Category: Internet

The Czech Police have been investigating more and more bias crimes involving hatred recently. Does this mean racism is increasing here, on average? Political scientist Jan Charvát says that in reality, such cases have always existed here, but in the past the public didn’t pay attention to them. At the start of last week a case came before the court of a married couple belonging to the majority group in society accused of assaulting several Romani children. That case has a very similar beginning to that of the brawl at a swimming pool this summer in Dubí (Teplice district), as a result of which several Romani people have been accused of committing assault – it began as a dispute among children, adults inserted themselves into it very sharply, and their approach to the situation has revealed the dominant tensions between the majority and the minority here. Charvát, who is an expert on political extremism, believes these cases do not, however, indicate that there is room for the situation in the coexistence of the majority and Romani people to become more dramatic. Even though nobody involved with the extremist scene was involved in either case, Charvát does not believe escalation of inter-ethnic tensions is on the horizon. “In the Czech Republic, for a long time, the idea has been established that there are extremists here who commit crime with an extremist subtext and who are followed by the Interior Ministry – and then there is another group of ‘normal’ people. The Interior Ministry has stuck to that model, but today such a concept is unsustainable, also from the perspective of the ministry, which is now abandoning it, or rather, is gradually augmenting it with the concept of hate crime,” Charvát, who is the author of several publications about extremism, told news server SeznamZprávy.cz. “We have long known that some of the crime aimed against minorities is not committed by people from extremist groups, but by absolutely normal, ordinary people who have never been part of any extremist organization and therefore were never followed by the Interior Ministry. Today what we are seeing is not a fundamental change – the situation is the same as it has ever been – but we have realized that our perspective has been erroneous, and now this is being demonstrated and manifested absolutely unequivocally,” the political scientist said.

via romea.cz: Czech expert says haters’ attention is fixating on Roma again, “migration” as a subject is over

Treasure trove of user data released by anti-fascist hackers lead to identities of scores of clandestine domestic terrorists. The real identities of more than a dozen clandestine members of the Atomwaffen Division white supremacist domestic terror group have been uncovered after a month long investigation. Long emboldened by their anonymity, using aliases from behind computer screens, their identities unknown to their communities, employers, law enforcement, and family and friends, the new revelations mean the true identities for many members of the Atomwaffen Division are now known, including the state cell leaders of Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Alabama, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington State, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, and members from these and other states. Atomwaffen Division is a white supremacist domestic terror group which has been active in at least 32 states and idolize Adolph Hitler, long-time American Nazi figure James Mason, and Charles Manson, hold armed live fire training “Hate Camps” in national forests and deserts, and seek societal collapse through ‘lone wolf’ school and church shootings and other random terror attacks to spark a race war and collapse of government. Many members are also practicing Satanists. The group is known to be responsible for at least 5 murders since 2017 as well as numerous aborted terror plots.
“It is just a collection of ‘lone wolves’ with very nihilistic views. I don’t think they have more than 40-50 people,” one former AWD cell leader told a reporter. “Their end game is pure and unadultered destruction. It is a death cult.” The group targets young boys for recruitment over the internet and is comprised of mostly dissaffected middle-class white youth, many still in high school and rife with teenage angst, struggling with sexual and other identity issues, and hostility towards girls, parents, and authority. (…) The Iron March data combined with earlier data releases by the independent media group, Unicorn Riot, of far right extremists who used the platform Discord, as well as thousands of still unreleased Attomwaffen Division messages obtained during this investigation, have provided a treasure trove for reporters, law enforcement, anti-fascist activists, and online sleuths. This is the first of 5 articles profiling the newly discovered identities of Atomwaffen Division members.

via nate thayer: Secret Identities of U.S. Nazi Terror Group Revealed

An anonymous teenager writes about his brief infatuation with the alt-right, which made him critical of how big tech platforms influence the way we think. When I was 13, I was convinced that Jews controlled global financial networks and that black Americans committed homicide at a higher rate than whites. I believed that the wage gap was a fallacy fabricated by feminists, and I was an avid supporter of the men’s rights movement. I accepted all of the alt-right maxims I saw as a Reddit moderator, despite my Jewish upbringing in a liberal household with a tight-knit family that taught me compassion, empathy, and respect for others. Now, I’m 16, and I’ve been able to reflect on how I got sucked into that void—and how others do, too. My brief infatuation with the alt-right has helped me understand the ways big tech companies and their algorithms are contributing to the problem of radicalization—and why it’s so important to be skeptical of what you read online. My own transformation started when I switched into a new school in the middle of eighth grade. Like anyone pushed into unfamiliar territory, I was lonely and friendless and looking for validation and social connection. But unlike others, I found that validation on the alt-right corners of the internet. The alt-right and the tech platforms that enable it became the community I needed—until I finally opened my eyes and realized it was turning me into someone who I never wanted to be. A few weeks after I started going to my new school, I noticed that a bunch of the guys in my class were browsing a website called Reddit. (…) That’s how I discovered r/dankmemes. At first, I only understood about half of the posts that I saw. A lot of the content referenced political happenings that I had never heard of. There were hundreds of sarcastically written posts that echoed the same general themes and ideas, like “there are only 2 genders,” or “feminists hate men.” Since I had always been taught that feminism and social justice were positive, I first dismissed those memes as abhorrently wrong. But while a quick burst of radiation probably won’t give you cancer, prolonged exposure is far more dangerous. The same is true for the alt-right. I knew that the messages I was seeing were wrong, but the more I saw them, the more curious I became. I was unfamiliar with most of the popular discussion topics on Reddit. And when you want to know more about something, what do you do? You probably don’t think to go to the library and check out a book on that subject, and then fact check and cross reference what you find. If you just google what you want to know, you can get the information you want within seconds. So that’s what I did. I started googling things like “Illegal immigration,” “Sandy Hook actors,” and “Black crime rate.” And I found exactly what I was looking for. The articles and videos I first found all backed up what I was seeing on Reddit—posts that asserted a skewed version of actual reality, using carefully selected, out-of-context, and dubiously sourced statistics that propped up a hateful world view. On top of that, my online results were heavily influenced by something called an algorithm. I understand algorithms to be secretive bits of code that a website like YouTube will use to prioritize content that you are more likely to click on first. Because all of the content I was reading or watching was from far-right sources, all of the links that the algorithms dangled on my screen for me to click were from far-right perspectives.

via fastcompany: I became part of the alt-right at age 13, thanks to Reddit and Google