'Hate 2.0'

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, recently testified before Congress that there has been a "stark rise in the number of hate and terror sites and Web postings," a New York Times blog reports. Its annual report says the Center has identified about 8,000 such sites in the past year, up 30% over last year, the blog adds. Contributing to the problem is the rise of the social Web on which people post hateful videos, comments, etc. The Center "attributes a third of the 30% spike to blogs and discussion groups that support terrorism. The rest is the material of age-old hatreds: 40% anti-Semitic, 20% anti-black, 15% anti-immigrant and the rest a hodge-podge of anti-religious, anti-government sentiment." To counteract all this, the Wiesenthal Center is asking Web users to participate in a sort of Web neighborhood watch program by emailing links to hate sites, videos, and groups to ireport@wiesental.com.

Hate on the social Web

It's just another example of how the social Web mirrors the "real world," with all that's good and bad in it - not that hate sites weren't a presence on Web 1.0, nearly from the beginning. "The Internet has become both a social gathering place and a pulpit for the current generation of neo-Nazis," the Edmonton Sun reports. It cites experts saying that people have become inured to hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan because of its "more sedate but just as powerful presence on the Web." It takes the forms of white-supremacy forums, blogs, and social sites, such as "a European-American online community for whites that bears an uncanny resemblance to the popular networking site Facebook."