EXTREMISMHow to Avoid Extremism on Social Media
The internet has been a haven for extremists since long before most people even knew it existed. Today, extremists share their likes and tweet their thoughts like everyone else. But they have also spun off into an ever-widening array of social media sites with greater appetites for hateful words and violent images.
You would not want to see what Alexandra Evans has seen.
She’s a policy researcher at RAND. Her recent work has focused on the growing threat of online extremism—work that has required long days immersed in violence, racism, misogyny, and hate. It led her and fellow extremism researcher Heather Williams to oversee the creation of a scorecard to help social media users—or parents, or advertisers, or the social media companies themselves—avoid the kind of content they’ve seen.
That’s not as easy as it might sound. Extremist groups have been trolling the internet for decades, and they have learned to temper their words and disguise their intentions. Nazis and hard-right militia members don’t always shout their fury at the digital masses. Sometimes, they whisper.
“There’s this idea that there’s a dark part of the internet, and if you just stay away from websites with a Nazi flag at the top, you can avoid this material,” Evans said. “What we found is that this dark internet, this racist internet, doesn’t exist. You can find this material on platforms that any average internet user might visit.”
In her previous life, before she pulled herself out, Acacia Dietz was a lead propagandist for the National Socialist Movement, marketing one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in America. She didn’t do it with swastikas and White power salutes. She did it with articles about illegal immigration or social unrest, dropping breadcrumbs here and there to lead people deeper into the rabbit hole.
“Say we had a podcast about Hitler,” she says now. “We would market it as a show about World War II history. It literally has almost nothing to do with that, but nobody knows until they go and listen to it. And if you can get people to listen, one of two things will happen. Either they’ll just go in the opposite direction—or it will pique their interest.”
The internet has been a haven for extremists since long before most people even knew it existed. The Anti-Defamation League issued a bulletin on “Computerized Networks of Hate” in 1985—the year Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turned one. Today, extremists share their likes and tweet their thoughts like everyone else. But they have also spun off into an ever-widening array of social media sites with greater appetites for hateful words and violent images.
