THE UNGOVERNABILITY OF DIGITAL HATE CULTURE.

• Author: Ganesh, Bharath

Introduction: The Dark Side of "Democratic" Digital Media

Social media has played an increasingly important role in domestic and international politics. Until recently, commentators and researchers on social media lauded its capacity to equalize the political playing field, giving voice to marginal groups and new actors. Iran's Green Revolution in 2009 and the Arab Spring in 2011 were two early events, among many others, in which social media platforms--particularly Twitter--were used to circumvent state surveillance, connect and coordinate protests, and share information. (1) While social media has been used by activists trying to counter authoritarian regimes and organize peaceful protests, its low barriers to entry have allowed extreme groups to exploit its benefits.

The printing press and the newspaper had a democratizing effect similar to social media's that prompted cynical reflections from Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. His qualm was that the press desituated knowledge from experience by making it readily available even to those that might not have any experience in the topic they were reading about. Everybody can become a commentator: "The new power of the press to disseminate information to everyone in a nation led its readers to transcend their local, personal involvement and overcome their reticence about what didn't directly concern them." (2) This has been taken to a new limit with the Internet, where "anyone, anywhere, anytime, can have an opinion on anything. All are only too eager to respond to the equally deracinated opinions of other anonymous amateurs who post their views from nowhere." (3) The democratizing force of social media thus also presents a risk: a clever group of these "anonymous amateurs" have the power to spread extreme views, bigotry, and propaganda through their commentary on anything, anywhere, any time.

The explosion of digital hate culture represents the dark side of the democratizing power of social media. Digital hate culture thrives on this democratizing force of social media. Its proponents write political blogs with the hope of attracting patronage from anonymous funders and others fashion themselves into YouTube pundits that educate audiences with misleading narratives based on secondary sources, repeating extreme worldviews and building on conspiracy theory and falsehood. (4) In a new media culture in which anonymous entrepreneurs can reach massive audiences with little quality control, the possibilities for those vying to become digital celebrities to spread hateful, even violent, judgements with little evidence, experience, or knowledge are nearly endless. (5) Digital hate culture grew out of the swarm tactics of troll subcultures, but has been co-opted for a political purpose, with automated accounts or "bots"--some of whom were associated with recent Russian information operations--adding to existing groups of users seeking to hijack information flows on social media platforms. (6) As Angela Nagle writes, those participating in digital hate culture are zealots in a "war of position" seeking to change cultural norms and shape public debate. (7) I use the term "digital hate culture" rather than "alt-right," "neo-Nazi," "white nationalist," "white supremacist," "fascist," or "racialist"--all subgroups that have a home in digital hate culture--to refer to the complex swarm of users that form contingent alliances to contest contemporary political culture and inject their ideology into new spaces. Digital hate culture is united by "a shared politics of negation: against liberalism, egalitarianism, 'political correctness', and the like," more so than any consistent ideology. (8)

This approach, centered on the naming of digital hate culture as an Anglophone phenomenon that is ungovernable, takes some distance from recent work by Alice Marwick, Rebecca Lewis, Whitney Phillips, and Robyn Caplan. Where their work provides theories of networked harassment and draws useful relationships between troll culture, gaming, and misogyny in the contemporary social media landscape, the focus here is on particular practices of hate as a challenge for governance and security rather than for media. (9) For example, Phillips articulates the unintended ways in which journalists might amplify the voices of alt-right activists by reporting on their use of social media to affect public opinion. (10) This opens up an important dilemma that journalists must negotiate, weighing the social benefits and potential harms of publishing a story which covers extremist right-wing views. (11) The contributions in this piece provide a different perspective on the implications of such hatred by focusing on governance and security. Further, while Marwick and Lewis focus on practices of the US alt-right and detail many of the coalitions that are covered below, the present focus is explicitly transatlantic and attempts to take a broader view of the challenges that digitally mediated hatred and right-wing extremism raises for American and European governments. (12)

In introducing the concept of digital hate culture in the context of politics and international relations, readers should be cautioned against a reading of digital hate culture as a global phenomenon, though similar cultural processes are at play throughout the world. The digital hate culture referred to here is linguistically, spatially, and culturally bound to Anglophone social media activity in North America and Europe, and it has strong resonances with hate culture and right-wing extremism in other European languages (e.g. French, German, and Swedish). Many scholars have noted that hateful exchange on social media is localized in a multitude of ways and it is not the exclusive domain of the white identity politics that this essay focuses on. (13) Consequently, it is important that readers remember that my reference to digital hate culture is one that refers to a network of users that post predominantly in English and perform an identity rooted in discussions that Jessie Daniels refers to as "networked white rage." (14) While the phrase digital hate culture has a certain generality in it, this naming avoids the reduction of the internal contestation between tenuously related but heterogeneous coalitions that are referred to by the umbrella term "alt-right."

To effectively combat digital hate culture, we need to understand its formal characteristics. In doing so, I focus on the strategies and tactics used by exponents of digital hate culture rather than the hateful language that they express. This draws out the dangerous elements of its speech and its ungovernability. Digital hate culture goes beyond offense; it employs dangerous discursive and cultural practices on the Internet to radicalize the public sphere and build support for radical right populist parties. By explaining its characteristics, I explore the cultural politics of digital hate and the codes that it uses to flout hate speech laws and content regulation by private actors. In doing so, I argue that digital hate culture is ungovernable, but with the right knowledge and tools democratic processes can work towards managing its dangerous effects. In developing a critical perspective on digital hate culture, I hope to offer policy professionals and researchers new ways of thinking that can better disrupt and destabilize these ungovernable networks.

The Red Pill and White Genocide: Common Sense in Digital Hate Culture

It is important to understand the broad frames that bring digital hate culture together. Digital hate culture builds on a cultivation of common sense amongst its audiences that ultimately seeks to radicalize those who listen. What is unique about digital hate culture is that it is centered around a collective identity rather than the loose, ephemeral connections of coordinated action that scholars of digital cultures have identified. (15) The concept of the swarm is a useful starting point for trying to understand the structure of digital hate culture, and (as I will discuss in the following section) contributes to its ungovernability. Yet the swarm encountered here challenges existing concepts of digital swarms, particularly that offered by philosopher Byung-Chul Han: "For a crowd to emerge, a chance gathering of human beings is not enough. It takes a soul, a common spirit, to fuse people into a crowd. The digital swarm lacks the soul or spirit of the masses." (16)

Unlike the generic digital swarm to which Han refers, the swarm that composes digital hate culture is different in quality. Despite their tenuous coalitions and the fragmentation and fracturing that many observers of the "alt-right" have identified, digital hate culture does have a "common spirit" that is based on the tropes of the Red Pill and white genocide. (17) Just as with religion or political revolutionaries, there are a multitude of ways in which this common spirit is interpreted, expressed, and actualized. This common spirit is a particular characteristic of right-wing cybercultures that have made use of new media in order to expand the audiences with whom they engage. The processes that bind contemporary right-wing extremism online should be understood as forming a community around forms of intimacy, sense, and feeling that are maligned or considered unacceptable in mainstream society. (18)

Digital hate cultures emerged through the appropriation of cultural practices from a range of groups: the so-called "manosphere," an antifeminist coalition of men's rights activists, bloggers, pickup artists and alleged experts in sexual strategy, and the Red Pill community; gamer and nerd subcultures; and a recently aligned coalition of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites Islamophobes, libertarians, Christians, atheists, conservative nationalists and so-called "race-realists" who profess a eugenic view of interracial competition. This collection of different viewpoints has led to two unifying frames by...