Online hate sites

This article talks about the Internet has been rightly hailed as a groundbreaking interactive marketplace of ideas, in which anyone with the necessary hardware and software can set up a cyber-stall. But the downside of this unparalleled information exchange is that, alongside its many valuable online resources, the Net also offers a host of offensive materials – including hate materials – that attempt to inflame public opinion against certain groups of people.

According to Mock & Armony (1998), the kinds of hate found on the Internet include expressions of hostility to "civil rights types" and "mud people" (the neo-Nazi term for non-whites and non-Christians), along with condemnation of race mixing, and page after page of antisemitic tracts, the majority of which deny that the Holocaust took place and promote conspiracy theories and other age-old antisemitic canards. Among the most virulent established websites are Canada's Heritage Front, Ernst Zundel's "Zundelsite," Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance (WAR), Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan, Radio Islam, the Committee for the Open Debate of the Holocaust Story, and the National Alliance, arguably the most openly Nazi organization on the continent.

Mock and Armony (1998) also states that online hate could only be stopped by using the education system to education the younger generation about multiculturalism, anti-racist, and human rights education in our schools. Besides that, to battle hate on internet efficiently, they suggested that the law and a community effort to help stem the rise of more hate sites.

In my opinion, I think that hate sites are unnecessary threat to the society; it invokes anger and violence that could be avoided. I do agree with Mock & Armony that the government, the community and the education system have their parts to play in stopping hate spreading across the internet. Together they would be able stop individuals with biased views from spreading their ‘poison’ on the internet.

Reference list

1)      Media awareness Network, 2009 ‘Media Issues, deconstructing hate sites’ http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/online_hate/deconst_online_hate.cfm

2)      Media awareness Network, 2009 ‘Online Hate, An Introduction’ http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/online_hate/index.cfm

1)      Mock K. Armony L. 1998, ‘ Hate on the Internet’, http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/articles/online_hate/hate_on_internet.cfm