{"id":12751,"date":"2016-04-01T11:22:30","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T19:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=blog&p=12751"},"modified":"2018-06-05T10:07:55","modified_gmt":"2018-06-05T18:07:55","slug":"who-is-watching-the-hate-tracking-hate-groups-online-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/dipsy.pbs.org\/independentlens\/blog\/who-is-watching-the-hate-tracking-hate-groups-online-and-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Is Watching the Hate? Tracking Hate Groups Online and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0<\/span>Welcome to Leith<\/i><\/a><\/strong>, the story of what happens when notorious white supremacist Craig Cobb tries to take over a small North Dakota community as a base for himself and his followers, may seem an unusual case. But for\u00a0those who track hate groups across America it is a less shocking\u00a0tale. Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)’s <\/span>HateWatch<\/span><\/a> and the <\/span>Simon Wiesenthal Center’s (SWC) Digital Terrorism and Hate Project<\/span><\/a> have made it a mission to follow\u00a0the activities of hate groups both in real life and online. The web has become an increasingly popular place for hate groups to congregate, and in many ways hide in plain sight, using the latest trends in technology to communicate, organize and add members. <\/span><\/p>\n

We spoke to two noted experts on tracking hate groups for their take on how this task has\u00a0become both easier, and paradoxically a lot harder, due to technology, and what our society could do to improve how we deal with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Is a Hate Group?<\/b><\/p>\n

First of all, it’s good to know how exactly “hate group” is being defined before we dig deeper. A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society. But there’s not always agreement as to which groups fit into that definition. (For the record, the SPLC officially lists these organizations as hate groups<\/a>;\u00a0it’s a long list which includes many subsets of the KKK.)<\/span><\/p>\n

“The number of hate groups has actually been rising since 2000, largely in reaction to rising diversity in the U.S.,” says Heidi Beirich<\/a>, Intelligence Project Director at the SPLC. “That was the year the Census Bureau definitively reported that in 2042, whites would no longer be a majority in the U.S. Of course, Obama\u2019s election and the economy added to the factors driving these numbers up.” For what it’s worth, there’d been a promising trend downward into 2015; a March 2015 report from the SPLC<\/a> counted 784 active hate groups in the United States, down from 939 groups the year before and a peak of 1,018 in 2011, a decline SPLC attributed at least in part to factors “ranging from the co-opting of their issues by mainstream politicians, to an improving economy, to law enforcement crackdowns.” [2018 Update:<\/strong> There’s since been a tick up again, to 954 hate groups, as per the SPLC<\/a>.]<\/span><\/p>\n

\"White

Craig Cobb, the white supremacist who tried to take over Leith, North Dakota, works online<\/p><\/div>\n

Technology: Boon or Bane<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Internet is our battleground!” Jeff Voss, American Neo-Nazi<\/pullquote><\/span><\/p>\n

Many would argue that the Internet has been both a blessing and a curse; that it’s led to a rise in hate groups and activity, but has also helped expose groups that were already there. As the Internet became a more widely used world wide web in the ’90s, the first white supremacist hate group to take full advantage was Stormfront, whose website launched in March 1995; after that, there was increasing interest by extremist groups who saw that the Internet could become a major recruiting tool.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that time span, as the <\/span>Wiesenthal Center<\/span>‘s Rick Eaton explains, it’s become much easier for hate groups to get their word out while still managing to remain somewhat anonymous. “<\/span>25 years ago an organizer would have to stand on street corners handing out literature, cajole acquaintances and others to get them interested, not to mention constant phone calls to keep people interested [to] get them to rallies and so on,” Eaton says. “Now they can easily post items to blogs and social media, send out mass emails, create discussion forums. In addition to the ease of communication, the Internet has for some time provided extremists with a sense of community, that they are not alone in their beliefs.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Mapping and Tracking <\/b><\/p>\n

The<\/span> FBI tracks hate crime,<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>which it defines as “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender\u2019s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.\u201d This <\/span>2014 Hate Crime by State<\/span><\/a>\u00a0data reveals that there were 5,479 officially designated hate crimes that year; individual states must be looked at with an eye on percentage of population for that state.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"SPLC's

SPLC’s HateWatch map tracking hate groups of the USA<\/p><\/div>\n

SPLC’s Hate Map<\/span><\/a> was compiled using hate group publications and websites, citizen and law enforcement reports, field sources and news reports. Logged activity can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing. As of this writing the HateMap lists 892 hate groups active in the United States, reflecting a disturbing rise in the number of hate groups and activity in recent years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“For many years we could track sites in the dozens or even hundreds; now it is impossible to find them all, much less keep track of them,” say\u00a0Wiesenthal Center’s Eaton. “Even though we are using digital measures and are creating a tracking software, it is hard to keep up.”<\/span><\/p>\n