investigativevoice.com

FACEBOOK, MYSPACE FUEL GROWTH OF ORGANIZATIONS DEDICATE TO HATE

By Allen McDuffee and Marisa Faitelson

The number of white supremacist organizations in the United States has more than doubled since the beginning of the decade, according to a recently issued report by a civil rights organization.

A study by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund concluded that since 2000 the number of U.S.-based white supremacist groups has increased 54 percent — fueled by the ease of communicating on the Internet and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The report, “Confronting the New Faces of Hate: Hate Crimes in America, 2009,” was produced by the LCCREF — a coalition of more than 200 organizations, a dozen of which contributed to this report.

The LCCREF report warns that although the election of President Barack Obama “appeared to close the book” on the history of inequality in America, a “spate of racially-motivated hate crimes and violence against minorities and immigrants that occurred before and after Election Day makes clear that a final victory over prejudice and racial hostility remains elusive.”

The LCCREF report, citing 2007 FBI statistics, points out that approximately 51 percent of the reported hate crimes were race-based, with 18.4 percent on the basis of religion, 16.6 percent on basis of sexual orientation and 13.2 on the basis of ethnicity. FBI statistics also reveal that the overwhelming majority of race-based crimes were directed against blacks (69 percent), followed by crimes against whites (19 percent), followed by crimes against Asians or Pacific Islanders (4.9 percent).

Driving the growth of extremists' groups is the ease of communication and building digital communities on the Internet. No longer limited to passing out leaflets on street corners, hate groups now reach potential audiences of millions by facilitating “communication among like-minded bigots across borders and oceans, anonymously and cheaply enhancing their ability to promote and recruit for their cause,” the report says.

Social networking sites also have bolstered the effort to recruit new members. According to the report, sites such as MySpace and Facebook, as well as extremist sites such as NewSaxon attract thousands of white supremacists, allowing like-minded individuals to form larger communities faster and more efficiently than web-based forums or discussion groups. The report cites the case of two white supremacists arrested in the fall of 2008 for plotting a racist shooting spree and assassination attempt on Obama who were reportedly introduced to each other by a mutual friend on a yet to be named social networking site.

Along with the rise of apparent hate crimes since the election of the country’s first black president, the global financial crisis and the Bernard Madoff financial scandal also have spawned a growth in anti-Semitic hostility, the report states. Yahoo! Finance has reported a doubling of anti-Semitic comments on message boards, prompting the Internet portal to increase monitoring of finance and message boards and to delete offensive comment.

Numerous white supremacist groups and individuals also have utilized video-sharing websites, such as YouTube and MySpace Video, as an effective means to promote hateful material that might not otherwise reach the public.

Not surprisingly, extremist websites are also reformatting their websites to keep pace with the popularity of mobile devices such as BlackBerries and iPhones. Stormfront and Vanguard News Network, two of the most popular white supremacist forums on the Internet, are fully accessible and searchable by cell phone.

The report points out that hate speech, which is usually protected under the First Amendment, internet activity, is now often being used to intimidate and harass individuals on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation or national origin, which are acts that qualify as criminal conduct not protected by the First Amendment.

Actual criminal cases regarding the Internet, however, have been few in number due to the nature of the Internet which is “vast and perpetrators of online hate crimes hide behind anonymous screen names, electronically garbled addresses, and websites that can be relocated and abandoned overnight,” the report states.

Those who send threatening e-mail communications through the Internet may convey these messages anonymously across state lines to victims in another part of the country. “Prosecutors face the daunting task of identifying the perpetrator, collecting and preserving evidence, and establishing jurisdiction over the criminal act,” according to the report. 

Allen McDuffee writes on politics for publications such as The Nation, Mother Jones and New York Observer. He is currently working on a book project, No Child Left Unrecruited, and blogs at www.governmentalityblog.com. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Marisa Faitelson is a New York-based researcher.