2 min read
ByMatthias Becker, Matthias Becker
The factors that influence people like the shooters in the Pittsburgh and Germany synagogue shootings are under-researched, Matthias Becker says
October 28, 2019 16:52When Robert Bowers shot and killed 11 Jewish congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27 last year, the media quickly drew attention to his online rants against Jews and Muslims on a platform called Gab, where he accused Jews of bringing “evil Muslims” into the US.
A fortnight ago in Halle, Germany, the gunman who tried to kill Jewish worshippers on Yom Kippur and shot two people dead had shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory on the Amazon-owned platform Twitch. He insinuated that Jews aim to destroy German culture through mass immigration.
From an academic perspective, these are deeply troubling, but not astonishing observations. For several years antisemitic, racist, and misogynistic attitudes have spread not only on right-wing supremacist platforms, but also on mainstream social media platforms — including Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. It should not come as a surprise that there are correlations between hate speech and hate crime.
As an extreme example, the Nazis’ crimes would not have been possible without antisemitic attitudes being publicised and discussed in German society. This also holds true for the internet.
Pittsburgh and Halle are not the only examples in which individuals express antisemitic ideas before they commit related crimes. The perpetrators of the horrific attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, or the synagogue in Poway, close to San Diego, and recently on the Walmart in El Paso, were all connected to the right-wing extremist platform 8chan. It is highly probable that the assailants were substantially radicalised after intensive contact with antisemitic material, as well as other hateful and exclusionary outlooks, in their virtual environment.
While there are usually multiple reasons why hate speech might turn into hate crime — it often depends on predispositions and the needs of the individual — it is striking that all the assailants had the same ideology and occupied the same online space.
For far too long, the role of the internet and discursive trends online in hate crime have been ignored or downplayed. There are also severe shortcomings in the way police enforcement agencies view the role of the internet.
Deep questions about the nature and the consequence of the digitalisation of society are only now starting to emerge. Studies of online phenomena have also not been able to cover the full dimension of hate speech: often quantitative studies focus on slurs that represent only the tip of the iceberg of hate speech.
The lack of adequate research into online radicalisation is worrying; we still do not know the full impact of the internet when assessing trends in the nature and frequency of hate speech. There is no reliable study that examines the variety of ways antisemitism (or any other hate ideology) reveals itself on the internet.
Nor are there studies into how prevalent it is — not in the US, nor in any European country — despite the centrality of the internet in our lives and the immense public interest in tackling the problem.
We therefore need to establish a new field of internet study that combines technological solutions with fields of expertise, such as studies on the various hate ideologies as well as applied linguistics.
Only through a more comprehensive examination can we start to see the full picture of how online hate speech leads to real world hate crime. There is clearly an urgent need for more sophisticated tools of analysis to help design counter-strategies for police and law enforcement agencies. This work is vital to help prevent more mass shootings.
Matthias Becker is research fellow at the Haifa Centre for German and European Studies. This piece is a shortened version of a longer essay that is available to read at fathomjournal.org
