I debated about sharing this not-great news about broadband, but it seemed like an opportunity to promote digital and information literacy. According to EurekAlert…

New research from Carlson School of Management Professor Jason Chan and NYU Stern Professors Anindya Ghose and Robert Seamans finds that broadband availability increased the incidence of racial hate crimes committed by lone-wolf perpetrators in the United States during the period 2001-2008. The addition of a single broadband provider led to as much as a 20 percent rise in racial hate crimes in areas where racial tensions were especially high.

Ouch! There were a number of other factors that also contributed to the rise – broadband does seem to play a role. The research indicates that broadband had little effect on recruitment efforts of known hate groups – but seemed to embolden the lone wolves as the excerpt above notes.

One issue is that people can really hone the news and information that they choose to receive online. One preventative measure might be digital literacy training and public service announcements. In library school I took a whole class in how to teach people to qualify resources, to understand authorship, ownership and purpose. We can start in the schools where the audience is captive but it seems like there’s a need to reach a broader audience too. The goal would be to recognize information versus option as well as to understand hate speech.

Another preventative measure is to combat the messages of hate with messages of tolerance or appreciation of diversity. Now granted that’s difficult because as I just said, each user can really filter the information we get online but maybe we go offline to address the issue.

One interesting aspect of the research is that they found that this wasn’t true in all communities and in researching the different communities they found that the ones with elevated hate crimes had searched for racially charged phrases. Ars Technica explains…

However, one major factor altered the relationship between rising broadband access and rising hate crimes. “Counties that have higher racial tendencies tend to have a higher effect,” study co-author Jason Chan said in a phone interview with Ars Technica. Meaning, if a county has more population segregation by race, added broadband correlated with a much higher rate of hate crime. The same was true if a county’s Internet users searched for more racially charged phrases online—often with the words “hate” or “jokes” attached. If not, then the impact, while present, was far less significant.

It seems like that information might be useful to pinpoint communities that could use help fighting hate crime. We could use the technology to find those communities and as an early warning system to future. That’s where to focus prevention efforts.

It also opens a Pandora’s Box of using search results (in aggregate or honed) by geography to get a snapshot of what’s going on in a community. Wouldn’t it be fun to know who is Minnesota is searching for broadband?