Recruiting media helped the Internet radicalize young hate-group members

Evidence

A development that obviously occurred after Allport’s (1954/1979) time is the recent scrutiny of hate speech on the internet (e.g., Glaser & Dixit, 2002; Leets, 2001), or what has come to be called “cyberhate” (Levin, 2002). White racist internet chat rooms and websites (e.g., www.Stormfront.org) include music, graphics, and videogames, which may enhance the extent to which hate groups can appear to be mainstream and thereby recruit young members. Benjamin Smith, who committed the hate-motivated drive-by murders in July of 1999, told documentary filmmaker Beverly Peterson months before his spree, “It wasn’t really ‘til I got on the Internet, read some literature of these groups that … it really all came together” (www.adl.org/internet/ extremism_rw/inspiring.asp). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1300

Categorization

• XREF: Plausibly connects to vault claims on how propaganda and recruitment channel prejudice; echoes media-effects themes in the Frankfurt School thread about how cultural form recruits adherents. — connects to: Automated recommendation feeds can expose teenagers to thousands of radicalizing videos — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 381; Ordinary, otherwise unremarkable people can become radicalized through online research — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 3; Recruiters convert expressed emotional pain into a gateway into radical groups — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 288