By Danny Bradbury

The  Internet  is  full  of  anti-social  rants, but  will  demonizing  the ranters  solve the problem?

It’s not a good time to be a goth in Canada. The community, with its stylized clothing and music, is normally fairly low-key, but events over the past year have bought it into the foreground in the worst way. In February, two Manitoba goths burned down a church and were later sentenced to jail. April saw a 12-year-old and her boyfriend charged with the murder of her Alberta family, and then 25-year old Kimveer Gill killed one person and injured 19 at a Montreal school in September, leading to headlines such as “Montreal killer was death-obsessed goth.” The most obvious factor uniting these troubled young people was their membership in the online goth community VampireFreaks.com. The site is a social network for goths, where users post their journals and profiles and list and rate their friends. Two hours before his shooting spree, Gill posted pictures of himself with a semi-automatic carbine, and the slogan “Fuck the world!” Jeremy Allan Steinke’s VampireFreaks profile (now deleted) proclaimed: “I believe in Blood, Destruction, Guts, Gore & Greed!” In his dislikes section, Steinke, accused of helping Richardson murder her two parents and eight-yearold brother, lists “homewreckers.” The Internet is a wild place, littered with extreme points of view and outlandish personalities. It allows people to engage with groups they couldn’t easily have found before. But as it brings together members of a subculture, does it exacerbate anti-social tendencies, pushing them dangerously close to the surface, or can it mitigate them by giving people a place to let off steam?

Sick Without The Web

Venting online obviously didn’t defuse these people’s anti-social tendencies enough to stop them spilling over into physical action. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine school shooters, was said to have published his killing fantasies and rants against society on a set of Web pages along with his own custom scenarios for the first-person shoot-em up game Doom. Jeff Weise, a student who killed seven in 2005 at Red Lake High School in Minnesota, is said to have regularly frequented online neo-Nazi chat rooms. But arguing that subculture Web sites and the Internet are corrupting our youth misses the point, said Randy Blazak, an associate professor of sociology at Portland State University. “There’s a certain amount of moral panic,” he said, likening it to the ’60s when themiddle-aged overreacted to mods and rockers, demonizing the whole group for the violent travesties of a few. Jethro Berelson, the owner of VampireFreaks.com, has been quoted as saying that the community is “generally very friendly and nice.” In fact, participating in groups that rebel against cultural norms is a great way for people to experiment, Blazak said. Young people still struggling for a sense of identity can find it difficult to do so in an inherently contradictory and complex society, so the binary world of rebellious subcultures can be appealing. In reacting against social norms, they strictly conform to a rigorous set of internal conventions. “These are worlds where everything makes sense. The rules are clear, right and wrong are well defined, and you know what people’s values are,” he said. For most, those values will extend to stylistic tendencies and political resistance; everyone wears the same goth uniform, uses the same rhetoric and listens to the same music. But that begs the question: why do a few turn bad, developing and acting out anti-social fantasies online? Experts say the tendency toward antisocial behaviour has to be there in the first place. For example, the Columbine shooters were already criminally minded, Blazak said. “They then came into the subculture afterwards, because it gave them a place where they could express that. They had permission to be hateful, but the hate came first.” Online interactions can reflect and amplify already warped views of reality. The Internet brings communities together, but it is also a distancing medium—we only ever see the online world through a piece of glass—and it can inflame personalities already given to self-aggrandizement or feelings of superiority. Stefan Fafinski, co-founder of U.K.- based criminology consultancy 1871 Ltd., has seen this effect in his research into online football hooliganism. “Folks that are otherwise socially inadequate can develop large, aggressive personalities online,” he said, calling them “keyboard warriors.” “The Internet has provided a gigantic forum for all kinds of things that can’t be said in polite society,” said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which tracks the activities of hate groups both online and off. “The anonymity of the various fora encourage you to go further than you would otherwise.” Blazak also has research suggesting that those spending lots of time online often have fewer social relationships. For the online contacts who do exist, it can be difficult to get close enough to someone to intervene or even spot warning signs (which of your 2,938 “friends” on MySpace is close enough to counsel you?). Compound that with an inability to leave an attractive, highly stylized fiction behind when you turn off the computer and things can get occasionally serious.

Hate Appeal

For many fringe subculture groups the danger lies in amplifying tendencies that already exist, but perhaps an even greater danger for young people lies in Web sites run by white supremacists, Nazis and similar organizations. Hate groups appeal to the disaffected and the lonely who find it difficult fitting into mainstream society, Potok said. Members of the sites that he tracks include older misfits, whose only option used to be to “stand in their living room, shaking their fists at the sky,” he said. But Internet hate sites can also provide a haven for the disaffected youth looking for a sense of belonging. Conversely, hate group leaders have been consistently targetting middle-class youths at the secondary-school age in an attempt to co-opt them into a focused movement, Potok said. “The reality is that a significant proportion come into this movement without racist feelings. Often they’re mad at their parents or for some other reason. It’s an alternative family.” Young people also become interested in music from bands affiliated with hate groups, much of which is available for
free online, said Phyllis Gerstenfeld, an associate professor at the State University of California. “A large percentage of the Web sites we looked at had some kind of free multi-media content on them,” she said. “It’s used as a recruiting tool.” 

Who's Responsible? 

Should such online activities be dealt with, and if so, how? When do the rebellious ramblings of the disaffected or immature become cause for concern, whether on a goth subculture site or a hate group site? And what happens when the two merge? The Manitoba church burners were reportedly caught with music linked to Varg Vikernes, a musician well known in the misanthropic extremist black metal subgenre. Vikernes is a former neo-Nazi group member who was linked to several church arsons. “There’s some leakage of ideology into goth and black metal and fringy subcultures,” said Potok, who adds that for some, Hitler, Satan and other evil symbols are interchangeable. “It’s the most outré stuff available.” It is not the responsibility of hosting companies to take down Web sites with content deemed anti-social, said Darren Widenmaier, director of corporate hosting firm Quadrant, and a board member for the Canadian Association of Internet Providers. “We need a court order to take something down because we’re not equipped to judge content,” he said. ISPs provide servers, they do not devote legal resources to what can often be complex cases.

On what grounds can a court order be obtained? “It’s delineated by one of three things,” said David Fewer, staff counsel for the Canadian Internet Policy and Interest Centre. The first is the criminal code, which covers obscene or hate speech. “The second area is human rights legislation, which is not a criminal case. It provides citizens with a civil recourse against hate speech.” Third, the general laws of the land cover expression-related issues such as defamation. But some are pressuring ISPs to take down overt hate group sites. Leo Adler, director of national affairs at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles, regularly approaches ISPs to remove sites that cross the line, and he claims considerable success. He has seen the number of hate sites grow from one in 1995 (a long-lived site called Stormfront) to around 6,000 today, “although in Canada there are very few,” he said. When he finds one, he approaches the ISP and tells it the site contravenes the law and (usually) their contractual terms. “Ninety per cent of the time we found that the server agrees with us and we shut them down. The few times they don’t agree, we go to the police.” But hate sites are often careful about not crossing the line, Gerstenfeld said. Many white supremacist sites argue that they love white people, rather than hating people of colour, for example. And these issues become moot when discussing subculture groups without an overt hate message. Is it right to shut down a subculture site like VampireFreaks.com when the majority of its users are law-abiding members of society? A predilection for black clothing and bad makeup is hardly grounds for discontinuing service.

In such cases, the solution is more complex than censorship or censure. “People love to talk about these groups because it allows them not only to gawk at them, but also to celebrate themselves as the ‘good’ people,” Blazak said. Instead of demonizing rebellious, anti-social ’net dwellers, we should try to understand them and talk them through things, spotting the warning signs before any transgressions occur. “In reality,” he said, “these are our kids, and we have a lot in common with them.”