This essay is about hate on the internet

Internet Hate Groups

For the first time in human history, we have the means to connect people from every corner of the globe, to talk to each other and share information at a cost that's far more affordable than any other means of publishing in the world. There is nothing more powerful as the Internet or the World Wide Web that has ever existed before. Hate is scary. By definition, "Hate is an intense hostility and emotional aversion to someone or something. It is displayed with words, harassment and/or acts of violence including killing." (Novick 4). Hate can be hidden from friends or family, but at other times it is bragged about. Hatred can be motivated by the desire for political power, for the need to put someone in their place, even by religious beliefs. The Internet seems to have pushed all our buttons of paranoia, especially these days, when we're already confused and frightened by all the violence and chaos in our world.

The first method is rebuttal, a technique long used by the anti-censorship or anti-hate organizations. "Rebuttal allows for the unrestricted dissemination of hate and negates it by offering a more "insightful and historically accurate" examination of political and social history." (Guide to Hate Groups, sound clip).This method eliminates the question of censorship and the stigma of governmental control. But it does not compensate for the real human pain of having swastikas, ethnocentric messages, or racial caricatures on one's computer screen, nor does it keep children from accessing the hate sites without understanding the true context of the debates. The second method is that of moral, a tactic which has been successfully used by social activists and interest groups throughout the 20th century. "Moral persuasion would shift the responsibility of eliminating cyber-hate from the government to non-governmental...