zealots seem to be acting at
their governments’ behest–but often they are working on their own,
determined to outdo their political masters in propagating dislike
of some unspeakable foe.

Consider the response in Russia to "The Soviet Story", a Latvian
documentary that compares communism with fascism. If this film had
com e out five years ago, the Kremlin would have issued an angry
press release and encouraged some young hoodlums to make another
assault on Latvia’s embassy. Some Slavophile politicians would have
made wild threats.

These days, the reaction from hardline Russian nationalists is
a bit more subtle. They are using blogs to raise funds for an
alternative documentary to present the Soviet communist record in
a good light. Well-wishers with little cash can help in other ways,
for example by helping with translation into and from Baltic languages.

Meanwhile, America’s rednecks can find lots of material on the
web with which to fuel and indulge their prejudices. For example,
there are "suicide-bomber" games which pit the contestant against a
generic bearded Muslim; such entertainment has drawn protests both in
Israel–where people say it trivialises terrorism–and from Muslim
groups who say it equates their faith with violence. Border Patrol,
another charming online game, invites you to shoot illegal Mexican
immigrants crossing the border.

>From the earliest days of the internet the new medium became a forum
for nationalist spats that were sometimes relatively innocent by
today’s standards. People sparred over whether Freddy Mercury, a rock
singer, was Iranian, Parsi or Azeri; whether the Sea of Japan should
be called the East Sea or the East Sea of Korea; and whether Israel
could call hu mmus part of its cuisine. Sometimes such arguments moved
to Wikipedia, a user-generated reference service, whose elaborate
moderation rules put a limit to acrimony.

But e-arguments also led to hacking wars. Nobody is surprised to
hear of Chinese assaults on American sites that promote the Tibetan
cause; or of hacking contests between Serbs and Albanians, or Turks
and Armenians. A darker development is the abuse of blogs, social
networks, maps and video-sharing sites that make it easy to publish
incendiary material and form hate groups. A study published in May
by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human-rights group, found
a 30% increase last year in the number of sites that foment hatred
and violence; the total was around 8,000.

Social networks are particularly useful for self-organised nationalist
communities that are decentralised and lack a clear structure. On
Facebook alone one can join groups like "Belgium Doesn’t Exist",
"Abkhazia is not Georgia", "Kosovo is Serbia" or "I Hate Pakistan". Not
all the news is bad; there are also groups for friendship between
Greeks and Turks, or Israelis and Palestinians. But at the other
extreme are niche networks, less well-known than Facebook, that
unite the sort of extremists whose activities are restricted by
many governments but hard to regulate when they go global. Podblanc,
a sort of alternative YouTube for "white interests , white culture
and white politics" offers plenty of material to keep a racist amused.

Tiny but deadly The small size of these online communities does not
mean they are unimportant. The power of a nationalist message can
be amplified with blogs, online maps and text messaging; and as a
campaign migrates from medium to medium, fresh layers of falsehood can
be created. During the crisis that engulfed Kenya earlier this year,
for example, it was often blog posts and mobile-phone messages that
gave the signal for fresh attacks. Participants in recent anti-American
marches in South Korea were mobilised by online petitions, forums and
blogs, some of which promoted a crazy theory about Koreans having a
genetic vulnerability to mad-cow disease.

In Russia, a nationalist blogger published names and contact details
of students from the Caucasus attending Russia’s top universities,
attaching a video-clip of dark-skinned teenagers beating up ethnic
Russians.

Russian nationalist blogs reposted the story–creating a nightmare
for the students who were targeted.

Spreading hatred on the web has become far easier since the sharp drop
in the cost of producing, storing and distributing digital content.

High-quality propaganda used to require good cartoonists; now anyone
can make and disseminate slick images. Whether it’s a Hungarian group
organising an anti-Roma poster competition, a Russian anti-immigrant
lobby publishing the locat ion of minority neighbourhoods, or Slovak
nationalists displaying a map of Europe without Hungary, the web
makes it simple to spread fear and loathing.

The sheer ease of aggregation (assembling links to existing sources,
videos and articles) is a boon. Take anti-cnn.com, a website built
by a Chinese entrepreneur in his 20s, which aggregates cases of the
Western media’s allegedly pro-Tibetan bias. As soon as it appealed
for material, more than 1,000 people supplied examples. Quickly the
site became a leading motor of Chinese cyber-nationalism, fuelling
boycotts of brands and street protests.

And then there is history. A decade ago, a zealot seeking to prove
some absurd proposition–such as the denial of the Nazi Holocaust,
or the Ukrainian famine–might spend days of research in the library
looking for obscure works of propaganda. Today, digital versions of
these books, even those out of press for decades, are accessible in
dedicated online libraries. In short, it has never been easier to
propagate hatred and lies.

People with better intentions might think harder about how they too
can make use of the net.