The term “cyber-racism” is what scholars refer to racist communication online. There is no surprise to me that the internet has a darkside because I’ve seen it. The amount of hate that continues to spread rapidly on various social media accounts has become a norm to me and many other users. Leading me to the question of how is racism being spread across the internet?
According to the article since 2017 “even the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim- Berners-Lee, has focused many of his comments about the dangers of manipulation of the internet around hate speech”(Biluc, Jakubowicz, & Dunn 2020). Majority of the racism that is spread online is by various racist groups. Although there are individuals who engage in cyber-racism to hurt others, racist groups are active on many different platforms with different goals and strategies to achieve them. The main goals of all cyber-racist typically are “to hurt or undermined other groups” and “to increase social desirability”.
To conclude, if constant online racism persist, we can potentially see an ever sharper division in society as the support for racism and far-right movements spread online.
LIS 4022 Spring 2020 