Helping Kids Deal with Online Hate
Anne Taylor
Anne Taylor is founder and former co-director of Media Awareness Network.
Issue Contents
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Young people are often naïve and easily brainwashed by racist propaganda because they don't have the experience or facts at hand to refute the lies and myths being fed to them.
Lonely, marginalized youth seeking a sense of identity and belonging are both the most attractive targets for racists and their most useful tools once recruited.
B’Nai Brith Canada (1995)
Until recently, addressing hate propaganda and its potential effects on young people has not been high on the agenda of Canadian educators. School authorities are usually aware when hate literature is distributed in or near school property and hate propaganda has not been a huge problem for Canadian schools.
But things are changing. Hatemongers can now reach millions quickly, cheaply and in a multitude of ways through the Internet. They can bring unsuspecting kids to their Web sites by tagging the sites with unrelated key words which are picked up by search engines. They can recruit new blood by infiltrating sites and chat rooms that are popular with kids. They can use the Net’s interactivity to gather personal information and foster relationships. Through these efforts they attempt to create the illusion, in certain online communities, that hate is legitimate and widespread.
In the early days of the Internet, hatemongers tried to spread their messages through interactive newsgroups. The free speech environment of these forums, however, ensured that false claims were challenged by healthy and vigorous debate. As a result, hatemongers soon retreated into less interactive areas of cyberspace, such as Web sites, allowing them to avoid interacting with those who disagree with their views. Web sites also help groups identify potential recruits who can be brought into the hate community through private chat rooms and e-mail, well away from the public eye.
With fewer opportunities for Internet users to openly confront hatemongers and debate their messages, it has become increasingly important to educate young people to recognize online hate in its many forms and to understand the strategies used to target them.
Media Awareness Network’s survey of 5,200 Canadian students in 2005 showed that 12% of students, in Grades 4 to 11, had encountered a hateful Web site and 10% of Grade 10 and 11 boys had purposely sought out hateful sites (Media Awareness Network, 2005).
The Spectrum of Hate
Hate propaganda is the far end of a whole spectrum of harmful online content that can engage young people and, with repeated exposure, could desensitize them to virulent images and messages on the Web. The Internet, for all its advantages, has an unkind side that offers an array of spiteful content directed not only at minorities, but at any person or group unlucky enough to be a target. Much of this content is simply mean-spirited, usually bolstered by satire and humour – a natural off-shoot of the put-down trend in popular culture.
Sites like <fugly.com> or <newgrounds.com> engage in cruel and even racist satire in a edgy, in-your-face manner. Such sites, and their so-called humour, are a challenge for young people, who are just figuring out their own sense of identity and sexuality. This is particularly true for those who find themselves on the margins of teen society, whose personal sense of inferiority can make them particularly receptive to disparaging or degrading messages about “others”.
“Othering,” as it is known, is a foundation of hate. It is also a way of handling insecurities and discomfort with differences, and maintaining the superiority of one’s own group. As educators are well aware, this climate of unkindness may also reverberate in young people’s own online communication, where a sense of anonymity and disconnectedness tends to minimize apathy and up the ante for aggressive, insulting communication (Willard, 2000, p. 3).
Targeting Young people
Exposure to cruel and nasty humour on the sites they favour could make young people more susceptible to hard core hate messages from organized hate groups such as SixthSunRising, the Ku Klux Klan or Stormfront. Hateful content propagated by these groups is not always easy to recognize. It can imbedded in all kinds of places – chat rooms, blogs, e-mail and gaming and music sites. The Web site www.martinlutherking.org is the kind of site students might bring up in a search for a Black History Month project, for example. Despite its respectable domain name, the site is, in fact, a potent brew of racism, anti-Semitism and Communist conspiracy theories – all in the guise of historical data.
A number of white supremacist groups host music sites, like Resistance Records (“pro-white CDs”, “Love Your Race”) to attract young people surfing the Net. Others encode their blogs or chat rooms with key words such as “hockey,” “Christmas,” “games” and “basketball,” that will guarantee a supply of young surfers. Clearly, filters can’t protect young people from this insidious activity.
Developing Personal Filters
What can help to protect kids is knowledge and a sharp eye – filters in their own heads, so to speak – so that they can recognize online hate and see it for what it is, whenever and wherever they encounter it.
As their use of the Internet grows, the risk of students accidentally encountering hate material increases. So it’s more important than ever for young people to understand that the Internet has no gatekeepers and that anyone and everyone can post their views. The ability to discriminate between biased prejudicial material and fair and accurate information has become a basic life skill. And young people are actively interested in acquiring this skill. When students in the Media Awareness Network’s survey were asked what Internet-related subjects they would like to learn about in school, the top choice (at 68%) of respondents was “How to tell if information you find on the Net is true or not” (Media Awareness Network, 2005).
Curriculum Connections
Deconstructing hate messages and “reading between the lines” is a fascinating critical thinking exercise, and it’s one that fits squarely into Language Arts and Social Studies curricula. It can involve: an analysis of bias, language, logical fallacies, symbols and the difference between fact and opinion; a scrutiny of propaganda techniques (such as the use of religious sanction and scientific authority, national pride or fear-mongering); and an examination of our own history and the roles that propaganda, discrimination and the scapegoating of minority groups have played. Critical thinking approaches can also include teaching kids practical skills for authenticating online information, through author searches, URL analysis and Web link searches that reveal which sites link to a certain site.
If students are able to recognize and deconstruct the messages of hate that come their way, much of the messages’ power is reduced. Critical thinking skills are key to protecting kids from misinformation; and addressing online hate head-on is an essential part of any anti-racism program.
Media Awareness Network offers teaching resources on bias, propaganda, stereotyping and online hate (www.media-awareness.ca).
For secondary lesson plans on these topics, check out “Online Hate” in MNet’s Lesson Library, For Teachers section.
For background essays, go to Media Issues, Online Hate.
Follow the links from Games for Kids on the main page to access Allies and Aliens, an interactive module for students in Grades 7 & 8. For
MNet’s professional development workshop and self-directed PD tutorial, Deconstructing Online Hate, contact licensing@media-awareness.ca.
References
B'nai Brith Canada . (1995). Is Your Child a Target? Guidelines for parents and teachers on the dangers of hate group recruitment in Canada . Retrieved March 5, 2006 from http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/articles/online_hate/hate_child_target.cfm.
Media Awareness Network. (2005). Young Canadians in a Wired World – Phase II, Student Survey. Available at http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/research/YCWW/phaseII/students.cfm
Willard, N. (2000). What is Right and What is Wrong? How can we help young people use information and communication technologies in an ethical manner? presented at National Conference on Cyberethics, University of Oregon , Eugene , Oregon , October 2000. Available at http://www.responsiblenetizen.org/onlinedocs/documents/whatisright.doc
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