If you were just paying attention to press releases<\/a>, this week it\u2019d be easy to believe that tech companies are winning the war on hate. Responding to the violence in Charlottesville, Mark Zuckerberg\u00a0solemnly reflected<\/a>\u00a0that there is \u201cno place for hate in our community.\u201d Snapchat announced that hate speech, \u201cwill never be tolerated\u201d on its platform. YouTube reassured us that helpful tools are on the way. Tech companies fled Trump\u2019s dual business councils<\/a> to protest his claim that some white supremacists are \u201cvery fine people.\u201d<\/p>\n In other headlines, a coalition of web providers made a controversial and unprecedented choice to yank their services<\/a> out from under the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist news site. Days later, Cloudflare abandoned<\/a>\u00a0the site to the whims of whoever feels like DDoSing it. Those decisions, part of the \u201cno platforming\u201d philosophy which would deny hatespeech purveyors a place to assemble and share their views, will likely have many reverberations in the days to come. For now, some things remain very much the same.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, while this week\u2019s burst of industry energy might suggest otherwise, hate groups are alive and well, making little if any effort to conceal their presence on all of the major social networks. Whether it\u2019s 4chan or Facebook, if you go looking for hate online, you\u2019ll find it. Dredging up racist, anti-semitic content often in seeming violation of a company\u2019s stated policy takes seconds \u2014 trust me, I went looking.<\/p>\n On something like Facebook, hate festers just under the paper thin layer between a user\u2019s social sphere and the platform at large. On a network like Twitter, it\u2019s right on the surface, bobbing unpleasantly along down the stream with dog photos and journalist chatter. For anyone surprised about the terrible events that unfolded in Charlottesville: You can find hate anywhere you look and you don\u2019t have to look very hard.<\/p>\n I took a grim tour around some of the major social sites into which we sink our hours to see what just a little bit of casual searching could find yet algorithms often can\u2019t (or won\u2019t). Again, this content is graphic and disturbing, but pretending it isn\u2019t there won\u2019t make it go away.<\/p>\n Facebook<\/strong><\/p>\n On Facebook, white supremacist memes thrive, even in wide open, public communities, and users sometimes skirt the detection by using a kind of unsearchable, far-right lexicon. Facebook might pick up on the anti-semitic slur \u201ckike,\u201d but by swapping that for \u201ckayak\u201d the content flies under the radar. I was surprised to see that surrounding words in multiple parentheses, also called an \u201cecho\u201d remains common practice to denote something or someone as Jewish. These symbols were established as part of the shallowly submerged white supremacy lexicon more than a year ago.<\/p>\n References to 1488<\/a> also remain common, where 14 is a nod to the \u201c14 words\u201d or \u201cWe must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,\u201d a popular mantra with white supremacists and white nationalists. The double 88 is usually a nod to the 8th letter of the alphabet, or \u201cheil Hitler.\u201d<\/p>\n Small waves of white supremacist memes crest and fall, and much like Facebook\u2019s fake news problem, each wave has another set right behind it and there are many oceans. When I spent some time looking through these communities this week, a particularly popular meme remixed the incredible violence of a counter-protester rolling off of a now infamous ash-gray Dodge Charger with a broad array of anti-black racist memes, some of them drawing from popular mainstream memes, like \u201cthe floor is\u201d joke<\/a>. Another pictured George Washington driving the Charger.<\/p>\n One public community I found easily hosted a livestream of Saturday\u2019s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the full video shot from the perspective of one of the torch bearing attendees. It felt surprising that so much of this content was just sitting right out in the open on a social network that connects faces to names.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/4162c_parenth.jpg?resize=640%2C194&ssl=1\")
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