Online Hate Groups

We present a study of the online forum Reddit, specifically a sub-forum for (typically
heterosexual) men who identify as involuntary celibates or ‘incels’. Incels are an online
imagined community who wish to, but do not, have sexual relations with women, seeing
women as the cause of their problems. Incels are explicitly marked for their sexuality, their
lack of sexual interactions, and their ideologies on gender and sexuality.
In this paper, we take a small but representative corpus of 65,000 words generated from 50
threads created and commented on by incels. We analyse word frequencies, collocations and
concordance lines to explore the representation of gendered social actors. Preliminary
findings show that, contrary to expectation, the most frequent terms for ‘women’ are not
pejorative and male social actors are referred to in the corpus with only slightly lower
frequencies. We also observe a pervasive generalisation of these gendered social actors,
which is indicative of how the members of this online community create, maintain and
reinforce their views of gender and sexuality. In qualitative terms, we note that first person
singular reference occurs only in narratives, a finding that complements the quantitative
results on generalisations. We also explore how women and certain men are constructed as
an ‘outgroup’ who are partly responsible for incels failing to engage in sexual interaction. We
finally discuss how incels position themselves with regard to social status and social capital
and how they argue that the type of masculinity they perform is marginalised

Responding to the phenomenon of 'online hate speech', this paper outlines the boundaries between the freedom of expression and hate speech. The paper draws on the ICCPR to distinguish between expressions that merely 'offend', to other forms of speech that are destructive of norms that guard against discrimination, hate and abuse, vilification and incitement. The paper discusses the inherent problems in combating hate speech in social media, though in form and substance it is much the same as in other media. The lack of a uniform approach to address hate speech among 'intermediaries' (social media platforms) is identified as part of the problem that leads to the use of 'hate speech' by groups advocating for extremist ideologies. Importance of fostering digital citizenship, awareness and understanding within and among the communities have been underscored as being imperative in seeking a solution.

Tragic rampage killing sprees are too often reoccurring events in the United States landscape. Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, dozens of children and young people have died at the hands of shooters, cited as loners, victims of bullying out for revenge against those that had wronged them; but the shooters have another and often less noted characteristic in common: Most of them are white, all of them are men. This thesis is about one of those men.
On May 23, 2014, Elliot Oliver Robertson Rodger killed six people, wounded 13, and committed suicide before police could apprehend him. Taking its departure in masculinities theory and affect theory, this thesis aims to explore the current state of hegemonic masculinity, and aims to demonstrate its influence on the motivation for Elliot Rodger’s rampage killing spree, on his justification of the crime, and on the discursive self-construction he left behind. Ultimately the thesis argues that Elliot Rodger used an ideology of hegemonic masculinity as a basis for creating a discursive self-construction as a grievable body, by blaming those he targeted: women.
The theoretical framework is constructed from theories and research by Judith Butler, Michael Kimmel, C.J. Pascoe, R.W. Connell and Lauren Berlant.

There is no doubt that George Lincoln Rockwell played a crucial role in the advancement of neo-Nazism in the USA. His national-socialist ideas of the state might have played into to the fact that he was often called "Hitler's Lenin" whose party was seen as a provocative yet harmless fringe group in the 1960s. Still, it was Rockwell's extraordinary talent for using social unrest and subtle racial stereotypes to gain popular support that exceeded the numeric relevance of his party by far.

Even if his media presence has been short-lived and did not reach systemic change in the USA, Rockwell up until today influences contemporary neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The revived American Nazi Party (ANP), for example, implies immediate ideological succession by resuming a name that had long been discarded by Rockwell himself. Furthermore, the modern ANP claims to carry on his “Struggle to Power” on their website. Bearing in mind that they, in fact, have not got any direct link to Rockwell’s ANP, this essay aims to see if and to what extent common goals and agitation strategies still look akin in both “party eras”.

Government agencies in New Zealand are not required to systematically collect data on online hate speech, thus, there is a lack of longitudinal evidence regarding this phenomenon. This report presents trends in personal experiences of and exposure to online hate speech among adult New Zealanders based on nationally representative data. The findings from this study are also compared with results from a similar research study conducted in 2018. In addition, this report explores people’s perceptions about other issues related to hate speech. The goal of this study is to fill some knowledge gaps regarding the extent and nature of hate speech in New Zealand. It also seeks to provide reliable and robust evidence to inform public conversation on the topic and the implementation of strategies and activities to ensure all New Zealanders, no matter what their characteristics, are safe online to benefit from the multiple opportunities of the digital environment.

Hate groups increasingly use social media to promote extremist ideologies. They frame their online communications to appeal to potential recruits. Informed by sociological theories of framing, we develop the "Hate Frames Codebook", a hand-coding scheme for analyzing online hate. The "Hate Frames Codebook" offers a twofold outlook on hateful communications. First, it adopts a Collective Action perspective to analyze how hate groups identify problems in the social groups they target, suggest solutions to the problems, and motivate their supporters. Then, the codebook highlights strategies of influence through the lens of Propaganda Devices. We validate our codebook by applying it to a sample of 250 publicly available tweets sent by 15 Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate groups. The codebook fosters future research by outlining the dimensions of framing in hate group communications, thus laying theoretical grounds for curating datasets and building computational models of hateful language.

Brevier:
Eine Untersuchung von Hasskommentaren im Internet, allen voran in den sozialen Medien, stellt ein Desiderat dar. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird unter Nutzbarmachung der normativen Argumentationstheorie versucht, 388 mitunter polarisierende Facebook-Kommentare im Kon-text einer Störung einer Theateraufführung durch die Identitäre Bewegung kritisch zu analysieren und diskursanalytisch zu interpretieren.

Abstract:
An examination of hate speech is a desideratum, as is generally the case with online communication - especially the social media - still reveals some open questions. In the present article, the use of normative argumentation theory attempts to critically analyse 388 facebook comments which are classified as potentially controversial. Background of the study is a disturbance of a performance by the identitarian movement in Vienna.

Government agencies in New Zealand are not required to systematically collect data on online hate speech, thus, there is a lack of longitudinal evidence regarding this phenomenon. This report presents trends in personal experiences of and exposure to online hate speech among adult New Zealanders based on nationally representative data. The findings from this study are also compared with results from a similar research study conducted in 2018. In addition, this report explores people’s perceptions about other issues related to hate speech. The goal of this study is to fill some knowledge gaps regarding the extent and nature of hate speech in New Zealand. It also seeks to provide reliable and robust evidence to inform public conversation on the topic and the implementation of strategies and activities to ensure all New Zealanders, no matter what their characteristics, are safe online to benefit from the multiple opportunities of the digital environment.