Hate 2.0

Of all the great things the age of social media has ushered in, let’s not be blinded to the emergence of the age old affliction which has plagued humanity ever since Kane took out Abel…Hate.

Hate speech was there ever since people could speak, write, through the days of the printing press, book publication, audio tapes, video tapes, DVD, Web 1.0 and here we are. Human endeavour has steered in the greatest of innovation an creativity to bring humanity together and with this Yin of greatness came its Yang… the force driving us apart.

What spawned the article was a piece written by Brad Stone in the New York Times blog which covered a Congressional Briefing entitled Hate in the Information Age. What really stood out for me was how widespread hate and terror sites were in our rising Web 2.0 world. As marketers and tech geeks we know firsthand about the power of new media to spread ideas and this has escalated exponentially with Web 2.0.

This isn’t simply about hate groups starting their own little social networks and Web 2.0 hang-outs on the web like they used to do with websites in Web 1.0. Videos are being spread on Youtube, Facebook and MySpace are being used as recruiting grounds.

“You now have neo-Nazi thugs who want to make sure they capture and memorialize their racist violence on video and then use it as a way to denigrate their enemy online to get recruits.” – Rabbi Cooper, Wiesenthal Center

The Wiesenthal Centre’s annual study showed a 30% spike in hate sites in the last year putting the figure at around 8000 sites; 30% of these were blogs and discussion groups supporting terrorist acts. The scary thing about this is the unbelievable power Web 2.0 has in terms of targeting young people, and conversely, how susceptible the youth are to new ideas.

Brad’s article also points out how hard it is for law enforcement to follow what’s going on when these guys market and train followers using the means of Web 2.0, which bypass the traditional sites.

But now… let me bring it closer to home and closer to our current predicament — South Africa’s scourge of crime and xenophobia. As an idea virus in itself we’ve already witnessed how the xenophobia incidents in Alexandra had spread to Kwazulu Natal, Mpumalanga and Cape Town independent of any Web 2.0; and yet, even on this level I’ve witnessed hate being spread as I was alerted by a Twitter post from a friend.

The repercussions of this are bloodcurdling, and it alerts us to the fact that these little pockets of hate are very real; and Web 2.0 is an excellent marketing tool.

On the issue of crime we see bloggers who post about their experiences of crime and this, although cathartic, spreads the anxiety and scorn many people feel about South Africa and its laissez faire government. But what else can we do? Web 2.0 is only a medium; the problem in South Africa is at the core of policy and politics at a place most of us can not reach.

The only place for change I can see is to hold people accountable, and the medium of Web 2.0 can help facilitate this. Emails, blog posts, Twitter, Facebook and other methods, using them in the same way activists in San Francisco had organised protests to get their voices heard. We need to be clever and creative in our use of our media especially in a climate of hate. It is our duty as human beings to stop this and today we have a medium which allows us to spread our own ideas and facilitate action in ways never thought possible.