Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet

by Abraham H. Foxman, Christopher Wolf

Emboldened by anonymity, individuals and organizations from both left and right are freely spewing hateful vitriol on the Internet without worrying about repercussions.Lies, bullying, conspiracy theories, bigoted and racist rants, and calls for violence targeting the most vulnerable circulate openly on the web.And thanks to the guarantees of the First Amendment and the borderless nature of the Internet,governing bodies are largely helpless to control this massive assault on human dignity and safety. Abe Foxman and Christopher Wolf expose the threat that this unregulated flow of bigotry poses to the world.They explore how social media companies like Facebook and YouTube, as well as search engine giant Google, are struggling to reconcile the demands of business with freedom of speech and the disturbing threat posed by today's purveyors of hate. And they explain the best tools available to citizens, parents, educators, law enforcement officers, and policy makers toprotect thetwin values of transparency and responsibility. As Foxman and Wolf show, only an aroused and engaged citizenry can stop the hate contagion before it spirals out of control - with potentially disastrous results.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Technology

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 4, 2013

Reviews

[Judie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first draft of VIRAL HATE ran six pages: It’s that important.

The rapid expansion of the Internet has widened the ability of at least two billion people worldwide to instantly access information and communicate with people at a never before dreamed of scale. While that ability has numerous benefits, it also can have disastrous side effects. VIRAL HATE, written by Abraham H. Foxman, long-time head of the Anti-Defamation League and Christopher Wolf, an expert in privacy and internet law, shines a light on those problems and offers suggestions for overcoming them.
Every community has people who have reputations as being anti-social, hateful, and, sometimes, dangerous. Some may have been drawn to organizations which focused on those hatreds. But they were relatively few in number and disorganized. With the advent of the internet, however, they were able to find others they never would have known otherwise. While one person might be circumspect in making hateful statements or committing crimes against his “enemies,” on the web that person found like-minded people Suddenly, they felt powerful enough to say things and do things that otherwise would have been left unsaid and undone. If no one in their community shared their view, they might conclude their extremist views are incorrect or kooky. With the Internet, they can always find others who share their views. Suddenly there is a community that says, ‘You’re not crazy, you’re right.’ That’s very powerful.” Psychologist Elizabeth Englander. “Rather than being forced to deal with the real world, hate-filled paranoics can live in a universe of violent fantasies twenty-four hours a day.”
The authors quote Sociologist Kathleen Blee, “When people have violent or racist ideas, they are often very vague, very amorphous. What the Internet does is get people to focus, to make their racist and violent ideas much more coherent and much more targeted toward particular kinds of people....Can gel [his or her] ideas. They give people a sense that violence is not only possible for somebody to commit, but laudatory.”
It affects everyone. Susan Benesch, director of the World Policy Institute’s Dangerous Speech project wrote, “People are increasingly privy to communication that they would not have heard (or read or seen) in the past.” This includes songs, jokes, words people use to “rally supporters, to teach fear and hatred of others outside the group, or to inspire violence.”
Internet users are also able to spread propaganda and lies to a wider audience and figured out how to manipulate the Internet to make their ideas seem more popular and reliable than they actually are. They spread of uncorroborated information to people who agree with them or who don’t recognize it a being false.
With newspaper readership on the decline, people are getting their information elsewhere, primarily online. And online is where today’s virus of hatred is being spread....[A]n online culture has developed–aided by the mask of anonymity–in which people who would never consider themselves members of hate groups employ racial, religious, and other epithets as part of their vocabulary in posting comments....In turn the common appearance of such epithets desensitizes readers, making hate speech and the denigration of minorities appear “normal.”
Many observers now feel that the uncontrolled flow of content on the Intenet has helped fuel a steady decline in standards of civility governing how people interact with one another–sometimes with deadly results. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has posted a comment only to have a response from a stranger vilifying me with extremely profane language.
“Internet hate speech serves to mislead millions of innocent people–especially young people who are enthusiastic users of new technology–thereby recruiting the next generation of bigots, racists, sexists, homophobes, and anti-Semites.”
VIRAL HATE goes beyond diagnosing the problems. It presents some suggested solutions and, often, tells why they won’t work. It points out that hate can and does kill innocent people. What may seem like a harmless prank to a high school or college student can ruin lives, not only of the target but of the perpetrator as well.
Many people say there should be laws against spreading hate on the Internet. In some countries, there are laws against some kinds of hate, such as denying the Holocaust is illegal in many European countries. But the United States guarantees freedom of speech. The authors discuss what that means, what it covers, and what speech could be disallowed. If speech was illegal, where should the line be drawn before permitted and illegal speech? They point out our Constitution refers to government actions, not those of private companies.
Some people think Internet hate speech could be stopped if people were not allowed to post comments anonymously since people often will say things they would never say if others could identify them. But sometimes being identified could result in serious consequences for the writer who not spreading hate.
The authors talk about what the Internet gatekeepers can and have done to stop hate speech while respecting freedom of speech. They offer suggestions for how to counteract hate speech. The best ones include counter-speech: Unbiased, fact-based, and available on the same basis and in the same location as the hateful speech to which it responds. They recommend speaking up. Let others know that you disagree with what has been posted. You may encourage others to do the same when they realize they have support for their thoughts. Children should be educated about using the Internet. It is a tool they can learn to understand and use wisely.
They advocate educating children about how the Internet works and how to use it wisely as well as being able to separate fact from bias and emotion. VIRAL HATE lists some sites to help recognize bias: Who Is Registry (http://www.internic.net/whois.html) traces ownership and authorship; Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) shows the popularity of sites and analysis of how it relates to other sites; Touch Graph (www.touchgraph.com) visually displays the relationship between links to and from a site.
A Canadian firm, Media Smarts (http://mediasmarts.ca/) teaches “youth to think critically about all the media.” Its booklet Responding to Online Hate presents examples of “The Other,” “The Glorious Past,” and “Victimhood.”
US government spokespeople...(must) distance themselves from and condemn attempts to sow hatred while affirming US commitment to free speech. Definitions, practices, principles, and rules governing our policies on hate speech must be developed collaboratively, with participation by many stakeholders.
There are six appendices offering suggestions for how to respond to extremist speech, dealing with cyber-bullying, and defining hate crime laws. One very funny segment is the reply of someone to a hate post: “you’re kind makes me sick. Don’t you think there is enough crazy people in the world without spreading it to more people, the world would be better without gays and lessbeans (sic) and trannies and other disabilities. You need to delete your page before people see it and get annoid (sic).”
The response begins, “Thank you for your lovely message, how nice of you to notice that I am Kind, I do try.”
Other appendices give specific information about identifying the problems and working together to resolve them so the Internet can be a tool for education and socializing, not a tool for spreading hate and lies. It has wonderful, easy-to-utilize suggestions for helping children learn what the Internet is and how to use it wisely and safely. It also tells how to deal with online debates and reporting hate speech.
Online bystanders have a responsibility. “When you see something, say something.”
I received an Early Reviewers copy of VIRAL HATE from LibraryThing and appreciate the opportunity to read it.

[Amanda J · Rating 3 out of 5]

An analysis of hate speech on the internet, how it can be controlled without legislation, and what the effects of this speech is. Starting with the simple idea of defining hate speech, this book thoroughly expresses the complexities of free speech when it comes to the internet.

As with any contentious subject, many of us agree on the base cause of the problem - hate speech is wrong. How to deal with it provides a whole new set of complexities to the discussion. I believe this book is a great discussion on the cause and possible solutions, presenting positive and negative consequences for multiple possibilities.

The text was well sourced and well written, providing real-life examples of hate speech and attempts at controlling it. It was written for a non-technical audience, although sometimes I was still slightly confused by the legal language.

[A. Bowdoin Van Riper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Discussing what to do about hate speech online is like discussing what to do about a genocidal dictator in a foreign country. Agreeing that it’s loathsome, and the world would be better off without it, is easy. Agreeing that getting rid of it will be a challenge (do it wrong, and the side-effects may turn out to be worse than the original problem) is also easy. Figuring out how to get rid of it, and what price you’re willing to pay in order to do so, is mind-bendingly hard.

The authors of Viral Hate spend roughly two-thirds of their 180 pages of text covering the easy stuff. They explain, with a lawyerly concern for precision and detail, what hate speech is, why it damages society, how government attempts to regulate it have collided with the First Amendment to the Constitution, and why private entities (which can limit speech as they see fit) have considerably more power and latitude to act. They catalog the extensive gray areas that make all but the most extreme forms of hate speech difficult to regulate, and outline the abundant reasons why overzealous regulation of hate speech has the potential to abridge freedom of speech, conscience, and assembly. All that, however, takes up a great deal of space, and leaves Foxman and Wolf correspondingly little time to articulate a solution. They outline the framework—“self-policing” of hate speech in online “public squares” by the users themselves, backed by companies willing to frame (and enforce) community norms—but the details are left as an exercise for the reader.

This unwillingness to engage with the details diminishes the book in two critical ways. First, it implies that the working-out of those details will be a straightforward, organic process: that unofficial governing bodies will emerge naturally from online communities numbering in the thousands or millions, that definitions of “hate speech” can (despite the gray areas) be crowd-sourced unproblematically, and that the side-effects of whatever mechanisms and definitions emerge will be negligible. Second, it implies that the self-regulation of speech in online communities has never been seriously attempted—that Wikipedia, Slashdot, Reddit, and the rest (as well as the work of those who have thought about them) have nothing to teach us. Neither is true, and readers with a serious interest in online communities and how they operate will be frustrated by Foxman and Wolf’s airy, seat-of-the-pants approach to problems that Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, and Clay Shirky (among others) have been thinking about—seriously and systematically, with close attention to the fine texture of the real thing—for decades.

Foxman and Wolf come from the world of law and public policy, and they’ve written a book that delves deeply into what they know and glides lightly over what they don’t. That is, perhaps, to be expected, but it serves neither the needs of readers, nor the realities of a complex problem, well. Add a star to my rating if you’re brand-new to debates about free speech and censorship; subtract one if you know how Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been a 30 page dense academic paper. I understand the need to make it more accessible, but I would have preferred a more condensed form. Apart from that, very interesting. Definitely helped me to realize how important it is to fight the "you should expect hate on the internet" attitude that is so common in response to feelings of outrage and anger at the horrible things that are said online.

[Sleepless Dreamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a sentence, very good study about a difficult problem. Longer review to come, maybe.

[Damaskcat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book about the spread of hate on the internet and how it can be controlled in very limited ways. It also covers the ways in which ordinary people can help to combat the insidious spread of racism and other forms of discrimination. The authors concentrate on the spread of anti-Semitism but what they say is applicable to any forms of hate speech, incitements to violence and cyber bullying.

Readers need to bear in mind that the authors primarily concentrate on the situation in the US. The law in the UK is rather different as, for example, cyber bullying can be prosecuted as a criminal offence here. In the US there is a need to use other laws and address the such problems in a comparatively roundabout way. Racism, misogyny, homophobia are more difficult to combat in the US than in the UK.

Of course the internet is international and therefore presents its own problems as all countries have different laws. This book examines several well known legal cases in the US which aren't well known in the UK and shows how invidious hate speech can be and how easy it is for it to make converts. The authors suggest that individuals should not try to engage in rational debate with bigots as it is impossible to have any sort sensible discussion with them. Posting links to reliable alternative points of view is probably the most you can do.

The book consists of half text and the rest is a collection of appendices on various topics, notes and an index. While some at least of the book is not relevant to the UK as the legal situation is rather different here it still makes thought provoking reading and may make some readers think twice before they make throwaway comments online which they would not make if face to face with a real person.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

oxman, Abraham H. and Christopher Wolf. Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.


Viral Hate, written by the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and the Chair of its Civil Rights Committee, discusses the spread of hate speech on the internet and what can be done about it. This book discusses the problem through the use of many examples, which has both good and points through that strategy. The good points is that by using many cultural examples, the reader is more easily able to identify with what is being called hate speech. However, this is helpful only if one is aware of the situation being discussed. By explaining hate speech through examples it also makes it a bit unhelpful as the authors never really give a precise definition of hate speech. The authors explain that part of that problem is that hate speech is difficult define. While not referenced in this book, it seems as if hate speech is understood in the same way as a Supreme Court Justice defined pornography- "I know it when I see it." This weakness also makes it difficult to understand what is meant by hate speech.


A hefty portion of he book examines what can be done about hate speech. The authors analyze a number of different methods and give their critiques. They suggest that passing laws banning hate speech is not helpful. They give a number of non-American examples of when this was done and why it was not successful. The authors examine a two-pronged solution to stopping internet hate speech: first, by using counter speech, an attempt at stopping the lies of hate speech with factual information and by enforcing community standards through internet sites, such as Facebook and Yahoo.


Overall, the book is helpful in giving a broad overview of the problem of hate speech on the internet. The book presents a helpful explanation to the various ways that are suggest for combatting hate speech and which ideas are the best solution to combatting hate speech.

[Gabriel Morgan · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is incredible to me that this fat fraud had the audacity to write a dozen books.

By the way, I have just demonstrated the efficacy of hate speech. It has its place, and Foxman is one such place. He has the suety pudding face and straining waistline of a child molestor.

Who is more handsome and charismatic, Abraham Foxman or Randy (huge carcass of colonialism) Fine? Randy fine and Abraham foxman could bump the ratings on an Ugly Pageant. Toss in Rabbi shmuley and the suspense mounts.

[Ariadna73 · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book the author describes the consequences of hate speech and how the internet has became a heinous vector for such behaviors. It also gives some hope and information on organizations that fight this sort of expressions. It was interesting, and more vulnerable people should take a good look at it so they don't go out there uncovered and unaware.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good overview of the situation, but the solutions offered sounded a bit naïve, and quite surprisingly so considering the credentials of the authors.

[Sarah]

I am preparing myself for some disappointment, but maybe it will make some good points.