Study: Hate groups flood social networking sites

From Jesse Solomon
CNN

NEW YORK (CNN) - Students from a New York school got a lesson in digital terror Wednesday at a center that has been monitoring hate sites on the Web since the 1990s.

The interactive presentation given to students of Independence High School by the Simon Wiesenthal Center is based on a report by its Digital Terrorism and Hate Project.

The study highlighted the proliferation of online hate and terror groups that use popular social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook to spread racist philosophies.

There was only one hate Web site in 1995, but more than 10,000 exist today, according to the study.

"It's an unfortunate byproduct of globalization," said Mark Weitzman, director of the center's Task Force Against Hate and Terrorism.

Thirty-percent of the hate sites found in the study were on Facebook, which has an estimated 200 million users worldwide.

Officials of the social networking site said content is monitored regularly.

"Where hateful content is uploaded and reported, Facebook removes it and disables the responsible accounts," Facebook said in a written statement. "Many of the groups or pages that were shown to us by the Simon Wiesenthal Center earlier this year as part of their study had already been removed under Facebook's rules."

However, the report noted that combating online bigotry is tricky, as offenders often kicked off a Web page under one identity often create a new profile under a different identity.

One white supremacist documented in the report boasted that he was able to change his profile sixty-four times.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who co-authored the study and serves as an associate dean at the center, hopes the data will spread awareness about the dangers of using social networking sights for extremist views.

"We'll make these findings available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the U.S. and around the world," Cooper said.