How a U.S. election strengthened the global hate network

Our new study of the online world shows that the 2020 U.S. elections generated rapid adaptations of the global online hate network. During these adaptations, millions of accounts already in hate communities were drawn closer to each other and toward a broad mainstream of billions. The 2020 election also triggered new hate content around immigration, ethnicity, and antisemitism that aligns with myriad conspiracy theories (including a common thread about Jewish-led replacement). We found that Telegram acted as a key strengthening agent even though it has historically been overlooked by regulatory bodies (e.g. U.S. Congressional hearings).
The main takeaway for policymakers is that since this online structure is still strong and intact, we can expect a similar story from future elections. Anti-hate messaging around major world events (the war in Gaza, the recent U.K. riots, or the 2024 U.S. elections, to name a few) must both target the existing blend of hate types and reach lesser-known social media structures.
How did we achieve our broad-scale findings? We built the equivalent of the James Webb Telescope for the online universe. To our knowledge, there is no other as detailed, so our results are really the first of their kind. We have the most powerful telescope in the world for understanding online space.
In detail, we studied both the content of publicly available social media hate speech (i.e. the narratives spread and the way hate is expressed) and its structure (i.e. the links between online communities where hate proliferates). We found that the last U.S. Presidential election cycle in 2020 dramatically changed the hate network, both around the election and later around January 6, 2021. Increases in the content shared within these communities (in terms of specific types of hate) correlated with structural strengthening in the network itself (measured statistically). By the end of our study period in January 2021, we observe that communities more frequently bind to others that are more similar to them (this is a measure called “assortativity”) and form larger clusters (by measuring the sizes of connected groups of communities).
This study builds on our previously-published work (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-024-00002-2, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-72538-1) where we underscored the importance and usefulness of such a structural map for the online landscape. Without knowledge of existing pathways and how they are used, how can we hope to curb the spread of harmful content?
Our new paper also shows how important the platform Telegram was in helping to “glue” together the hate network. If links between communities are roads, then certain major Telegram channels acted as highway interchanges during the months we studied. In recent months, Telegram has been in the news because its founder was detained by French authorities after being charged with several crimes related to user activity on the platform. It is undeniable that roughly four years ago, this platform played a key role in reinforcing the global hate network, but the way current-day legislation handles platform abuse must also take into account newly emerging platforms. Too often, public and government attention is aimed at the most well-known ones like YouTube or Facebook. Whether or not detaining Telegram’s founder was an effective or useful measure, it is good that a widely-used but lesser-known platform such as Telegram is becoming subject to more scrutiny than it has historically. In fact, recent reports suggest the E.U. is investigating ways of regulating Telegram using the Digital Services Act.
What’s the upshot? In the rapidly-approaching 2024 U.S. presidential election, the entrenched infrastructure of the online hate network will certainly affect both the election itself and the public reaction to it in the following weeks and months. It is very important that people understand how their personal feeds can be affected by this, even if they themselves are not involved with or have ever viewed hateful content online; an increasingly potent hate-spreading network of communities makes this inevitable. With new platforms cropping up daily, it is not clear that Telegram will play the same role it did during the 2020 election, but it is likely that a similarly loosely-moderated platform or group of platforms will.
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