A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates and practices hate, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation or other designated sector of society. Those organizations are mostly promoting their ethnic conflicts, and even ethnic cleansing. Many hate organizations are influenced by religious belief, such as Nation of Islam. Basically, religious cults use the internet to solicit victims who will surrender both their free will and their personal property and money. Besides, hate groups often engage in harassment and defamation and may be the catalyst for other types of physical world violence.
According to a 2003 FBI Law Enforcement bulletin, a hate group, if unconstrained, passes through seven successive stages. In the first four stages, hate groups vocalize their beliefs and in the last three stages, they act on their beliefs. The report points to a transition period that exists between verbal violence and acting that violence out, separating hardcore haters from rhetorical haters. Thus, hate speech is seen as a prerequisite of hate crimes, and as a condition of their possibility. (Wikipedia, 2010)
Nowadays, the internet has become a place for hate groups to inhabit. This is because the internet has evolved into a sprawling system of communication with attendant large-scale commercial, industrial, and social relevancies. In addition, the internet and the World Wide Web have been implicated as contributors to a culture of hate and violence. For example, hate crimes against the tragic shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, served to further focus attention on media that may play a part in motivating individuals to violent behaviors. (Leland, 1999)
Internet has chosen by hate groups to inhabit is because of the young have shown a tendency to frequently use it, and this applies no less to young paranoids. A lot of worldwide hate groups use the internet to recruit young new members, maintain contact with existing members and coordinate activities. Groups like Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront, The Watchmen, Skinheads, Zundelsite, and Odin's Law all use the Internet to try to recruit young members. Because most children do not have the cognitive skills to evaluate the nature of the information presented to them in Internet hate propaganda.
According to Johnson and kaye (1998), the internet’s interactivity, anonymity and perceived credibility combine to create a powerful tool for persuasion. The internet has allowed hate group able to package their message in a visually persuasive manner and in the interactive environment of the medium the recipient of a persuasive message may become desensitized and more accepting of the message. Hate groups are able to present themselves better in a mainstream way and recruit more followers to support them and hence they can be more efficient.
Hate organizations use Web sites to connect to their target audiences securely and easily. Besides, they used internet to launch their side projects. The critical public scrutiny has made hate groups increasingly seek a smaller public profile, making themselves more difficult to track and monitor and this will become harder to block those hate organizations legally from society because of their rights under the First Amendment when they work in private. The free market of internet has become a place for hate groups to present themselves. They can do whatever they want on internet because they are protected under the First Amendment. People will tend to join the groups because of the propaganda spread by the groups. To avoid this, younger should be smart when surfing internet.
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References
Ø Henry Becker. 2007. ‘Internet-based hate groups aim to recruit minors’. Viewed on 27 November 2010. Available from: <http://voice.paly.net/node/18203>.
Ø Margaret E. Duffy. 2010. ‘Web of Hate: A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Rhetorical Vision of Hate Groups Online. Viewed on 27 November 2010. Available from: <http://www.sagepub.com/Martin2Study/pdfs/Chapter%2010/Duffy%20article.pdf>.
Ø Wikipedia. 2010. ‘Hate group’. Viewed on 27 November 2010. Available from: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_group>.
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