ABSTRACT
Understanding online hate as a social process entails accounting for how hateful ideologies, influencers, and digital tools interact and reinforce each other. Previous research has focused on how online hate purveyors deploy hateful messaging in order to terrorize targets or disrupt out-group activities. Such research presumes that online hate messages, instigated by groups, are produced on one platform and spread on another as they travel linearly from instigators through other aggressors toward targets. The research in this chapter complicates this notion about online hate’s unidirectionality and instrumentality. Analyses investigated how sharing links to YouTube videos on “fringe” platforms affected comment activity on YouTube. There was a distinct circularity in hate messengers’ reciprocal switching among multiple platforms, which appeared strategic, networked, and at times self-reflexive. Notably, the commenters did not target the creators of YouTube videos for harassment, but rather they used the video channels as reference points and the focus of conversations among themselves. They appeared to form bonds, reinforce hateful worldviews, and amplify content they perceived to be antisemitic. The comment sections for these videos became host to what are called hate parties: Threads of hateful rhetoric that are extensions of content found on the fringes.
