Library Assistant Makes Hobby of Tracking Internet Hate Speech

Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-gay radicals are the stuff of David Goldman's weekends.

Goldman, a research assistant at a University library, has committed himself to tracking the rapidly growing traffic of hate speech on the Internet--everything from a group claiming "If your refuse to help arrest faggots, you really should expect to be left behind when God comes to collect His people" to one which asserts that "The Jew is like a destroying virus that attacks our racial body."

Originating as a Web development team project for the library in the spring of 1995, Hatewatch, Goldman's Web-based hate-monitoring organization, has gathered momentum.

"We were looking generically at ways to put our information and wanted to play with different formats," he says. "The next day I saw an article about Storm-front."

Goldman visited the site, one of the earliest white supremacist presences on the Web, and decided to focus the library's project on hate on the Internet, compiling a database for researchers.

But this incarnation had a limited lifespan.

"I realized I could not stay objective. I was having a difficult time just listing the groups," he says.

Separating from the library and its server, Hatewatch developed into an activist site.

"We don't say eliminating. We believe in the notion of containing and marginalizing extremist speak from political discourse," he says.

Hate.com

Since the inception of his project, Goldman says he has witnessed the explosion of sites espousing hate.

"In 1995 there were six groups on the Web. And there were two real ones--Stormfront and the Aryan Crusaders Library," he says.

According to a number of studies, the relatively low cost and effort of Internet publishing has opened up a new forum for hate speech.

"It allows organizations that have been limited by money and geographic location to communicate freely, to organize and spread propaganda," Goldman says. "The Internet is a medium that allows anyone to publish their gripes and grievances."

The spread of hate speech on the Internet is well-documented. Several weeks ago, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released its second report on extremist use of the Internet, titled "High Tech Hate."

"New technical tools are attractive to haters," says Gale Ganz, director of fact finding for the ADL. "In terms of how hate groups build strength and communicate with one another, the net is a very useful tool, and we have to be extremely alert."

While the ability to disseminate information widely at little cost has made the Internet attractive to hate groups, Goldman says its anonymity is also critical.

To combat that anonymity, Goldman says, Hatewatch live-links to active hate sites.

"I always tell people, 'Don't believe what I have to say. Go see it.' I let the people speak for themselves. They do much better job hanging themselves than I ever could," he says. "These are not subtle folk."

The Many Faces of Hate

Cataloging about 150 live-links, Gold- man's page is a bistro of hate. Users choosing to view hate by category are presented with nine categories: white supremacy, neo-Nazism, black racism, anti-Semitism, anti-gay, anti-Christian, anti-Arab, Christian identity and Holocaust denial.

Pages run from the simplistic to the sophisticated. Dripping blood graces Neal Horsley's Creator's Rights Party page and several Ku Klux Klan sites come complete with accompanying Celtic music.

The variety of formats mirrors diversity of content.

Even in Hatewatch's smallest category--anti-Christian-the two groups represented there fail to take the same line.

Altar of the Unholy Blasphemy urges readers to "sodomize Jesus Christ for Christ would love to sodomize you....Sodomize the priest--Avenge the little boys of the world."

The Christian Holocaust site instead urges genocide.

"The greater concerned and anonymous warriors of the Christian Holocaust, all humans concerned for liberation and justice for all humans, all spirits wishing to be free in a world undestroyed by weakness declare nihilistic total hate ware upon Christianity," it reads.

But the word "hate" is absent on many pages in the other categories. The Aryan Nations Web site presents white racialism as a message of love.

"We believe that there is a battle being fought this day between the children of darkness (today known as Jews) and the children o flight (Yahweh, The Everliving God), the Aryan Race, the true Israel of the Bible," the site says.

But not all pages focus on a single issue.

Horsley treats a variety of topics. According to the page, his political party is "committed to arresting faggots of all types." In an unrelated move, he takes an anti-abortion stance and advocates secession by means of nuclear weapons.

The Aryan Dating Page (ADP) is less policy-oriented.

Assuring readers that "women and men listed on the Aryan Dating Page are heterosexual white gentiles only,' the site suggests visitors "use ADP to arrange dates for friendship or love."

The ADP also includes advice for dating and a disclaimer. Recommending that couples schedule their first meeting for a public place, the site says, "ADP can not [sic] guarantee anything about the person who will meet you. There is much variety in the racist movement."

Despite the apparent diversity of focus, Goldman says common assumptions underlie many of the sites and allow the groups to communicate.

"It's Christian Identity which allows this discussion to take place," he says. "Jews as the spawn of Satan and black people as mud people also allows them a certain common ground."

The overlap in issues is apparent. Many pages classified as "white supremacist" also denigrate Jews and homosexuals.

Making Connections

Pages often link to each other as well. Stormfront lists more than 50 links to other sites sharing its white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideology.

But what the sites do not reveal is the strength or size of the organizations they represent.

Mark Potok, director of publications at Klanwatch, a hate group monitoring project run by the Southern Poverty Law Center, says a group must take action--be it publish literature, run an active Web site, distribute leaflets or hold rallies--within a calendar year in order to be listed as an active hate group.

"What we're trying to get away from is inflating the count," he says. Particularly on the Web it is "difficult to distinguish between bona fide groups and wayward individuals."

While Goldman acknowledges that a given site may be the work of a single, isolated individual, he warns against underestimating these Web publishers.

"These are not good old boys driving a pickup truck with a gun rack," he says. "Some are, but some are young kids who are very technologically savvy. Some are white middle-class Americans who ascribe to a prenicious point of view. Some are very educated and well to do."

"It's a dangerous misconception to somehow write these people off as the product of a brother-sister union," he says.

Calling it Hate

Not all Web publishers listed by Goldman are willing to accept being labeled as hate groups.

Mike Alamore, minister of Kingdom Identity Ministries, which describes itself as a "Politically Incorrect Christian Identity outreach ministry to God's chosen race (true Israel, the white, European peoples)", calls the categorization "unfair."

I'm not the only person or group that's been called names," he says.

The Holocaust denial category is particularly problematic. While some sites express hatred for Jews, not all do.

Arthur R. Butz, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University, runs a Web site on the university's server dedicated to Holocaust revisionism.

"This is historical revisionism of a sort," he says. "Just about any history project worth anything is."

He maintains that his opinions are not hate speech but says he is "not terribly upset" about his listing on Hatewatch.

"I'm accustomed to observing a lot of stupid people commenting on this," he says.

But Ganz says the ADL considers Holocaust denial with or without explicit anti-Semitism to be hate.

"Holocaust denial is an aspect of anti-Semitism," she says. "You cannot have a site that says that the Holocaust didn't happen or didn't happen the way history shows it happened without considering it anti-Semitism."

Potok says Klanwatch also sees the close relationship between Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

"By and large it is a cloak for anti-Semitism," he says. "The far right by and large has taken great pains to strip away explicit racism and couch arguments in pseudo-academic terms. They don't talk much about satanic Jewish bankers running the world but that is the subtext."

But while Hatewatch lists Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam site under the category of black racism, Potok says Klanwatch has not listed the organization, though it does monitor it.

"It's not clear that all members of the group fit into the category of a hate group," he says.

He notes, though, that the president of the Southern Poverty Law Group recently called Farrakhan a "notorious bigot" in a newsletter.

Goldman acknowledges pride in one's race does not necessarily constitute hate.

"If you're proud because you're white, that's your business. If you denigrate others, that's my business," he says.

For some groups, categorization is clear-cut.

Rev. Matt Hale, "pontifex maximus" of the World Church of the Creator (WCC)--a "white racialist religion"--does not shrink from the word "hate." Hale is not bashful about being listed on Hatewatch.

"I think every organization is a hate group to some extent. They have certain goals and they hate that which threatens those goals," he says. "We do hate that which threatens our race. We do hate the non-whites in general because they threaten us."

Hale says the goal of his group is to use legal means to "cleanse our land of the non-white races."

The WCC's message has been well-received on college campuses, Hale says. Flyers from the organization appeared on the Harvard campus in September.

Hale says students are "shocked by all the non-white organizations that exist" on college campuses.

Though he said did not know their specific affiliations, Hale says that some WCC members have told him they are students at Harvard.

"That's what they said when the joined up," he says, "And they were proud of it."

Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, says he also believes hate is a necessary part of his message.

His Web site, "God Hates Fags," is among Hatewatch's anti-gay links.

"If I'm on Brother Goldmans' list of hate preachers, that's all right," Phelps says. "You can't preach God without preaching hate."

"Anybody who thinks God loves everyone is a nincompoop," he says.

Phelps and 11 of his church's 213 members visited the Boston area this weekend bearings signs reading "Thank God for AIDS" and "Fags Doom Nations." The group has gained national media attention for picketing the funerals of AIDS victims.

Phelps says that being called a hater does not trouble him.

"It is a matters of supreme irrelevancy to me what the response is to this simple gospel message that I've been preaching for 50 years," he says.

"That's my job, child. Don't you understand that?" he adds.

Finding the Center

All groups spreading hate messages get catalogued on Hatewatch, but Goldman says he believes the white supremacist groups are the most dangerous.

"Their rhetoric is a little more aggressive," he says.

Potok says he believes the "Patriot movement" is greater concern.

These groups, which include militia organizations, common law courts and conspiracy theorists, represent the "clearest threat," he says.

"This is not be label all followers as racists or criminals. However, within that movement there is a percentage--be that one or 10 percent--who are clearly inclined to violence," he says.

Klanwatch lists patriot groups separately from hate groups because their rhetoric is not explicitly racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic. For these groups, he says, the enemy is "the federal government or its minions or some shadowy world conspiracy."

Patriot groups are not listed on Hatewatch because they do not meet hate speech criteria.

Though the ADL and Klanwatch have noted a decline in active hate groups over the last few years, Goldman says he believes they have moved to the Web.

And, he says, their presence in cyberspace does not mean they should be taken any less seriously as a real world threat.

"If someone says they want to kill Jews, I'm going to take them at their word," he says.

Containing Hate

Centralizing hate groups onto one site and providing a critical context is the foundation of Goldman's endeavor.

"If you take cockroaches and you shine a light on them, they freak out. They scurry away," he says.

As part of this effort, Hatewatch has incorporated Real Audio interviews with both promoters and fighters of hate onto the site.

Goldman says he hopes visitors will use the site to get informed and as a "pedagogical tool" for children.

The site currently attracts about 700 individual users each day with hits totalling 3,000 to 4,000.

But Hale says he believes the same exposure Goldman hopes will help marginalize hate actually contributes to the spread of his message.

"We feel he's doing us a favor," he says.

Goldman denies that his site facilitates communication among the groups.

"I have never believed that Hatewatch empowers racists to work more," he says. "Anyone with a search engine and knowing one page can find everything else."

Tests seem to bear this out. Many sites already link to each other and a Yahoo search for the words "white pride" turned up 427 entries earlier this week.

Most of the Web publishers whose pages are listed on Hatewatch say this is not how their supporters find them.

"Hatewatch hasn't been sending us much traffic of late and so we've dropped our links to it," says Jeff Vos of the Cybernet Nationalist Group, which promotes an anti-gay agenda.

"It seems as if most people prefer to use other means to finding sites like ours rather than going through 'hate monitoring' sites--which are also likely monitoring them as well," he says.

But even though the site does not seem to aid the communication of Hate groups, Ganz says the ADL questions the practice of live-linking to these sites.

"We see there being no point in making it any easier to find these groups," she says. "It's easy enough to find them anyway. We don't encourage people to contact these groups."

The ADL and Hatewatch diverge over live-linking, but they see eye to eye or government regulation.

Both organizations say that government regulation is neither desirable not possible.

"The technology doesn't allow easy denial of access," Goldman says. "The Internet looks at censorship as damage and works around it."

But Hatewatch does support private service providers with model policies to prevent hate pages from sprouting up on their servers. Many of these providers offer free Web pages.

Having a policy "forces them to spend the money" on a commercial service. Goldman says. "Why should a person who survived the death camps at Auschwitz be on the same server as a Holocaust denier?" he says.

Hatewatch lists nine service providers with no-hate page policies.

Geocities, which provides free e-mail and Web pages, offers a simple explanation for their no-hate page policy.

"We don't think people should hate each other," says Dick Hackenberg, vice-president of marketing.

He said Geocities also believes that control of Web page content should be conducted by providers.

"Our feeling is that the industry should be self-regulating," he says.

While Goldman endorses service providers with no-hate page policies, he says he believes individuals' getting informed and involved is most important.

"The thing that fatigues me the most is not a hate groups or hate speech. It's people who say 'Yeah, yeah, yeah I'm really interested' and you never hear from them again," he says.

"At universities especially people and to forget that good thoughts are not equal to actions," he adds.

Hatewatch is located at http://www.hatewatch.orgCrimsonJoshua H. SimonA LOUD PROTEST: Demonstrators from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, picket in front of the Statehouse in Boston last weekend.

Pages run from the simplistic to the sophisticated. Dripping blood graces Neal Horsley's Creator's Rights Party page and several Ku Klux Klan sites come complete with accompanying Celtic music.

The variety of formats mirrors diversity of content.

Even in Hatewatch's smallest category--anti-Christian-the two groups represented there fail to take the same line.

Altar of the Unholy Blasphemy urges readers to "sodomize Jesus Christ for Christ would love to sodomize you....Sodomize the priest--Avenge the little boys of the world."

The Christian Holocaust site instead urges genocide.

"The greater concerned and anonymous warriors of the Christian Holocaust, all humans concerned for liberation and justice for all humans, all spirits wishing to be free in a world undestroyed by weakness declare nihilistic total hate ware upon Christianity," it reads.

But the word "hate" is absent on many pages in the other categories. The Aryan Nations Web site presents white racialism as a message of love.

"We believe that there is a battle being fought this day between the children of darkness (today known as Jews) and the children o flight (Yahweh, The Everliving God), the Aryan Race, the true Israel of the Bible," the site says.

But not all pages focus on a single issue.

Horsley treats a variety of topics. According to the page, his political party is "committed to arresting faggots of all types." In an unrelated move, he takes an anti-abortion stance and advocates secession by means of nuclear weapons.

The Aryan Dating Page (ADP) is less policy-oriented.

Assuring readers that "women and men listed on the Aryan Dating Page are heterosexual white gentiles only,' the site suggests visitors "use ADP to arrange dates for friendship or love."

The ADP also includes advice for dating and a disclaimer. Recommending that couples schedule their first meeting for a public place, the site says, "ADP can not [sic] guarantee anything about the person who will meet you. There is much variety in the racist movement."

Despite the apparent diversity of focus, Goldman says common assumptions underlie many of the sites and allow the groups to communicate.

"It's Christian Identity which allows this discussion to take place," he says. "Jews as the spawn of Satan and black people as mud people also allows them a certain common ground."

The overlap in issues is apparent. Many pages classified as "white supremacist" also denigrate Jews and homosexuals.

Making Connections

Pages often link to each other as well. Stormfront lists more than 50 links to other sites sharing its white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideology.

But what the sites do not reveal is the strength or size of the organizations they represent.

Mark Potok, director of publications at Klanwatch, a hate group monitoring project run by the Southern Poverty Law Center, says a group must take action--be it publish literature, run an active Web site, distribute leaflets or hold rallies--within a calendar year in order to be listed as an active hate group.

"What we're trying to get away from is inflating the count," he says. Particularly on the Web it is "difficult to distinguish between bona fide groups and wayward individuals."

While Goldman acknowledges that a given site may be the work of a single, isolated individual, he warns against underestimating these Web publishers.

"These are not good old boys driving a pickup truck with a gun rack," he says. "Some are, but some are young kids who are very technologically savvy. Some are white middle-class Americans who ascribe to a prenicious point of view. Some are very educated and well to do."

"It's a dangerous misconception to somehow write these people off as the product of a brother-sister union," he says.

Calling it Hate

Not all Web publishers listed by Goldman are willing to accept being labeled as hate groups.

Mike Alamore, minister of Kingdom Identity Ministries, which describes itself as a "Politically Incorrect Christian Identity outreach ministry to God's chosen race (true Israel, the white, European peoples)", calls the categorization "unfair."

I'm not the only person or group that's been called names," he says.

The Holocaust denial category is particularly problematic. While some sites express hatred for Jews, not all do.

Arthur R. Butz, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University, runs a Web site on the university's server dedicated to Holocaust revisionism.

"This is historical revisionism of a sort," he says. "Just about any history project worth anything is."

He maintains that his opinions are not hate speech but says he is "not terribly upset" about his listing on Hatewatch.

"I'm accustomed to observing a lot of stupid people commenting on this," he says.

But Ganz says the ADL considers Holocaust denial with or without explicit anti-Semitism to be hate.

"Holocaust denial is an aspect of anti-Semitism," she says. "You cannot have a site that says that the Holocaust didn't happen or didn't happen the way history shows it happened without considering it anti-Semitism."

Potok says Klanwatch also sees the close relationship between Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

"By and large it is a cloak for anti-Semitism," he says. "The far right by and large has taken great pains to strip away explicit racism and couch arguments in pseudo-academic terms. They don't talk much about satanic Jewish bankers running the world but that is the subtext."

But while Hatewatch lists Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam site under the category of black racism, Potok says Klanwatch has not listed the organization, though it does monitor it.

"It's not clear that all members of the group fit into the category of a hate group," he says.

He notes, though, that the president of the Southern Poverty Law Group recently called Farrakhan a "notorious bigot" in a newsletter.

Goldman acknowledges pride in one's race does not necessarily constitute hate.

"If you're proud because you're white, that's your business. If you denigrate others, that's my business," he says.

For some groups, categorization is clear-cut.

Rev. Matt Hale, "pontifex maximus" of the World Church of the Creator (WCC)--a "white racialist religion"--does not shrink from the word "hate." Hale is not bashful about being listed on Hatewatch.

"I think every organization is a hate group to some extent. They have certain goals and they hate that which threatens those goals," he says. "We do hate that which threatens our race. We do hate the non-whites in general because they threaten us."

Hale says the goal of his group is to use legal means to "cleanse our land of the non-white races."

The WCC's message has been well-received on college campuses, Hale says. Flyers from the organization appeared on the Harvard campus in September.

Hale says students are "shocked by all the non-white organizations that exist" on college campuses.

Though he said did not know their specific affiliations, Hale says that some WCC members have told him they are students at Harvard.

"That's what they said when the joined up," he says, "And they were proud of it."

Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, says he also believes hate is a necessary part of his message.

His Web site, "God Hates Fags," is among Hatewatch's anti-gay links.

"If I'm on Brother Goldmans' list of hate preachers, that's all right," Phelps says. "You can't preach God without preaching hate."

"Anybody who thinks God loves everyone is a nincompoop," he says.

Phelps and 11 of his church's 213 members visited the Boston area this weekend bearings signs reading "Thank God for AIDS" and "Fags Doom Nations." The group has gained national media attention for picketing the funerals of AIDS victims.

Phelps says that being called a hater does not trouble him.

"It is a matters of supreme irrelevancy to me what the response is to this simple gospel message that I've been preaching for 50 years," he says.

"That's my job, child. Don't you understand that?" he adds.

Finding the Center

All groups spreading hate messages get catalogued on Hatewatch, but Goldman says he believes the white supremacist groups are the most dangerous.

"Their rhetoric is a little more aggressive," he says.

Potok says he believes the "Patriot movement" is greater concern.

These groups, which include militia organizations, common law courts and conspiracy theorists, represent the "clearest threat," he says.

"This is not be label all followers as racists or criminals. However, within that movement there is a percentage--be that one or 10 percent--who are clearly inclined to violence," he says.

Klanwatch lists patriot groups separately from hate groups because their rhetoric is not explicitly racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic. For these groups, he says, the enemy is "the federal government or its minions or some shadowy world conspiracy."

Patriot groups are not listed on Hatewatch because they do not meet hate speech criteria.

Though the ADL and Klanwatch have noted a decline in active hate groups over the last few years, Goldman says he believes they have moved to the Web.

And, he says, their presence in cyberspace does not mean they should be taken any less seriously as a real world threat.

"If someone says they want to kill Jews, I'm going to take them at their word," he says.

Containing Hate

Centralizing hate groups onto one site and providing a critical context is the foundation of Goldman's endeavor.

"If you take cockroaches and you shine a light on them, they freak out. They scurry away," he says.

As part of this effort, Hatewatch has incorporated Real Audio interviews with both promoters and fighters of hate onto the site.

Goldman says he hopes visitors will use the site to get informed and as a "pedagogical tool" for children.

The site currently attracts about 700 individual users each day with hits totalling 3,000 to 4,000.

But Hale says he believes the same exposure Goldman hopes will help marginalize hate actually contributes to the spread of his message.

"We feel he's doing us a favor," he says.

Goldman denies that his site facilitates communication among the groups.

"I have never believed that Hatewatch empowers racists to work more," he says. "Anyone with a search engine and knowing one page can find everything else."

Tests seem to bear this out. Many sites already link to each other and a Yahoo search for the words "white pride" turned up 427 entries earlier this week.

Most of the Web publishers whose pages are listed on Hatewatch say this is not how their supporters find them.

"Hatewatch hasn't been sending us much traffic of late and so we've dropped our links to it," says Jeff Vos of the Cybernet Nationalist Group, which promotes an anti-gay agenda.

"It seems as if most people prefer to use other means to finding sites like ours rather than going through 'hate monitoring' sites--which are also likely monitoring them as well," he says.

But even though the site does not seem to aid the communication of Hate groups, Ganz says the ADL questions the practice of live-linking to these sites.

"We see there being no point in making it any easier to find these groups," she says. "It's easy enough to find them anyway. We don't encourage people to contact these groups."

The ADL and Hatewatch diverge over live-linking, but they see eye to eye or government regulation.

Both organizations say that government regulation is neither desirable not possible.

"The technology doesn't allow easy denial of access," Goldman says. "The Internet looks at censorship as damage and works around it."

But Hatewatch does support private service providers with model policies to prevent hate pages from sprouting up on their servers. Many of these providers offer free Web pages.

Having a policy "forces them to spend the money" on a commercial service. Goldman says. "Why should a person who survived the death camps at Auschwitz be on the same server as a Holocaust denier?" he says.

Hatewatch lists nine service providers with no-hate page policies.

Geocities, which provides free e-mail and Web pages, offers a simple explanation for their no-hate page policy.

"We don't think people should hate each other," says Dick Hackenberg, vice-president of marketing.

He said Geocities also believes that control of Web page content should be conducted by providers.

"Our feeling is that the industry should be self-regulating," he says.

While Goldman endorses service providers with no-hate page policies, he says he believes individuals' getting informed and involved is most important.

"The thing that fatigues me the most is not a hate groups or hate speech. It's people who say 'Yeah, yeah, yeah I'm really interested' and you never hear from them again," he says.

"At universities especially people and to forget that good thoughts are not equal to actions," he adds.

Hatewatch is located at http://www.hatewatch.orgCrimsonJoshua H. SimonA LOUD PROTEST: Demonstrators from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, picket in front of the Statehouse in Boston last weekend.