Web sites featuring hateful rhetoric and calls for violence have spiked to record levels this year as extremist groups issue their messages to coincide with world events.
The number of sites advocating hate or depicting violence rose from 8,667 at the end of 2003 to 10,926 at the end of April 2004, according to SurfControl Inc., a Scotts Valley, Calif., Web-filtering company. It’s the largest increase in such sites seen by SurfControl over an entire year. Hate and violence sites are showing up on the Internet at a faster rate than pornography.
SurfControl separates all Web sites into 40 categories, such as arts and entertainment, games or education. It defines a “hate” site as any site that promotes a “political or social agenda that is supremacist in nature and exclusionary of others based on their race, religion, nationality, gender, age, disability, or sexual orientation.” It also includes any site that advocates an attack on or degradation of these groups.
A site is considered violent by SurfControl if it depicts torture, mutilation or horrific death, advocates people to put themselves or others in danger, or provides instructions on how to make bombs or similar devices. News sites are not included in these categories. SurfControl has used these criteria in its Web-filtering practice since 1996.
Groups that track Internet content said sites advocating hatred of Jews, Muslims, blacks and gays have become more pervasive and more extreme in their calls for violent acts, including murder. General anti-American Web sites have become more hostile as well, SurfControl said, and the amount of graphic violence and death appearing online has jumped.
“The kind of thing we’re seeing is more connections to hate and violence,” said Susan Larson, SurfControl’s vice president for global content. “The line between what was acceptable two to three years ago to now has changed.”
Hate sites were once dominated by American-based racist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation and Skinheads gang. And while those sites are as prevalent as ever, Web-content analysts have noted a new wave of anti-Semitic and anti-American sites created by radical Muslims voicing support for terrorist groups.
Sites noted by SurfControl include www.christiangallery.com, a pro-life site featuring graphic photos of aborted fetuses, and www.holywar.org, a site that refers to members of the Bush administration as the “Jewish Mafia” for supporting Israel.
U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq, which has been unpopular in the Arab world, has fueled extreme anti-American sentiment online, and a reappearance of sites that blame the September 11 attacks on Jews or claim the attacks were part of a U.S.-led conspiracy, SurfControl said.
The Internet is increasingly being used by terrorist groups to spread their messages and raise money, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group based in Los Angeles, reported last month. In particular, the center saw a spike in the number of sites recruiting young people to become suicide bombers as part of a holy war against Jewish people and Westerners.
The recruitment of young people by hate sites is more common across the board, Surf-Control said. www.stormfront.org, a large white supremacist Internet portal, features a page designed for children and a service for single people looking for mates.
It is not known whether the increase in hateful and violent Web sites has triggered attacks against any particular group. The Anti-Defamation League reported that incidents of Anti-Semitism dropped slightly from 1,559 in 2002 to 1,557 last year in the United States. But the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations noted a record 1,019 incidents of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment in 2003.
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