White Supremacy Thriving Online, Despite Prevention Efforts

Some monitor organizations say hate groups are still able to use these platforms, as many of the measures taken to counter them are not properly enforced.

Change the Terms, a coalition working to stop hate online, states on its website that “major tech companies have repeatedly failed to adequately address the problems that their own platforms are creating.”

In a petition on its site directed at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the organization states “Twitter has done very little to stop white supremacists from organizing, fundraising, recruiting and normalizing attacks on women and people of color on its platform.”

Twitter said in a blog post in May that it, along with a few other tech giants, are committed to “working collaboratively across industry to attack the root causes of extremism and hate online.”

Restricting extremists online

When it comes to imposing regulations on both mainstream social media and fringe websites, experts have differing views.

Maura Conway, professor of international security at Dublin City University, told VOA the key point that should be taken into consideration when regulating is not the size of the site, but “the nature of the material being circulated, and the nature of the interactions taking place on the sites, and whether these are of a violent extremist or even terrorist nature or not.”

Alina Polyakova, a fellow at Brookings Institution and founding director of the Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology, says regulating content control is a “dead end” because of First Amendment protections, and that looking into the distribution channels, not the content itself, is essential.

“They (algorithms) help to promote extremist messages online. … When we know how the content is distributed, then we can regulate it,” she said at a recent event hosted by Public Knowledge, a nonprofit organization advocating freedom of expression and open internet, last week.

Josh Lipowsky, a senior researcher with the New York-based Counter Extremism Project, told VOA that more pressure is also needed on fringe sites to make sure they meet their responsibility of thwarting supremacist propaganda on their platforms.

Lipowsky said “restricting this type of rhetoric is not limiting freedom of speech under the First Amendment. We are talking about private businesses that provide services. They are well within their rights to set limits on how their services are used to avoid abuse of their platforms.”

He continued, “Sites like Gab pride themselves on being open forums that guarantee free expression. But they do not and cannot exist in a vacuum. They still need the web service companies to operate, and that is where pressure can be applied.”

He added that governments should step in to address these issues to “ensure across-the-board compliance in the interest of public safety and security.”

Matthew Grady and Rikar Hussein contributed to this story.