To fight hate speech, we must understand the haters

Neo-Nazis gathered at Elwood Beach this week. OSCAR KASPI-CRUTCHETT argues we will not end their conspiracy theories by denying the grievances of the alienated, but by restoring their faith in democracy.

Many Australians were shocked this week to see an image of neo-Nazis performing the Hitler salute at a popular Melbourne landmark, the trig station at Elwood Beach, close to Melbourne's Jewish population centre.

The photo showed 20 people — apparently 19 men and a child — displaying the flag of the European Australia Movement, a far-Right group which promotes white supremacy and spreads canards about a "takeover" of European civilisation.

The dramatic image displays a small fringe gang but the problem they illustrate is much broader: hate speech and conspiracy theories which undermine our social cohesion and threaten minorities.

There has been a dramatic change in awareness of conspiracy theories over the past few years, which usually plays out online. While research found no evidence of more people believing conspiracy theories, there is no question that the capacity to spread hate and falsehood has increased.

In Australia, a study by the eSafety Commissioner in 2019 found 14% of the adult population has been the target of hate speech online.

Before 2016, few would have considered the proliferation of fake news online to be an existential threat to democratic civilisation. In the early 2010s, social media platforms still had a utopian veneer, heralded as an exciting revolution that would allow truth to speak unmediated by the structures of traditional journalism.

A devil-may-care attitude to misinformation prevailed in big tech. Advocates warning against hate speech received mixed results and varying public attention. Even in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly dismissed allegations that Facebook influenced  the outcome as a “crazy idea”.

As Donald Trump rode an avalanche of half-truths and hyperbole to the White House, he transformed global perceptions of the digital revolution. Aghast at Trump’s win, which sparked populist success around the democratic world, liberal observers began searching for explanations. In time, misinformation on social media found its way into the centre of the narrative.

In the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, it became transparent that millions of bots, cyborg accounts, hacked or stolen usernames had played a role in the outcome by amplifying fabricated information in Trump’s favour.

This was compounded by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which confirmed that far-Right and populist movements were employing these techniques on an industrial scale. In the following years, widely publicised studies confirmed that, on Twitter especially, fake news spread significantly faster and further than credible information.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the already souring sentiment towards social media hardened into outrage, as various platforms served to amplify health misinformation, re-animate the moribund anti-vaccine movement, and facilitate the organisation of the US Capitol insurrection, anti-lockdown demonstrations in Australia and Canada’s explosive ‘Freedom Convoy’.

In October 2021, when data engineer Francis Haugen published the Facebook files, the backlash was so calamitous that it forced the company to rebrand as Meta. By now, misinformation had become public enemy number one for the liberal Western mainstream.

Today, most politicians, big-tech executives, progressive activists, social media investors and state regulators openly recognise the threat posed by misinformation and speak in solemn terms about the imperative to combat it. An armada of conventions and summits have been held at the world’s leading universities, attended by leading public figures, focused on how to address the problem.

The new landscape has been given a name: a post-truth world, which suggests that if society can clear out the “bad actors”, the foreign bots, and the “super-spreaders”, public discourse and private exchange can salvage a sense of common truth and shared reality.

Increasingly, groups such as the Jewish community, the queer community and ethnic minorities at risk of hate speech feel their safety hinges on this task of flagging and debunking every lie and distortion.

Yet the spread of conspiracy and extremism appears undeterred, and vulnerable communities none the safer.

Few have more invested in the fight against misinformation than the Jewish community, with its ancestral understanding of how quickly malicious tales can metastasise into bloody violence. Jewish intellectuals, alongside sociologists and anti-fascists of all backgrounds, have played a notable role in the study of conspiracy and hate speech.

American Jewish historian Richard Hofstadter has argued that deep in the collective conscious of any political community is a mode of expression called the “Paranoid Style”. Defined by conspiratorial fantasy, heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and aggression, the Paranoid Style is a recurrent phenomenon, motivated by frustration, anxiety and precarity, appearing during periods of instability and especially heightened apocalyptic panic.

Hofstadter maintained that paranoid movements are united in believing that a vast, evil international cabal of some kind is the motivating force all political events. In the US, it took the form of the Anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic movements, McCarthyism, and the Illuminati Panic. In Australia, the Paranoid Style emerged in the economic downturn of the late 19^th century, when some frustrated workers took to blaming the machinations of “Jewish bankers” for the crisis. The Paranoid Style, he concluded, can only be avoided by adjusting its requisite social conditions.

Another influential American Jewish thinker, Daniel Goldhagen, asserts that with regards to antisemitism in particular, the degree of bigotry does not change, only its “cognitive salience, emotional intensity and expression”. There is a generally constant level of conspiratorial antisemitism in Christian civilisation, he argues, which becomes more or less manifest according to political and social conditions.

In the current context, waves of antisemitism occur not because people are being exposed to these ideas for the first time but because a latent underlying belief is activated by social stress. During an economic crisis, this is why xenophobic antisemitism increases regardless of the actual financial standing of the targeted community.

American sociologist Arnie Hochschild interviewed hundreds of Tea Party (conservative Republican) supporters in the American south and found that emotional injury, not incorrect beliefs, is the essential engine of the radicalism that has mutated there. Her findings would suggest that much of the anti-misinformation rhetoric we see today might be making things worse - salting the very wounds and resentments which made conservatives so willing to believe lies about their opponents, and minorities, in the first place.

These communities experience more trauma-related deaths, divorces, industrial pollution and have a lower life expectancy than liberal areas. Their lot has not improved at a time when non-whites and women are perceived to have made advances.

But Hochschild argues that it is how they see themselves perceived as being more influential than the material quality of their actual lives. Extremist ideology transforms this experience of real and imagined abandonment into an emotional injury of cultural humiliation.

The late shock-jock Rush Limbaugh and other far-Right personalities, Hochschild observes, are seen as defending these people, and their ancestors, from the insults of the liberal media and from unceasing orders about what they should feel: happy for the gay couple, sad for the refugees, and eagerly willing to pay their taxes. It is the emotional defence and permission to feel provided by extreme-Right ideology that matters here, not a particular promise or set of false but persuasive assertions.

The abnormality of these conspiratorial responses reflects the abnormality of our point in history. After decades of falling or stagnant living standards, democratic backsliding and deteriorating working conditions, the liberal establishment around the world must accept that it has lost any claim to the unconditional faith of working communities.

Unless their sense of going backwards is arrested and replaced by stability and certainty, the appeal of conspiratorial nihilism will continue to spread. Trickery and deception play an important role, but people have legitimate reasons to reject the legacy of globalisation driven by Western governments and rationalised by their liberal elites. Large sections of society, here and abroad, have been abandoned, and even if the story of this abandonment is retold incorrectly, in its spirit there is a truth that cannot be denied.

A top-down approach will not prevent people from believing dangerous and incorrect narrative. The habits of conspiracists are the clearest proof of this. These communities are impervious to debunking or fact-checking, the target of their grievance changes on a whim, and it is common for whole meta-narratives to be revised or overturned.

Thus, it is almost impossible to persuade people using rational argument. One day, the omnipotent evil is communist public-school teachers, the next it is gender ideology, and after that, critical race theory, or globalist paedophiles. The lie of the day does not matter, for in each lie the same story is encased and it is one with a dangerously authentic resonance.

Misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy will not be tamed by governments trying to break their underlying grievance, but by demonstrating that the democratic system can still grant them a decent living and include working people in the administration of public affairs.

For the Jewish community, and all those alarmed by the conspiratorial far-Right, this must occupy the centre of the agenda. The fight against unrestricted hate speech on social media cannot be abandoned, but it cannot be allowed to obscure a broader understanding of the social forces that are driving it.

The populist revolt is derived from the misinterpreted but indisputably real experiences of its followers, which have often been replicated over generations, more desperate and venomous with each iteration. There is no alternative but to changing these experiences and re-admitting these communities into the family of democracy by earning back their faith through action, not imposing “our” facts from above.

Photo: Neo-Nazis at Elwood Beach (Facebook)