Session 12: What Shadows Lurk in the Hearts of Men… Or Computers?

Session 12: What Shadows Lurk in the Hearts of Men…or Computers?
Chair: Rachel Waterstradt

Hate Communities in Cyber Space
Manjeet Chaturvedi
India

The expansion and diversification of internet services have brought about online discussion groups to connect with each other and form social networks to exchange communication and other types of relationships. We have studied some samples of activity of such groups
in the cyber space who were formed or have developed to express hate. We found out that the online groups’ discussions actively centred on blame game, abuses and at times indulged into extreme forms of holding out threats. In many cases, the group evolved into a hate community (a communal being) for expressing hatred against individuals, groups, communities and even nations. They have been found out to be spreading hatred against religions, ideologies, cultures and peoples not merely as ‘gossip’ but quoted texts and modern media sources to substantiate their narratives as ‘facts’. But everything happened in cyber space.
The study observed ‘threads’ of the members of hate communities and followed the designs and patterns of their ‘narratives’ that weaved the hatred. Samples of threads and entailing messages were chosen on the
basis of their commonality, novelty of hate idea or expression and frequency of exchanges between the haters and those being hated. The people, who harboured hate, released their emotion through internet services against the hated who were outta there if not in the group and got applauds. The messages gained momentum and became collective
consciousness where finally the alternate arguments were weeded away as profane. In cyber world the fate was predictable. The people not known to be practising crime fell in line to distribute the seeds of hatred in a cyber reality where they thrived as hate community, free from counter-insurgencies. Some cases for restricting free flow of online evilness have been initiated in different courts of law of many nations including a recent one in India.

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Remediation, Analogue Corruption, and the Signification Of Evil in Digital Games
Ewan Kirkland
Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe Campus, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available