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Interview with the Center for Research and Creative Activities

Professor of Criminal Justice, Kevin Borgeson, has a new book titled, Cyberhate: The Far Right in the Digital Age, published by Lexington Press. Kevin joined us in a short interview to tell us more about this new book and future projects.

Co-authored with James Bacigalupo and Robin Maria Valeri, the new book looks at how the radical right utilizes the internet to create hate pages and the psychology behind why and how, as well as the negative impact these pages have in the real world. Borgeson pointed out that the idea to write this book came after he and Robin Veleri, “did one of the first studies that ever looked at whether or not people can detect a hate page when they are online." He added, "we decided because of social media and things of that nature we wanted to focus on a well-rounded look. We looked at legal issues with cyberspace, different groups that use it, the introduction of the alt-right in recent years, and why people have cyberhate and then they turn to use it in the real world.” 

One specific chapter speaks to Borgeson’s focus within the book. “My degree is in social psychology on criminal behavior, so I wrote the chapter on everyday viewing of hate sites online and how that transfers over into why people commit violence.” He also noted that he was very interested in researching the legal issues that come with these hate pages. For example, he stated, “hate groups figure out how to beat the algorithm that things like Facebook put up. One of them is called the love effect. They will have a language that's on their pages and then behind it they put, ‘love,’ and so the algorithm is [set] to pick up hate speech but if it sees the word ‘love,’ in the tag it assumes that it has made a wrong assumption and skips over it.”

While this book was primarily written for an academic audience, Borgeson has a new project he'll be working on later this year. "In April I’m going to start working on a book on hate homicide and that's going to be written for a non-academic audience.” This book will look at data gathered over the last twenty years and possible trends in homicide cases during that time. “We wanna see if there are any trends over the last twenty years, and then we also did the years of Trump's presidency. We looked at the four years of Trump and we’re looking to see what trends happened in those years compared to the other 16 years.” 

Congratulations Professor Borgeson on this new book, we are excited to learn more about your upcoming work as well!