Attorney Christopher Wolf, a pioneer in Internet law, visited the Bay Area recently to talk about the new book he co-authored with Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
“Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet” was released June 4. The book discusses how racists and anti-Semites are using the Internet to disseminate their hateful information, and weighs the fight against this phenomenon vs. free speech.
Wolf spoke June 7 at Books Inc. in Berkeley. Foxman did not attend the talk, but JNS.org sat down with him for an interview, some of which is excerpted here.
JNS.org: Why did you decide to write about this topic now?
Foxman: “In the last 10 years we’ve seen a communication revolution in terms of the Internet changing the way we talk to each other. It had magnificent impact, but it also provided a super highway for communicating hate. That’s why we decided to do a book to analyze this and to alert people out there that, yes, it’s a wonderful addition to the way we communicate, but be aware that it’s also a very serious, threatening vehicle for bigots, racists and anti-Semites.”
JNS: In the book you discuss the fact that websites run by extremists are often ranked among the leading search results for a topic on Google, such as Jewwatch.com for the search result “Jew.” Has ADL ever tried to take up this issue?
Foxman: “What we found is that bigots operate 24-7. They’re out there all the time sending their messages of hate or defamation, and due to this [search engine] algorithm process, when you press the [search] button on ‘Jew,’ first you’re going to get anti-Jew [content] because the ‘Jew’ word is being bombarded by bigots rather than being embraced by friends and loving people.
“You have the same thing with Holocaust denial. There are more people out there propagating hate and denial, than understanding, learning and being sympathetic to the lessons of the Holocaust.
“[Google and Yahoo told us] ‘Why don’t you tell your community to bombard Google with good stuff?’ and in fact about two years we did that. The Jewish community sent out word to ‘go out there [and] bombard with ‘I love Jews’ and nice stuff about Jews.’ It worked, but it’s crazy.
“So far what happens is that when there are egregious abuses, I would say seven out of 10 times, the major companies that run these websites do respond and do remove ‘the content.’ But there is another problem: That stuff never dies on the Internet. You can take it off but it finds its way back, and it always exists somewhere in the stratosphere.”
JNS: What can regular Internet users do to mitigate the prevalence of anti-Jewish material?
Foxman: “They should be alert to it, complain to us [at ADL], to the providers, share with the legislators. First of all it’s awareness. No. 2 is to use the [online] vehicle for good speech. We can also ask the providers to put disclaimers on some of the stuff out there.
“A couple of months ago a [Facebook page] appeared about the third intifada. The providers said, ‘This is like a conversation; it’s freedom of speech,’ and we said to them, ‘Intifada is not a conversation piece. It’s a call for violence, and therefore you should not permit it.’ We complained to Facebook, Facebook analyzed it and came back to us saying, ‘You’re right,’ and they removed it.”
JNS: What are some unusual examples of online hate, or examples that people might easily recognize?
Foxman: “There are some websites, one called martinlutherking.org that masquerades [as a harmless website]. Innocently, you may want to find out what Martin Luther King said, what he was about, and you log on and all of a sudden you realize, or you may not realize, that it’s a white supremacist website.
“What many of the hate organizations did early on was to purchase and protect website domains. Many people in the beginning of the Internet weren’t aware of the value of this. If you buy a domain for the Holocaust Institute, it could become anything, but it becomes Holocaust denial. You have to be aware. Every great invention in our history had two sides to it. There was also a dark side, and we need to understand it. That’s basically what [my new] book says.”
“Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet” by Abraham Foxman and Christopher Wolf (256 pages, Palgrave Macmillan, $27)