Cyberhate: the globalization of hate

TLDR

The Internet has enabled hate movements to reinvent themselves, create cohesive collective identities, and expand beyond national borders, yet scholars have largely overlooked its role in fostering a global racist subculture. The study aims to uncover how the Internet facilitates the global consolidation of hate movements in order to identify intervention strategies to reduce their impact. The authors argue that online communication fosters a shared collective identity essential for movement cohesion. The study finds that online communication has amplified domestic visibility of hate groups in the U.S., Germany, and Sweden, and by transcending borders, it enables the movement to expand internationally, creating a potential global racist subculture.

Abstract

Increasingly, scholars are examining the ways in which the Internet allows the hate movement to retrench and reinvent itself as a viable collective. The many electronic means available to the movement – blogs, newsgroups, 'zines, etc. – allow an ease of communication and dissemination of their views never before possible. While there are obvious points of convergence across the various Klan groups, or identity churches, or skinhead organizations, the hate movement has historically been varied and, in fact, fractured. Internet communication facilitates the creation of the collective identity that is so important to movement cohesiveness. Clearly, this has strengthened the domestic presence of these groups in countries like the United States, Germany and Sweden. Yet relatively less attention has been paid to the way in which the Web facilitates the consolidation of a global movement. Internet communication knows no national boundaries. Consequently, it allows the hate movement to extend its collective identity internationally, thereby facilitating a potential 'global racist subculture'. It is this process that we seek to uncover in this paper, with an eye to thinking about ways to intervene so as to weaken the impact.