On Wednesday morning, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center delivered a presentation to the students of New York’s Independence High School about the spread of hatred on the Internet. This was not your typical PowerPoint deck: Cooper’s tour through the darker recesses of the Web included YouTube videos depicting burning Korans; an image gallery belong to a Greek skinhead group on photo-sharing site Photobucket; and a controversial poem posted to IslamOnline.net entitled “How to Behead.”
In Simon Wiesenthal’s new report on this topic, “Facebook, YouTube +: How Social Media Outlets Impact Digital Terrorism and Hate,” the group discovered around 10,000 instances of what it considers hateful or potentially dangerous postings on the Web, an increase of 25% from last year. Cooper says this number of instances is, in a sense, “not even that important anymore” – since the conversational nature of the Web makes it hard to count the number of incendiary comment threads, Twitter posts and re-posts, and copycat videos.
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