"The Internet is the greatest thing to happen to hate. It’s also the worst thing."
-David Goldman, Hatewatch.org

The Internet, once the domain of young white males primarily interested in science and computing, is now a community inhabited by nearly all types of people. The Internet has become a place where one can easily connect with people like themselves. While people who hold extremist views are few in number and often geographically distanced, the Internet can easily connect them with one another, making the Internet especially suited to those types of people. It is therefore not surprising that hate groups have found a home on the Internet.
In perhaps the most recent report to document the number of racist websites, there are an estimated 4,000 world-wide, with approximately 2,500 of those in the United States . This is a substantial increase; in 1998 there were only an estimated 537, and 474 in 1997 . "The number of extreme right-wing German-language Web sites has more than doubled in the last year, now totaling more than 1,000…" . There are many different types of hate sites on the Internet that are directed at groups such as African Americans, homosexuals, Jews, and white people. For this report, I chose to study Anti-Semetic "white pride" hate groups who expressed intolerance towards anyone outside their race. I chose this group because they seem to represent a large majority of the hate groups online.
Is the presence of hate groups online something to fear? Will the increased ease of contact between these kinds of people create problems? Unfortunately, we have yet to find the answers to these questions — the evidence just hasn’t been collected. What we can do is examine the presence of online hate groups, analyze their websites and tactics they employ to recruit members, evauluate their beliefs, and attempt to assess the impact they could have on our society.

Some groups are already doing that "For every race-hate site such as Stormfront, there is a watchdog…" . The most prominent watchdogs of hate groups online are the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hatewatch.org, and Wisenthal.com. Just as the Internet has allowed individuals to unite under hate, it has also allowed people to unite against it. By exposing themselves to the world, hate groups not only gain members, they gain enemies as well. "When you expose hate groups for what they are people get enticed to get involved to stop them" says David Goldman, executive director of Hatewatch.org . These sites actively monitor and publish reports about the various hate groups active on the Internet. However, this is the extent of their power. Hate speech in the United States, in most forms, is protected (the details on the exact criterion for protected speech will be examined later). This limits what groups such as ADL can accomplish with regards to keeping hate off the Internet.

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Hate, Law, and the Internet