trolls.3x299MIT Technology Review

A group of journalists and researchers wade into ugly corners of the Internet to expose racists, creeps, and hypocrites. Have they gone too far?

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Hate is having a sort of renaissance online, even in the countries thought to be beyond it.

It is generally no longer acceptable in public life to hurl slurs at women or minorities, to rally around the idea that some humans are inherently worth less than others, or to terrorize vulnerable people. But old-school hate is having a sort of renaissance online, and in the countries thought to be furthest beyond it. The anonymity provided by the Internet fosters communities where people can feed on each other’s hate without consequence. They can easily form into mobs and terrify victims. Individual trolls can hide behind dozens of screen names to multiply their effect. And attempts to curb online hate must always contend with the long-standing ideals that imagine the Internet’s main purpose as offering unfettered space for free speech and marginalized ideas. The struggle against hate online is so urgent and difficult that the law professor Danielle Citron, in her new book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, calls the Internet “the next battleground for civil rights.”

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Research Group was founded during the exhaustive process of unmasking a particularly frightening Internet troll. That episode began in 2005, when Fredriksson and his close friend Mathias Wåg learned that an anonymous person was requesting public information about Wåg from the government. As a return address, the requester used a post office box in Stockholm. That kept Fredriksson and Wåg in the dark at first. But the next year, they obtained a copy of a prison magazine in which a notorious neo-Nazi named Hampus Hellekant, who was in prison for murdering a union organizer, had listed the same post office box. In 2007, after Hellekant was released, pseudonymous posts began to appear on Swedish neo-Nazi forums and websites, soliciting information about Wåg and other leftist activists.

For three years, Fredriksson and some like-minded investigators tracked Hellekant’s every move, online and off. “He was functioning more or less as the intelligence service for the Nazi movement,” Fredriksson says. Their counterintelligence operation involved a mix of traditional journalistic techniques and innovative data analysis. One unlikely breakthrough came courtesy of -Hellekant’s habit of illegally parking his car all over Stockholm. Fredriksson’s team requested parking ticket records from the city. They were able to match the car’s location on certain days with time and GPS metadata on image files Hellekant posted under a pseudonym. In 2009 they sold the story of Hellekant’s post-prison activities to a leftist newspaper, and Research Group was born.