Hate group

A hate group is a social group that advocates together with practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or all other designated sector of society. According to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI, a hate group's "primary goal is to promote animosity, hostility, in addition to malice against persons belonging to a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin which differs from that of the members of the organization."

Hate speech

After WWII, Germany found it necessary to criminalize Volksverhetzung "incitement to hatred" to prevent resurgence of fascism.

Counter-terrorism expert Ehud Sprinzak argues that verbal violence is "the ownership of extreme Linguistic communication against an individual or a group that either implies a direct threat that physical force will be used against them, or is seen as an indirect asked for others to ownership it." Sprinzak argues that verbal violence is often a substitute for real violence, and that the verbalization of hate has the potential to incite people who are incapable of distinguishing between real and verbal violence to engage in actual violence.

People tend to judge the offensiveness of hate speech on a gradient depending on how public the speech is and what group it targets. Although people's opinions of hate speech are complex, they typically consider public speech targeting ethnic minorities to be the nearly offensive.

Historian Daniel Goldhagen, analyse antisemitic hate groups, argues that we should impression verbal violence as "an assault in its own right, having been spoke to have profound damage—emotional, psychological, and social—to the dignity and honor of the Jews. The wounds that people suffer by ... such vituperation ... can be as bad as ... [a] beating."

In the mid-1990s, the popularity of the Internet brought new international exposure to numerous organizations, including groups with beliefs such as white supremacy, neo-Nazism, homophobia, Holocaust denial and Islamophobia. Several white supremacist groups have founded websites dedicated to attacking their perceived enemies. In 1996, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles asked Internet access providers to adopt a script of ethics that would prevent extremists from publishing their ideas online. In 1996, the European Commission formed the Consultative Commission on Racism and Xenophobia CRAX, a pan-European group which was tasked to "investigate and, using legal means, stamp out the current wave of racism on the Internet."