HOME PAGES FOR HATE

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

ON THE INTERNET, WHEN PEOPLE want to chat about the bleaker side of life, they often find their way to alt.support.loneliness. The forum, a Usenet newsgroup, is open 24 hours a day for anyone who wants to post messages lamenting a breakup with a spouse, or how tough it is to meet people or find true love or even a true date. It's a moderately popular group. Or it was, before the Carolinian Lords of the Caucasus showed up.

The CLOC, an unabashedly white-supremacist organization based in Columbia, South Carolina, takes pride in running locals off certain innocuous parts of Usenet with its race baiting. Members claim to have emptied out half a dozen forums already, including, improbably, alt.fan.barry-manilow and alt.food.dennys. "If you want an organization which makes things happen, visit our victims and learn first-hand what kind of a group we are," they boast at their World Wide Web site, which features an image of a burning cross. "CLOC is clearly on the forefront of the great war for Aryan domination of the Internet."

This virtual hooliganism may sound absurd. For people who rely on the Internet to communicate, though, it's a real and growing problem. Like more conventional groups, racists have discovered that the Net is a marvelous way to get their message out to a huge audience at low cost. Last week the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the world's largest Jewish human rights organization, decided that enough is enough. Citing "the rapidly expanding presence of organized hate groups on the Internet," Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center's associate dean, sent letters to hundreds of Internet access providers, asking them to help draft a code of ethics that would squelch Websites that promote bigotry and violence.

Predictably, civil libertarians are uneasy about the proposal, seeing it as yet another assault on free speech in cyberspace. Congress has already signaled its intent to enact legislation that would criminalize "indecent" speech online, rather than adopting the less onerous restriction against "obscene" speech that is the print standard.

Yet Cooper claims his letter is very much in keeping with the Constitution and traditional media practice. He argues that the First Amendment also protects publishers who choose not to disseminate materials they find offensive. Most mainstream newspapers and magazines, for example, won't run ads from racist or hate groups. The people who sell access to the Internet, he believes, should start behaving the same way. "In effect," says Cooper, "this is a recognition that the Internet has come of age. We're not looking for prior restraint or to keep these guys off the Internet. We're saying, Adopt the same approach to the First Amendment that your brothers have done in traditional media."

Among purists, though, the whole point of the Internet is that it isn't like traditional media. A wide spectrum of viewpoints is tolerated and even encouraged online, especially on the freewheeling, anarchistic Usenet. The notion is that for the first time in history, anyone can express his or her views to a mass audience. As a result, Cooper's proposal is stirring up opposition from cyberspace denizens on both the left and the right.

It has got a cold reception from Internet access providers too. "The answer to hateful speech is more speech," says Sameer Parekh, president of Community ConneXion, a popular provider in Berkeley, California. By banning hate groups from the Net, he says, "you are promoting the idea that they might actually have something valuable to say."

The campaign has given even the hatemongers a chance to sound civic-minded. Says Milton John Kleim Jr., a self-described "white nationalist Usenet Viking" whose writings also appear on many racist Web pages: "What Mr. Cooper doesn't understand is the fact that there are a lot of people in our society who are very angry--the angry-white-male theme. A lot of these angry white males, if they're prohibited from venting their views, might actually come forward and do something."

But what if freedom of speech destroys an environment, as victims of the Carolinian Lords of the Caucasus know it can? "They're real idiots," says Jay D. Dyson, who used to post messages to the alt.support.loneliness group until the invasion by CLOC. Dyson explains that at first CLOC members used the forum to troll for new members. "It's frightening because these [lonely] people are at the lowest point in their life, and a drowning man will grasp at anything to keep from going under." Later, though, the postings turned nasty and even threatening. A CLOC leader, who uses the screen name "Racial Theorist," says his organization doesn't mean any real harm: "What this thing is about is having fun. And shock value."

Perhaps. But it's finished as far as Dyson and his friends are concerned. Last week the lonely folks decided to deal with the racists in their own way. They voted to create a special kind of newsgroup from which unruly intruders can be evicted. No one should be forced to tolerate intolerance, even in cyberspace.

--With reporting by Chris Stamper/New York

With reporting by CHRIS STAMPER/NEW YORK