We Can Win: Fighting Hate Online

For the past three years, I have had the pleasure of playing an online massive multiplayer nation simulation game. Now, I can already hear the laughter but bear with me here. In the game, you create a “nation” and govern it according to your values. These nations congregate into “regions,” oftentimes communities united by a common value or interest. There are some roleplaying communities, some political communities, some religious communities, some communities for fun, etc. Typically speaking, most of these communities are great places; I’ve met plenty of wonderful people in them that continue to respectfully challenge my perspectives, teach me fascinating tidbits about their own lives and improve my gameplay experience.Having said this, the internet also gives people the mask of anonymity. Oftentimes, this can be quite useful and liberating—it enables people to open up about things they wouldn’t ordinarily tell people in real life. It enables them to be honest with their struggles, explore their identities and talk about important issues. But as we know all too well, that mask has a darker side, insofar as it gives bigots, fascists and other extremists the ability to spew their rhetoric without fear of social consequences. Fascists seem intent on taking up residence everywhere on the internet—they are on Reddit, they are on Facebook, they are on discussion forums—they are everywhere. And so they try to take up residence in our little game; a couple people have tried to form fascist and/or Neo-Nazi regions, to varying degrees of success. That led to a question we are still grappling with. How do we respond to the formation of hateful communities on our platforms?When I first heard of their existence, I was frankly shocked. I had no idea that the bigots were here too, albeit in small numbers. Part of me wanted to instantly walk away from the site entirely. After all, if I choose to sit at a table with Nazis, am I not complicit in their crimes? But then I realized that walking away was a non-solution at best, and a surrender at worst. I had no reason to leave my online home because a few fascists decided to try and invade it. Instead, we had to fight.But before doing so, we had to decide who our enemy was. The game had banned on-site hate speech, thankfully, so most of the fascist subcommunities tended to reside on offsite chat platforms for their specific regions. On the main website itself, the groups would often disguise themselves as “German monarchist” groups, or use some other in-character shield to hide their Nazism. They would lure people into those communities by having regional residents, many of whom were entirely oblivious to the scheme, onto their regional chats. In those unregulated platforms, they would spread extremist, hateful propaganda and radicalize unsuspecting nations. More than a few were teenagers, some even younger.The process of teasing out who these regions were has been complicated, to say the least. There have been some regions that we missed for a long time, and on the other end, some regions unfairly targeted as “fascist” by groups with their own motives, both in-game and political. But we’ve been able to take some steps; for instance, we developed a script to automatically alert nations who join known fascist regions. Our rationale is simple there—we want to prevent people from being accidentally sucked into hateful communities. We have also used in-game mechanics, typically used for friendly, in-character “wargames,” to shut down fascist regions. We have isolated their communities, and taken quite a few steps to keep them away from the eyes of younger, more impressionable players. Those steps have been quite effective—there are fewer fascist regions than ever, and those that exist are perpetually on the run.But sometimes, in the process of doing so, we forget to engage with the almost-radicalized, those at the tip of falling off the edge into a very sinister world of alt-right content. One of the typical extremist tactics is that of invasion, one where the fascists try to infiltrate existing center-right communities and radicalize them. Oftentimes, they can be very sly about this, disguising their views or exploiting more relaxed moderation teams. This exact process happened a year or two ago; a group of fascists subtly took over a center-right region, one that my own region had been allied to for years, and polluted it with filth inappropriate to describe in a high school newspaper. When our region found out about this, we took several steps to clean up the mess. But the most important of those steps was an extended hand—we reached out to those whose community had been taken away, and worked to monitor their clean-up. Their chat server has since gotten so much cleaner, the fascists have been expelled, and several have been deradicalized. What is the point here? Simply put, we need to stand up, firmly and peacefully, to deny extremism a platform in our communities. In the face of a radicalizing internet, we should not be afraid, because progress is possible when we dig in our heels. Did I make enemies in the process? Yes, and I’m frankly a minor player in the fight—my favorite moment on the site came when one fascist community’s leader posted this: “the substantial clerical-fascist constituency of [our region] considers [your] progressivist and pro-LGBT interpretation of Roman Catholicism to be abominable.” And I’m not even a major player in the anti-fascist movement. That region no longer exists, thanks to the work of people of all affiliations across the site, including at least three Exonians. And that task of denying fascists a platform is left to all of us, not just a select few power-players. The task is certainly formidable, but there is the world to be gained.