Hate Almost-Crimes and the Rise of Inter-Nationalism
By: Jonathan Albright
Tags: Politics, Tech, Terrorism, Hate, Nationalism

Instagram, November 2017

Without a doubt, the expression of hate has become more fashionable. Today, it is legitimized by authoritative figures and should-be role models in statements, promoted in campaign slogans, and strategically funneled out through headlines, sound bites, and expertly organized meme blasts — all calculated moves meant to secure their standing in society. Hate is being displayed—many would say normalized—in ways that haven’t been seen for decades.

Dare I say expressing hate is…trendy? As a researcher whose work frequently overlaps with the subject, sometimes these acts of hate — crimes, almost-crimes, or non-crimes — can be traced to specific origins, and made clear that hate campaigns and targets have been coordinated. In these scenarios, it’s easier to assign blame for the consequences, a result that comes with its own unique set of challenges. More often, however, hateful acts surface more randomly.

Infinity War

Through shared feelings, hate is a chaos force multipler. In its wake, we see the rapid fragmentation of social institutions, established communities, and the dissolution of coherent discourse. Hate sidelines what should be social progress, partitioning it into never-ending clusters of conflict and what I like to call outrage porn.

If hate were part of physics, it would be pure entropy creeping into our civic and political processes, rendering them unstable and untrustworthy. This entropic effect helps form the ill-logical basis for many hate acts: catalyzing feelings — namely the perceived loss of control that nudges individuals and groups to take matters into their own hands — to fix the perceived ills in their world on their own terms.

How do you fight the spread of chaos?

We must expand our defintion of what hate actually represents: First and foremost, as I’ve argued here, hate is a feeling — a condition. These feelings precede actions, and we must further recognize that only a tiny fraction of hate-related acts can be categorized as crimes. And if we wait until these acts become crimes, it’s already too late.

While hate has an ideological basis, these ideologies all involve sets of shared values, embedded within specific cultural and social contexts. It’s no wonder, then, that “random” acts of hate seem to increase in frequency and intensity as established cultural and social norms undergo change.

Third, as the diffusion of hate is inter-nationalist by nature, it’s not confined to race (e.g., “white nationalists”) or class, nor is it exclusive to the “online” or “offline” realms. Like in how we curb foreign terrorism, we need to create broad sets of obstacles and clear disincentives that make the recruitment of hate-related ideologies harder and extremist group affiliations less accessible.

We can’t make hate disappear, but we can dramatically slow down the entrepreneurial path of radicalization. Literacy and educational initiatives are fine, but these require extraordinary cooperation and consensus about funding and outcome goals. We can slow the spread of hate through laws, but laws require considerable forethought, not to mention hawkish enforcement and oversight.

Most importantly, fighting hate demands unprecedented cooperation — between business, government, and public sectors, and across agencies, regimes, and countries. Smart policymaking, international cooperation, and proactive private sector buy-in — in this case sustained technological and personnel investment from American technology companies with supervision from government and state agencies is the necessary first step towards reigning this chaos in. Not the least because hate thrives in environments that lack well-defined rules.

I’ll also double down on making the less popular case that media attention, occasionally bordering on obsession, reporting on hate incidents — including horrific acts of racial and ethnic violence and domestic terrorism—only helps to amplify the theater of hate propaganda, promoting opportunistic recruitment into extremist ideas and cultural xenophobia.

Hate Almost-Crimes

The tragedy in Christchurch, New Zealand illustrates again that in dealing with hate, we face an existential global problem. The events that follow in hate’s wake will never be limited to criminal acts and publicized events in North America, Europe, and Asia. Thus the response by the New Zealand government, and the skillful handling of the massacre by the country’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern should offer policymakers an example of best practices in responding to hate—particularly as a framework in reducing the residual publicity that the event aftermaths receive.

American policymakers should not limit their initial approach to investigating, and presumably, attempting to regulate the spread of hate to acts that can be officially categorized as crimes. Because it makes playing the whack-a-mole game that much harder.

Approaching the fight against hate as a condition rather than acts that “cross the line” into definitive criminality means it is larger in scope. But it also means that the real battle is much better defined. I see this as another prerequisite to combatting the full extent of the problem. The polarization gateway into crimes — in many cases targeted sectarian violence — almost always involves a series of almost-crimes, and before that, a slippery slope of publicly expressed, mutually reinforced feelings.

While it’s fair to stigmatize “AI” — meaning algorithms and machine learning — as a contributing factor, we need sharp criticism of reckless media reporting on hate—whether crimes, almost-crimes, or non-crimes. When journalists and news outlets treat acts of hate like the news-of-the-day, as scholars danah boyd, Whitney Phillips, and others have pointed out, they provide the underlying ideologies with the legitimacy and social status they crave. In my view, this has the direct effect of turning cultural extremism into popular culture.

Mitigating the havoc that hate will continue to wreak on our society means taking away the provocative glamour and oppositional outrage its proponents gain with minimal effort through adversarial media attention. This strategy has less to do with censorship, a response which I have personally found to result in even more publicity, but through smarter news coverage and editorial decisions. For tech companies, it means curbing free promotion, monetized or otherwise.

All of this requires coming to stark terms with the notion that hate—and hate-related acts—are are not about crimes, or even nationalism, but rather are part of a condition that leads people and groups down a path towards unacceptable behaviors. By expanding the definition of hate in the ways I’ve discussed here, American policymakers can move forward with more effective long-term strategies to inhibit its global spread.