This eye-opening documentary about the role of social media in spreading white supremacist violence, which just won the Tribeca Festival’s Best Documentary Feature Award, is at its most arresting when we meet a Black lawyer named Anika Collier Navaroli.
Navaroli worked for Twitter, when she warned about the violence that Donald Trump’s Tweets would likely inspire, and for Twitch, when she made a similar warning. Both warnings were ignored. The connection between social media and the insurrectionist riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 is perhaps more widely known (“Be there. Will be wild”) than with the shooting death of ten African American shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store on May 14, 2022. The teenage shooter was radicalized by web platforms like Twitch, and livestreamed part of the attack on Twitch.
“I could no longer sit inside technology companies and beg people in charge to listen to me when I knew that people’s lives were at stake,” Navaroli tells Swedish journalist My Vingren, who has spent a decade using her own computer skills to track online right wing extremist influencers, and confronting the major social media platforms with their complicity.
“Hacking Hate” focuses on Vingren’s detective work, having created false online identities for herself, in infiltrating and exposing one such network, which starts with a preening body builder who calls himself The Golden One, quotes Hitler and says it’s not wrong to kill. His huge following of mostly young men included (as Vingren documents) one man who became a mass murderer. She connects The Golden One to an underground group called the Nordic Foundation, and uncovers its founder, a man named Vincent (she learns his family name, but the documentary, directed by Simon Klose, doesn’t share it with us.) She follows down the rabbit hole of Vincent’s identity, which is Byzantine and shocking; among the revelations is the real possibility that Vincent was working as a Russian agent.
The Tribeca Festival citation reads: “The documentary jury awards a film that bravely and fearlessly investigates the misuse of the internet to encourage hate and bias by allowing media giants to profit and foster the continuation of the outrage. On trial are First Amendment freedoms that have been violated for profit.”
