Understanding and Contextualising Racial Hatred on the Internet:

This thesis builds upon the growing body of criminological literature in the field of racially motivated offending by embracing two key aims. Firstly, it aims to investigate the way in which Internet newsgroups create an enabling environment for the expression and development of on-line racial hatred and therefore endeavours to understand how newsgroups may be used to facilitate criminal and other harmful activity. Secondly, the study examines three newsgroups in depth and a number of Websites with an aim to understand their structure, organisation and dynamics as well as aspects of recruitment, dissemination of hate literature and the command and control of members. This thesis also places online bias, prejudice and hate speech within a social and historical context by arguing that the foundations for online hate speech did not merely arise with the development of the Internet in the 1970s but is bound up within an historical and social context that began some three and a half centuries ago during the Atlantic slave trade and hardly curtailing in the US and the UK until the 1960s