Abraham FoxmanRezensionen

It's fascinating reading this book in the time of the alt-right, which has been a grassroots movement borne from the viral hate discussed in this book. I would love to read an updated version of this book in light of Trump's election and how viral hate movements made that possible and have now gone mainstream. This book touches upon some of the neo-Nazi movements we're seeing so prominently in action today and offers some concrete steps we can take to help fight these trolls, but again, it feels like that movement has spun so out of control that it's hard to deal with on a case-by-case basis. A timely topic but yeah, by now, the book is a bit dated.

oxman, Abraham H. and Christopher Wolf. Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Viral Hate, written by the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and the Chair of its Civil Rights Committee, discusses the spread of hate speech on the internet and what can be done about it. This book discusses the problem through the use of many examples, which has both good and points through that strategy. The good points is that by using many cultural examples, the reader is more easily able to identify with what is being called hate speech. However, this is helpful only if one is aware of the situation being discussed. By explaining hate speech through examples it also makes it a bit unhelpful as the authors never really give a precise definition of hate speech. The authors explain that part of that problem is that hate speech is difficult define. While not referenced in this book, it seems as if hate speech is understood in the same way as a Supreme Court Justice defined pornography- "I know it when I see it." This weakness also makes it difficult to understand what is meant by hate speech.

A hefty portion of he book examines what can be done about hate speech. The authors analyze a number of different methods and give their critiques. They suggest that passing laws banning hate speech is not helpful. They give a number of non-American examples of when this was done and why it was not successful. The authors examine a two-pronged solution to stopping internet hate speech: first, by using counter speech, an attempt at stopping the lies of hate speech with factual information and by enforcing community standards through internet sites, such as Facebook and Yahoo.

Overall, the book is helpful in giving a broad overview of the problem of hate speech on the internet. The book presents a helpful explanation to the various ways that are suggest for combatting hate speech and which ideas are the best solution to combatting hate speech.

This was a very enlightening book about hate crimes and its presence on the internet. I especially liked that the authors outlined concrete ways to combat this online unpleasantness. It's definitely a good read for anyone that surfs the internet on a regular basis.

I recieved this book very late, I won it in may, and did not recieve until mid august. The book is well written, and researched. Hate on the internet is very wide spread, and I agree with the authors, that the only real way to combat this is for the good people to stand against it. It's a very good book, and I highly recommend it for your reading pleasure, and information.

Discussing what to do about hate speech online is like discussing what to do about a genocidal dictator in a foreign country. Agreeing that it’s loathsome, and the world would be better off without it, is easy. Agreeing that getting rid of it will be a challenge (do it wrong, and the side-effects may turn out to be worse than the original problem) is also easy. Figuring out how to get rid of it, and what price you’re willing to pay in order to do so, is mind-bendingly hard.

The authors of Viral Hate spend roughly two-thirds of their 180 pages of text covering the easy stuff. They explain, with a lawyerly concern for precision and detail, what hate speech is, why it damages society, how government attempts to regulate it have collided with the First Amendment to the Constitution, and why private entities (which can limit speech as they see fit) have considerably more power and latitude to act. They catalog the extensive gray areas that make all but the most extreme forms of hate speech difficult to regulate, and outline the abundant reasons why overzealous regulation of hate speech has the potential to abridge freedom of speech, conscience, and assembly. All that, however, takes up a great deal of space, and leaves Foxman and Wolf correspondingly little time to articulate a solution. They outline the framework—“self-policing” of hate speech in online “public squares” by the users themselves, backed by companies willing to frame (and enforce) community norms—but the details are left as an exercise for the reader.

This unwillingness to engage with the details diminishes the book in two critical ways. First, it implies that the working-out of those details will be a straightforward, organic process: that unofficial governing bodies will emerge naturally from online communities numbering in the thousands or millions, that definitions of “hate speech” can (despite the gray areas) be crowd-sourced unproblematically, and that the side-effects of whatever mechanisms and definitions emerge will be negligible. Second, it implies that the self-regulation of speech in online communities has never been seriously attempted—that Wikipedia, Slashdot, Reddit, and the rest (as well as the work of those who have thought about them) have nothing to teach us. Neither is true, and readers with a serious interest in online communities and how they operate will be frustrated by Foxman and Wolf’s airy, seat-of-the-pants approach to problems that Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, and Clay Shirky (among others) have been thinking about—seriously and systematically, with close attention to the fine texture of the real thing—for decades.

Foxman and Wolf come from the world of law and public policy, and they’ve written a book that delves deeply into what they know and glides lightly over what they don’t. That is, perhaps, to be expected, but it serves neither the needs of readers, nor the realities of a complex problem, well. Add a star to my rating if you’re brand-new to debates about free speech and censorship; subtract one if you know how Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography.

A basic introduction to online hate speech and the issues that surround trying to deal with it. Not a bad work, but if you already have a basic knowledge of the topic, you should look else where.

My first draft of VIRAL HATE ran six pages: It’s that important.

The rapid expansion of the Internet has widened the ability of at least two billion people worldwide to instantly access information and communicate with people at a never before dreamed of scale. While that ability has numerous benefits, it also can have disastrous side effects. VIRAL HATE, written by Abraham H. Foxman, long-time head of the Anti-Defamation League and Christopher Wolf, an expert in privacy and internet law, shines a light on those problems and offers suggestions for overcoming them.
Every community has people who have reputations as being anti-social, hateful, and, sometimes, dangerous. Some may have been drawn to organizations which focused on those hatreds. But they were relatively few in number and disorganized. With the advent of the internet, however, they were able to find others they never would have known otherwise. While one person might be circumspect in making hateful statements or committing crimes against his “enemies,” on the web that person found like-minded people Suddenly, they felt powerful enough to say things and do things that otherwise would have been left unsaid and undone. If no one in their community shared their view, they might conclude their extremist views are incorrect or kooky. With the Internet, they can always find others who share their views. Suddenly there is a community that says, ‘You’re not crazy, you’re right.’ That’s very powerful.” Psychologist Elizabeth Englander. “Rather than being forced to deal with the real world, hate-filled paranoics can live in a universe of violent fantasies twenty-four hours a day.”
The authors quote Sociologist Kathleen Blee, “When people have violent or racist ideas, they are often very vague, very amorphous. What the Internet does is get people to focus, to make their racist and violent ideas much more coherent and much more targeted toward particular kinds of people....Can gel [his or her] ideas. They give people a sense that violence is not only possible for somebody to commit, but laudatory.”
It affects everyone. Susan Benesch, director of the World Policy Institute’s Dangerous Speech project wrote, “People are increasingly privy to communication that they would not have heard (or read or seen) in the past.” This includes songs, jokes, words people use to “rally supporters, to teach fear and hatred of others outside the group, or to inspire violence.”
Internet users are also able to spread propaganda and lies to a wider audience and figured out how to manipulate the Internet to make their ideas seem more popular and reliable than they actually are. They spread of uncorroborated information to people who agree with them or who don’t recognize it a being false.
With newspaper readership on the decline, people are getting their information elsewhere, primarily online. And online is where today’s virus of hatred is being spread....[A]n online culture has developed–aided by the mask of anonymity–in which people who would never consider themselves members of hate groups employ racial, religious, and other epithets as part of their vocabulary in posting comments....In turn the common appearance of such epithets desensitizes readers, making hate speech and the denigration of minorities appear “normal.”
Many observers now feel that the uncontrolled flow of content on the Intenet has helped fuel a steady decline in standards of civility governing how people interact with one another–sometimes with deadly results. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has posted a comment only to have a response from a stranger vilifying me with extremely profane language.
“Internet hate speech serves to mislead millions of innocent people–especially young people who are enthusiastic users of new technology–thereby recruiting the next generation of bigots, racists, sexists, homophobes, and anti-Semites.”
VIRAL HATE goes beyond diagnosing the problems. It presents some suggested solutions and, often, tells why they won’t work. It points out that hate can and does kill innocent people. What may seem like a harmless prank to a high school or college student can ruin lives, not only of the target but of the perpetrator as well.
Many people say there should be laws against spreading hate on the Internet. In some countries, there are laws against some kinds of hate, such as denying the Holocaust is illegal in many European countries. But the United States guarantees freedom of speech. The authors discuss what that means, what it covers, and what speech could be disallowed. If speech was illegal, where should the line be drawn before permitted and illegal speech? They point out our Constitution refers to government actions, not those of private companies.
Some people think Internet hate speech could be stopped if people were not allowed to post comments anonymously since people often will say things they would never say if others could identify them. But sometimes being identified could result in serious consequences for the writer who not spreading hate.
The authors talk about what the Internet gatekeepers can and have done to stop hate speech while respecting freedom of speech. They offer suggestions for how to counteract hate speech. The best ones include counter-speech: Unbiased, fact-based, and available on the same basis and in the same location as the hateful speech to which it responds. They recommend speaking up. Let others know that you disagree with what has been posted. You may encourage others to do the same when they realize they have support for their thoughts. Children should be educated about using the Internet. It is a tool they can learn to understand and use wisely.
They advocate educating children about how the Internet works and how to use it wisely as well as being able to separate fact from bias and emotion. VIRAL HATE lists some sites to help recognize bias: Who Is Registry (http://www.internic.net/whois.html) traces ownership and authorship; Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) shows the popularity of sites and analysis of how it relates to other sites; Touch Graph (www.touchgraph.com) visually displays the relationship between links to and from a site.
A Canadian firm, Media Smarts (http://mediasmarts.ca/) teaches “youth to think critically about all the media.” Its booklet Responding to Online Hate presents examples of “The Other,” “The Glorious Past,” and “Victimhood.”
US government spokespeople...(must) distance themselves from and condemn attempts to sow hatred while affirming US commitment to free speech. Definitions, practices, principles, and rules governing our policies on hate speech must be developed collaboratively, with participation by many stakeholders.
There are six appendices offering suggestions for how to respond to extremist speech, dealing with cyber-bullying, and defining hate crime laws. One very funny segment is the reply of someone to a hate post: “you’re kind makes me sick. Don’t you think there is enough crazy people in the world without spreading it to more people, the world would be better without gays and lessbeans (sic) and trannies and other disabilities. You need to delete your page before people see it and get annoid (sic).”
The response begins, “Thank you for your lovely message, how nice of you to notice that I am Kind, I do try.”
Other appendices give specific information about identifying the problems and working together to resolve them so the Internet can be a tool for education and socializing, not a tool for spreading hate and lies. It has wonderful, easy-to-utilize suggestions for helping children learn what the Internet is and how to use it wisely and safely. It also tells how to deal with online debates and reporting hate speech.
Online bystanders have a responsibility. “When you see something, say something.”
I received an Early Reviewers copy of VIRAL HATE from LibraryThing and appreciate the opportunity to read it.

Two members of the Anti-Defamation League, a well-known watchdog group aimed at eliminating anti-Semitism in America, bring us a book about "viral hate," or the racism that spreads through social networking sites and the underbelly of the internet. The book provides examples of internet hatred, primarily racism and homophobia, and advises a number of methods for combating it.

I was surprised to find that this book is more of an advocacy work than a history or critical analysis of the rise of racism and other bigotry on the internet. While there are a number of interesting examples of what happens when internet racism and homophobia get out of control, I would have appreciated (and expected) more trend data. The authors seem to expect us to believe that the internet has catalyzed groups like neo-Nazis, without providing any trend data on these groups' activities or membership, and without engaging alternative explanations for their resurgence on the national scene, including the sharp reduction in factory jobs, the election of an African-American president, and the mainstream anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican party. Others have looked at these in connection with the recent rise of white supremacist groups, so it seemed a glaring omission to me that this book did not.

I should also note that for first amendment defenders such as myself, the arguments in this book aren't particularly persuasive. While the authors are clear in explaining the many things that private internet companies could do and clarifying that this is different from government action, which is bound by the Constitution, each time it came up, the argument seemed to circle back to, "But this is actually more important than free speech, and it'd be nice if we could make some headway without that pesky first amendment in the way." They fall all over the United Kingdom's ability to prosecute hate speech and say it's great that other countries don't have the same historical love for the concept of free speech. I was not exactly sold.

Also, I found the use of the term "hater" in this book to be distracting. For young folks, "hater" has a pop culture meaning, and I couldn't take it seriously as an interchangeable term to "bigot."

This book is worth reading for people who are interested in the topic of viral internet content and advocacy around hate speech/hate crimes. It isn't exactly revolutionary, but it's an interesting perspective for those of us who value the first amendment's free speech provision -- worth considering how "clear and present a danger" things like hate speech might be. Sadly, it will not satisfy your hunger for statistics or academic analysis. I am still looking for that.

While not as engaging as Alan Dershowitz's Case... books on the subject, The Deadliest Lies is nevertheless a worthwhile book. Foxman manages to bring a few different perspectives to several of the issues and writes with a more easygoing style than does Dershowitz. At times Foxman got a bit repetitive and references to himself in the third person in one part of the book were a bit odd. Of course, the biggest problem with this book, like Dershowitz's Case... series, is that those who would most benefit from reading the arguments are probably least likely to read the book. On the other hand, the book does give Israel's supporters (as well as others who want to be able to argue against some of the lies or distortions that Foxman confronts) some ammunition to use to support their positions.½

What? What? What did we do?