Online Hate: The seedy underbelly of the internet

As a refugee to Canada from the Congo and a person of colour, Arielle Kayabaga had already learned from a young age what it was like to experience prejudice and oppression, and civil war.

But when she entered politics in 2018 as the first Black woman elected to city council at age 27, she faced a different type of prejudice and oppression — the type that lives online and surfaces in dark and hateful comments on various social media platforms.

One might think that Kayabaga has developed a thick skin and become a hardened politician over the years, but it’s just not so.

“I still feel the same way I felt the first time I ever received the first hateful comment, she reflected. “I remind myself that I’m only feeling this way because I’m a human being and I’m happy I am a human being in politics.”

Being in politics led Kayabaga from municipal council to Parliament Hill, elected in 2021 as the MP for London West under the Liberal banner.

It’s in this role that the online hate she faced ramped up to a much greater degree than previously experienced.

“I can’t tell you how many times a post has 30 comments and out of the 30 comments there are only one or two real comments where they’re either constructive, or feedback, or good comments. Otherwise it’s a lot of trolls,” explained Kayabaga.

The comments are ugly, with her name added to lists of those in public office or high-profile positions who are turned into targets for those who peddle in online hate.

“Sometimes it’s a list of evil c**t, witch c**t, traitor c**t… whether it’s targeted toward my physical looks, my thoughts and ideas, with no debate, just name-calling.”

In fact, Kayabaga can hardly make a move, whether in person or online, without online trolls attempting to dehumanized her.

“You post something, you come back to it like two hours later and whenever I see that it has 75 comments I know that that’s not a good sign.”

She laughed it off, but she understands it’s the anonymity of the trolls that give them the courage to spew such vitriol.

“These are people who are behind a screen. They don’t have real names they don’t have a way to identify them when they make these comments online. Some of them follow me regularly. Like I think, they don’t follow my pages, but they track what I post regularly.”

Public appearances can be a whole other can of rotten worms for the municipal turned federal politician.

“Every single time I do an activity that’s very public, it goes crazy. You’ve got to let it die down for a few days, and then you get back to your regular life again.”

 

THE RABBIT HOLE OF ONLINE HATE

How did it get to this point, where people, especially those in public roles, are the targets for online attacks?

Those who perpetuate hate online attain their world view through one of two paths, or sometimes both, according to Dr. Barbara Perry, the director of the Centre on Hate Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University.

“I think there are those [people] that harbour those feelings and they go looking for like-minded others and they sort of mutually reinforce one another and continue to escalate and to reaffirm those positions,” explained Perry.

“And then we have those who are drawn in. So they might be liking a Facebook post that they see, or sharing a tweet that they see that maybe is a joke. And this is how, often, people are sort of hooked in initially, right? We see these funny memes that surface, innocuous, just having fun, just making a joke, and they ‘like’ the person who is sharing them, they become exposed to more and more, and in fact they become targeted for recruitment purposes as well,” said Perry.

And thus, the online purveyor of hate or hate speech is born. It’s a dangerous phenomenon on a number of levels, with the strong possibility that online hate escalates to offline, or in-person expressions of hatred, Perry Added.

“Some form of attack or assault on individuals, whether it’s really vitriolic verbal attacks, or in fact physical attacks. But I think it also invokes fear,” she said.

As it reaches this point, it has now grown beyond an exchange between like-minded individuals, but rather, it’s directed toward targets, she said.

“Whether it’s the Queer community, as we’re seeing so much of now, or faith-based communities. They become fearful and less willing to interact in the online space, become a little more reclusive, perhaps.”

Much of the hate, she explained, is wrapped up in conspiracy theories. “That also highlight the dangers of this ‘tyrannical state’ that people are talking about that’s responsible for mass immigration, that’s responsible for multiculturalism. It also, I think, enables and allows for actions against the state, but also distrust in the machinery of politics and cynicism, if not complete withdrawal from the political process.”

London, Ont. based technology analyst Carmi Levy calls online hate “the seedy underbelly of the internet.”

He said while most of us pay little attention to it, it’s likely in our feed or in the feeds of those we follow or interact with.

“One of the reasons why it doesn’t cause more outrage than it does is because it doesn’t present itself as overt, in your face racism, or homophobia, or anti-Semitism,” explained Levy. “It’s often couched in code words. It’s often dog whistles to a particular audience that unless you know what those dog whistles are, you’re not going to pick up on them.”

Levy agrees that recruitment to a particular world view or set of values is often the goal, and those being targeted aren’t necessarily aware.

Through relentless exposure to propaganda, social media users are led down a so-called ‘rabbit hole’ of online hate. Levy said it’s a long-term process and the subject is quietly pulled in.

“You might have a problem with life, you might have a challenge, and you find others who share your perspective. You start raging to each other a little bit, you complain, you take that sort of family of racists as a family. They reinforce your view and slowly you radicalize over time,” he said.

Some suggest the Toronto van attack is one of the highest profile Canadian examples of this phenomenon.

The vehicle-ramming attack occurred on April 23, 2018 when a van driven by 25-year-old Alexk Minassian targeted pedestrians, killing 11 and injuring 15.

Police said the attack was motivated by revenge for sexual rejection by women.

At the time, Minassian described himself as an ‘incel’ (involuntarily celibate) and in social media posts he had described the attack as part of an ‘incel rebellion.’ He told police he was radicalized online by a subculture of sexually frustrated men.

 

HARD TRUTHS: NEW CANADIAN IDENTITY?

So how does online hate fall into the contemporary Canadian identity? It’s an uncomfortable question, but difficult to ignore given its pervasiveness.

As Perry explained, the very qualities that many believe make Canada great, including diversity and multiculturalism, are the qualities that exacerbate anxieties and fears, “for white men in particular, that they fear if other groups gain some rights, they must be losing some rights. So there’s a sense that they’re losing their privilege in particular, and that exacerbates the anxiety and escalates the expressions of fear, hate, hostility.”

Fighting online hate in its own blood-stained arena is proving to be a challenge, not only in Canada, but globally.

Levy said part of the problem is that technology has raced ahead of our ability to monitor online hate and to filter out the worst of the abuse.

“Yes, we have hatred laws, hate-speech laws, but they don’t specifically apply to the technologies that we’re using to interact online day to day,” he said.

In many cases, Levy added, perpetrators are well aware that the law can’t touch them if they share hateful messages online. “A lot of these laws are national in nature. They stop at the border, they apply only in Canada. Those who spread online hate know that. They position themselves deliberately off-shore. Their servers are located outside of Canada’s borders. They reach in to other countries knowing full well that they, they feel that they are untouchable,” said Levy.

This situation with Canadian law and minimal regulation on what’s published or shared online, creates unforeseen challenges when adjudicating matters involving online hate.

“Law isn’t always black and white with a big red line down the middle,” said London, Ont. based veteran criminal lawyer Gord Cudmore.

He explained that free speech must also become part of the discussion, whether online or not, complicating matters further.

Cudmore said there are two ways to formulate laws to address this problem, one is the legislature and one is the court system. “So what we probably need is a definitive decision from probably the court of appeal, stating what constitutes, or what the various tests are. What are the ingredients of hate crimes, or hate speech.”

Online hate legislation has been very slow in coming, said Perry. “There’s a real pushback to it. It’s really a hot potato. It’s going to be some time before we see new legislation,” she said.

Perry added that she would like Canadian authorities to make better use of the legislation that’s already in place, such as the hate propaganda legislation, which addresses messages advocating genocide.

Perry also said that community-based organizations and civil society organizations need to be better supported in combating online hate at the grass-roots level.

“For example, workshops for communities to protect themselves to build their own resilience against these online attacks. Also, those organizations that are providing programs around enhancing critical digital literacy so people know, especially youth but also adults, know when perhaps they’re being recruited.”

She said she’d like to see more government funding for these organizations, which are responsible for, “S lot of really good work out there being done on the ground,” said Perry.

 

STAYING GROUNDED

As for Kayabaga, she’s learned that she will always be a target for online attacks, but she’s worried more now for her teenaged son.

“It’s harder on him than it is on me,” she said. He obviously loves his mom and thinks great things about his mom. So reading some of that stuff is not great.”

She said she has gone so far as to remove him entirely from social media, “Because I don’t want it to cripple him, I don’t want him to think that he’s ‘less than’ because of the comments that people are making online about his mother.”

In the meantime, Kayabaga said despite the attacks, she’ll keep doing what she’s doing, trying to make a difference for her constituents and for Canadians. But sometimes it’s hard.

“I try not to internalize it because it doesn’t reflect my values, it doesn’t reflect who I am as a person, it doesn’t reflect the ideas that I think about myself, so I try not to internalize it as much as possible. But its there, right? I think it affects me when it affects the people around me.”