Social media: Where voices of hate find a place to preach

On Twitter, David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, sometimes tweets more than 30 times a day to nearly 50,000 followers, recently calling for the “chasing down” of specific black Americans and claiming the LGBTQ community is in need of “intensive psychiatric treatment.” On Facebook, James Allsup, a right-wing advocate, posted a photo comparing migrant children at the border to Jewish people behind a fence during the Holocaust with the caption, “They present it like it’s a bad thing #BuildTheWall.” On Gab, a censorship-free alternative to Twitter, former 2018 candidate for US Senate Patrick Little, claims ovens are a means of preserving the Aryan race. And Billy Roper, a well-known voice of neo-Nazism, posts “Let God Burn Them” as an acronym for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies offer billions of people unparalleled access to the world. Users are able to tweet at the president of the United States, foster support for such social movements as Black Lives Matter or inspire thousands to march with a simple hashtag. "Social media companies have succeeded in sort of negotiating a place for themselves in the world where they are not the publishers,” said Benjamin Lee, senior research associate for the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats, who researches digital media and the far-right. “And somehow we all sort of sat down and accepted it up until the point we didn’t, and now they’re running to catch up.” “There is this kind of lingering question, which is, what obligation are they under to provide services to people?” Lee said. “Freedom of speech is freedom to express yourself, but it’s not freedom to force other people to publish what it is you have to say.”