Hate and Social Media Warfare

The healthcare sector is comprised of several well-organized special interest groups. There are several special interests that do not have such a high level of organization but rely heavily on grassroots support to promote their perspective toward a special interest. Hate as a special interest is one such example. Certainly, there are well-organized hate groups, but there is no central organization that directs hate activity. Unfortunately, hate is something that self-perpetuates without the need for a central command.

The United States, like all countries, faces a myriad of social problems and challenges. Unfortunately, hate is one of the biggest problems that has plagued the United States for the last century. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting Program collects data about single-bias and multiple- bias hate crimes. A single-bias incident is defined as an incident in which one or more offense types are motivated by the same bias. As of 2013, a multiple-bias incident has been defined as an incident in which one or more offense types are motivated by two or more biases. Highlights of the 2014 hate crime statistics include

• ? In 2014, there were 5462 single-bias incidents that involved 6385 offenses, 6681 victims, and 5176 known offenders. The 17 multiple-bias incidents reported in 2014 involved 33 offenses, 46 victims, and 16 offenders.
• ? Analysis of the 5462 single-bias incidents reported in 2014 revealed that 47.0% were racially motivated; 18.6% resulted from sexual orientation bias; 18.6% were motivated by religious bias; 11.9% stemmed from ethnicity bias; 1.8% were motivated by gender-identity bias; 1.5% were prompted by disability bias; and 0.6% (33 incidents) resulted from gender bias.
• ? In 2014, law enforcement agencies reported that 3081 single-bias hate crime offenses were racially motivated. Of these offenses, 63.5% were motivated by anti-black or African American bias; 22.8% stemmed from anti-white bias; 5.5% resulted from anti-Asian bias; 4.6% were motivated by anti-American Indian or Alaska Native bias; 3.6% were a result of bias against groups of individuals consisting of more than one race (anti-multiple races, group); and 0.1% (4 offenses) were motivated by anti-Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander bias.
• ? In 2014, law enforcement agencies reported 1178 hate crime offenses based on sexual orientation bias. Of these offenses 58.0% were classified as antigay (male) bias; 23.6% were prompted by an anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (mixed group) bias; 14.3% were classified as anti-lesbian bias; 2.6% were classified as anti-bisexual bias; and 1.5% were the result of an anti-heterosexual bias.
• ? In 2014, hate crimes motivated by religious bias accounted for 1092 offenses reported by law enforcement. A breakdown of the bias motivation of religious-biased offenses showed that 58.2% were anti-Jewish; 16.3% were anti-Islamic (Muslim); 6.1% were anti-Catholic; 4.7% were anti-multiple religions, group; 2.6% were anti-Protestant; 1.2% were anti-Atheism/ Agnosticism; and 11.0% were anti-other (unspecified) religion.
• ? Of the single-bias incidents in 2014, 790 offenses were committed based on the offenders’ biases toward the perceived ethnicity of the victims. Of these offenses, 52.4% were anti-not Hispanic or Latino bias; and 47.6% were anti-Hispanic.
• ? Of the 6418 reported hate crime offenses in 2014, 27.2% were intimidation; 26.4% were destruction/damage/vandalism; 23.6% were simple assault; 12.0% were aggravated assault; and the remaining offenses included additional crimes against persons and property.

Hate continued to thrive in the United States and in June 2015, a self-declared white supremacist named Dylann Roof, shot and killed nine churchgoers, all African American, at their Charleston, South Carolina, church. The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is the oldest black church in the Southern United States. In June 2016, Omar Mateen, an American-born man who had allegedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), gunned down 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. These offenders had no relationship with each other except that they chose to act upon their hatred.

The South Carolina incident prompted new calls to remove the Confederate flag from public buildings in the United States. Many people see the Confederate flag as a symbol of hate and a reminder of the period in which the United States supported slavery. The subsequent removal of the flag from several locations was cheered by those citizens who want to move past hatred and to a more equitable society. On the other hand, there are many people that do not want to move forward and organized, through social media warfare tactics, to protest and resist the removal of their sacred hate symbol. Confederate flag sales boomed on many websites, while other ecommerce websites had enough respect to remove and ban the sale of Confederate flags and other Confederate items.

People that commit hate crimes seem to like to talk about the crimes or their motivations. Many have had social media pages and have left a wide variety of social media posts. Upon apprehension of hate crime perpetrators, law enforcement agencies routinely look at their social media pages and posts. Often, what is found is disgusting.

Some hate crime perpetrators work alone because they are so socially maladjusted that they do not have many friends. However, many haters like to be members of groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked over 800 hate groups operating in the United States in 2016. The Center provides a map of where these hate groups operate so that citizens can see how many hate groups exist in their area [2].

In addition to the Southern Poverty Law Center, many other groups use social media warfare tactics to fight hate crimes. These groups use social media warfare tactics to recruit and indoctrinate citizens in an anti-hate agenda and to build relationships between organizations, communities, and individuals to combat hate. Organizations fighting hate include the following:

• ? American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
• ? American Association of University Women
• ? Anti-Defamation League
• ? Asian American Justice Center
• ? Hindu American Foundation
• ? Human Rights Campaign
• ? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
• ? National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
• ? National Center for Transgender Equality
• ? National Council of Jewish Women
• ? National Disability Rights Network
• ? National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
• ? National Organization for Women
• ? Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund
• ? The Sikh Coalition [3]

Mainstream social media application providers and website managers work with law enforcement to fight against hate, and they have policies that generally disallow hate speech, threats, and dangerous material from being posted. Pages and posts that support terrorist activities or organized crime are deleted and accounts are suspended. Any content posted that encourages crimes against people or property are often removed. Hate speech is deleted from many websites and social media streams that include content directly attacking people based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. Social media providers largely rely on reports from social media users to identify organizations and people dedicated to promoting hate on websites or in social media. They also employ a variety of social media monitoring tools to identify and eliminate hate content.

However, mainstream social media is not the only communications tool available on the Internet. The alternative right (Alt-Right) has its own web space. Its websites may come and go quickly, but the Internet and social media applications are used by the alternative right to spread far-right ideologies, form groups, and support communication between individuals whose primary perspective is one of white supremacy. They also believe in racial purity and that their white privilege conflicts with modern social conditions and perspectives, such as political correctness and human rights for all people. In the United States, the alternative right and many radical right-wing groups feel that immigration and racial equality is a threat to white power and the dominance in society that they would like to maintain. Many of them feel that God is on their side and use that to promote their perspective. Social media warfare tactics used by hate groups include the following:

• ? Self-validation to support the validity and legitimacy of a hate group’ s position
• ? Influencing like-minded hate groups to adopt a position and use the same or similar rhetoric and justifications for an issue
• ? Reinforcing hate group partners’ position on an issue
• ? Recruiting and indoctrinating new members to a hate group
• ? Relationship building with other hate groups
• ? Deception regarding a hate group’s target or targets
• ? Divisiveness to instigate hatred toward a target group
• ? Trolling social media posts and debating the viewpoint of a poster

Hate groups still manage to get plenty of posts and pages on mainstream social media sites. Like many social media writers, the haters are rather prolific. Some of these hater journalists have a considerable fan base and many followers. Their perspectives vary, some are bitter and spiteful, others are advocate anti-social behavior. An informal survey of hate related social media posts conducted in early September 2016 found numerous hate posts on popular mainstream social media sites. The “n-word” has been removed from posts listed in this book, but this is the essence of some of the tags and subject lines found on social media sites:

• ? Ultra Right! Radicalized National Socialist! Anti-Multiculturalism! White Power!
• ? White Pride! White Lives! Have a white history month. Uppity Negroes STFU/Damn Porch Monkeys
• ? White Power: save white people from being a dying breed. Fuck n-word and Indians! And everyone who is not white
• ? For The White Race! The White Race Only! Fuck n-word And Fuck Kikes!

The same informal survey showed that it is easy to find anti-Muslim posts just about anywhere on the Internet, and they can be as nasty as those listed earlier. The essence of these tags and subject lines is presented here (misspellings have been corrected, specifically, Muslum was changed to Muslim).

• ? No Anti American Muslim Animals in Our Country. No Political Correct Crap!
• ? The Muslim-In-Chief keeps ISIS going. They know Obama is Anti-American
• ? Scary military veterans post pro-Trump anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, proguns and white nationalist tweets
• ? Anti-America Muslim Activity Should Be Stopped By Force!
• ? No more foreigners. No more Muslims
• ? I’M ANTI MUSLIM.....I’M ANTI OBAMA
• ? Wipe That Muslim Smile Off your Face, Satan!