Group 5 Amber, Jessica, Veletta, Meghan, and Kristopher

Hate on the internet is the malicious intent to spread prejudice and biases about a targeted group or persons.  It can take many forms including websites, blogs, YouTube, personal comments, personal sites and propaganda.  However, even on seemingly harmless sites, negative agendas can still be found.    

Objectivity, authority, currency, and accuracy are the defining factors to establish appropriate criteria for analyzing ‘hate’ sites.  Objectivity is the ability to present an argument without bias while authority is a credible expert in the field.  For currency the site is contemporary and the political correctness of the site connotes accuracy.  Our fist encounter was the Institute for Historical Review.  We googled Holocaust denials, and stumbled across a religious site that had the Institute tagged.  This site seems creditable at first glance, but upon further review one might notice the subliminal hate materials advertised along the side of the page.   The second search was conducted under the frame ‘bullying,’ which we defined as a personal attack upon another person or group.  We chose to search for propaganda during elections and came across anitobama.com.  Propaganda was the appropriate angle to take because it is usually an open attack against political candidates.  Another form of hate on the internet is through religious persecution, such as anti- Muslim, anti-Christian, and anti-Jew.  The site we found was a blog entitled Things Muslims Hate which openly attacked Muslims.  This site is based on the stereotypes and racial profiling that are associated with Muslims.  Finally we decided to search for sites associated to racial discrimination.  We came across the Aryan Nation website which makes no effort to hide their feelings of hate towards Blacks and Jews.  

We learned that hate and bigotry on the internet can be subtle or blatent. However, the internet pages that are most shocking were the most subtle in their intent of hate because you were not expecting to find this type of information on that site.  Our group consisted of Amber, Jessica, Veletta, Meghan, and Kristopher.  As a group we collaborated on the issue of hate, its definition, establishing our criteria which were taken from www.3widener.edu site, searching for potential hate motivated web pages, and wrote our report as we worked.