Web of Hate
Canadian Business, volume 69, no. 5 [Special Technology issue]
(Spring 1996): 12.
Web of Hate
By fighting Nazis on the Net, is Ken McVay aiding their cause?
Ken McVay's obsession started four years ago. The former
convenience store manager had seen his computer business collapse
and was wondering what to do with his UNIX system. Browsing
through a newsgroup, he came across a piece of historical
revisionism of an ilk that is now widespread in certain
newsgroups and on the World Wide Web but was still surprising to
find in 1992--"really blatant anti-Semitism," he says.
McVay, who isn't Jewish and claims to be apolitical--he
hasn't voted in 23 years--began to spend his spare time tracking
down and refuting the claims of hatemongers and those denying on
the Internet that the Holocaust had happened. His project, named
Nizkor (Hebrew for "we will remember"), existed mainly in
newsgroups until May 1995, when it went on the Web. The special
technology of the Web allows McVay to link his documents to a
number of racist and anti-Semitic sites. The 114,000 pages of
Nizkor, which sits on the hard drive of McVay's computer in
Campbell River, BC, is the largest on-line collection of evidence
on the Holocaust.
Nizkor's pages had been steadily increasing until January
1996, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los
Angeles, asked Internet providers in Canada and the US to deny
Web access to hate groups. When the racists lurked in newsgroups,
their message lacked appeal because, according to the Wiesenthal
Center's Rabbi Abraham Cooper, "You could judge: this person is
a fool, or worse." But the Web, because of its profoundly
democratic nature, is a great equalizer of ideas: bad ideas now
look as pretty as good ones. "The Flat Earth Society can do as
nice a job [in designing its Web page] as Carl Sagan," says
Cooper.
The debate over how best to fight racism on the Net is,
in part, a debate on what the Net has become. Cooper believes it
is now a major communications vehicle and that providers should
therefore be governed by the "unwritten rules of engagement" that
traditional media, such as newspapers and television, follow.
McVay, on the other hand, argues that providers are far more
similar to common carriers, such as the telephone, than to
publishers or broadcasters. "They're just moving information,"
he says. The first 10,000 miles go through the telephone system;
[it's only] the last quarter inch that's on the screen."
McVay now devotes all of his time to Nizkor. He earns
$1,200 a month from speaking engagements and through public
support, including that of local Jewish groups. His ancient
computer was recently upgraded, thanks to a donation from a
Christian businessman.
McVay worries that the Wiesenthal Center's request will
make government intervention more likely. "I suspect I have the
largest on-line collection of hate literature," he says. If hate
speech is yanked off the Web, his pages might have to go too.
After all, fighting Nazis on the Net is what McVay wants to do
with the rest of his life.
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By Rebecca Carpenter