by Maximilien Boucher
Founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, the Southern Poverty Law Center started as a civil rights law firm and has since become a prominent organization dedicated to combating racism and extremism in the United States. Every year, it tracks the presence and activities of hate and anti-government groups across the nation, striving to limit their influence by exposing their actions and leaders. In an effort to better understand how these movements have fluctuated over time and where they are today, I conducted an investigation using the SPLC’s tracking data and by consulting with an analyst from their team.
As defined by the SPLC, hate groups hold beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics, while antigovernment groups see the federal government as an enemy of the people and promote baseless conspiracy theories. The provided graph indicates a notable decline in the number of hate groups over recent years, reaching the lowest level since 2000. Concurrently, there has been a resurgence in antigovernment groups since 2021, following an eight-year period of decline. This juxtaposition suggests a potential relationship between the trends of these two types of groups.
At this juncture, our analysis raises two critical questions:
(1) Does the decrease in the number of hate groups correspond to a reduction in the overall level of hate in America? Investigating the prevalence of hate crimes could shed light on whether hate persists in society despite the diminished presence of groups that explicitly promote discriminatory ideologies.
(2) Could the dynamics of antigovernment groups offer insights into the trends observed with hate groups? Preliminary data suggest that antigovernment activity tends to diminish when Republicans are in office (e.g., during the Bush and Trump administrations) and peaked during the presidency of Barack Obama, the first African American president. This pattern warrants further exploration to understand the interplay between political climates and the activities of these groups.
The paradoxical trend depicted in the chart is striking: hate crimes in the United States have surged to unprecedented levels, while the number of hate groups has concurrently dwindled to historic lows. Occurring nearly every hour in 2022, according to the FBI, these crimes are defined by being “motivated by prejudice based on race, gender, gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientations, or ethnicity." The rise in hate crimes amid a fall in the number of identified hate groups raises urgent questions about the mechanisms of hate transmission in society.
After consulting with a Southern Poverty Law Center representative and reviewing their annual documents, including the 2022 hate and extremism report, it seems that the SPLC posits that hate has not actually diminished; rather, it has become more mainstream and thus become less trackable.
The central mechanism behind this dissemination is the migration of hate online. Hate speech and extremist ideologies are proliferating on social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok, reducing the threshold for engagement. Individuals can now contribute to and feel a sense of belonging to a cause with much more ease, expanding the solidarity once provided by formal group memberships (NPR).
This phenomenon of hate groups and ideas gaining traction online can be seen with the decline of the "old school" and more traditional hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and Racist Skinheads, whose lack of online presences have been significant weaknesses in keeping their movements afloat.
Moreover, the presence of extremist ideologies on social media platforms grants them an unprecedented level of exposure. This dynamic was exacerbated in the tumultuous landscape of 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic compelled a shift in social dynamics, leading to a significant increase in online activity as individuals and communities sought connection and information in a time of widespread lockdowns and social distancing measures. Further, stringent Covid-19 restrictions, the salience of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the contentious "Stop the Steal" campaign surrounding the U.S. elections served as catalysts, igniting hate and antigovernment sentiment and corresponding to vigorous online discourse.
As more popular social media companies were forced to implement measures to address the proliferation of hate on their platforms, other alternatives such as Signal, Parler, and Telegram that offered significantly less content moderation quickly grew in popularity.
Telegram, in particular, has become a haven for hate groups and individuals who have been banned from other platforms. The platform’s end-to-end encryption and lack of content moderation have made it a popular choice for those seeking to spread extremist ideologies and organize events without fear of censorship. In fact, the peak of Telegram downloads around the time of the January 6th Insurrection as highlighted in the visual above mirrors the close to 10 million hate content items removed from Facebook during the same period.
The proliferation of these ideas on the internet has dramatically lowered the barrier for participation in these movements, significantly broadening their reach. In effect, this accessibility has also made it easier for political candidates to adopt and leverage these conspiracies for popular support. The chart above highlights this by showing how deeply government-related conspiracies and extremist ideologies have penetrated the political landscape.
Moreover, the endorsement of QAnon-like conspiracies by prominent figures such as former President Trump has placed antigovernment groups in a weird position. While traditionally positioned against the government, these groups found themselves in a paradox where the government appears to support causes they align with. This unusual scenario contributes to a broader acceptance and normalization of such extremist ideologies within higher political offices, allowing these movements to not only prevail but continue to spread through society.
The hate group tracking numbers are from the SPLC Hate Map. The dataset contains the number of hate groups based on ideology for every year since 2000. As for the number of antigovernment groups, I used a mixed methodology to get the data as it was not as openly available as the hate group data. This was done through going through combining numbers I found in older reports (2019) and through my interview with the SPLC representative. The data on the political endorsement of extremist groups was sourced through the SPLC Action Fund. For the hate crime data, I used the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics. I processed the data and created visuals using Python and polished them using Adobe Illustrator.