The great strength of the Internet is also its weakness. The Internet allows for the rapid dissemination of news, views and ideas, which quickly inform the world, but unfortunately also quickly fan the flames of hate.
Last week was Holocaust Remembrance Week, honouring the six million Jews and others who were put to death by the Nazis in Europe during the Second World War. It coincided with the 10th anniversary of another genocide, much closer to home - that of Rwanda, where an estimated one million people were murdered.
The fact that such events are commemorated would imply that people had learnt from the mistakes of the past. But a glance at the daily news shows otherwise.
While organisations such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice have been set up in an attempt to stop such actions happening again, their record of doing so has been dismal at best.
The main reason for the failure of such organisations is that there are always those who will harbour hatred against their fellow human beings. Reasons for such hate run the full gamut of human emotion and include fear, envy, jealousy and pure spite. However, people who foster such hatred want to spread it and the Internet is probably the most convenient and efficient way to do so.
Someone is out there watching for all this hate stuff and making the rest of the world aware of what it really is.
Paul Vecchiatto, journalist, ITWeb
The US-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre ( www.wiesenthal.com) named after Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, monitors some 4 000 Internet sites that it classifies as spreading hate. It recently published a report on around 200 of these sites that stimulate hate and violence through games that encourage children to shoot illegal immigrants, Jews, black people, and gays.
One of the more troubling aspects is that some of the hate sites have disguised themselves rather innocently. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC) report says that one site proclaims to be a history of US human rights activist Martin Luther King, but is actually run by a racist organisation.
The problem with this kind of deception is that it compromises the Internet`s value as a research tool and it becomes important for parents and teachers to be able to recognise such hate sites for what they really are. Doing this without compromising the freedom of speech and expression will be a tightrope walk and there will never really be a satisfactory answer as to just how to do it.
Another finding of the SWC report is that the number of hate sites that promote "terrorist recruitment, urging young people to join 'holy wars` and become suicide bombers" has increased.
The good thing about all of this gloomy news is that someone is out there watching for all this hate stuff and making the rest of the world aware of what it really is. While the weakness of the Internet allows such sites to exist, the upside is that their message of hate can be fairly easily found and classified for what it is.
Share
