Online access, lone wolf hate?

When Jason Chan began researching hate crimes and the Internet, he expected to find a link between high-speed access and the growth of large, organized hate groups.

He found the hate, but little organization. Instead, he and his colleagues discovered regions with faster broadband and racially segregated populations showed an increase in hate crimes committed by individuals acting alone.

"The hate groups will be providing the ideological motivation, the encouragement and probably the justification, and some instructions on how like-minded individuals could carry out lone wolf attacks," said Chan, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

The patterns Chan found offer fresh evidence of what experts say are the shifting tactics of racial hatred, from public demonstrations to encouraging individual actions, making the threat harder to detect.

That includes Minnesota, where demonstrators say the men who confronted them in last week's 4th Precinct protest shootings were white supremacists.

"It's much harder to track than the old era when they'd put up a flyer and say, 'The National Socialist Movement will be protesting in their Nazi uniforms at the state capitol.' Those days are gone," said Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Project, which tracks hate groups.

"What we have been seeing over the last few years is a decline in the number of organized hate groups, sort of like where you are a card-carrying member," she added. "People are ditching those because they don't need them anymore and they're moving to online venues."

Nationwide there was significant growth in hate groups from 2008 until 2012. Then the number began to shrink. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 1,002 hate groups nationwide in 2010. By 2014 that number fell to 784.

In 2014 the report identified eight such groups in Minnesota, where hate groups have been active for years. The National Socialist Movement got its start in Minnesota.

It's still unclear if the men tied to the 4th Precinct protest shootings were part of any such group. A man charged in connection with the shooting there of several Black Lives Matter protesters made racist comments online and in a video, according to court documents.

For several years, though, some groups have encouraged supporters not to join an organization.

The White Aryan Resistance website says, "Membership groups have become as obsolete as WWII aircraft carriers, making excellent targets. W.A.R. is a stealth submarine."

Audio posted on the site offers advice for not drawing the attention of law enforcement.

"You just stay by yourself, you don't network," it tells followers. "You shut up about race. You got a racial tattoo cover it up. That tattoo I have of Beowulf is covered up. You see me on the street and I've got a long-sleeved shirt on, you'd never guess I was a racist."

That lone wolf mentality is more dangerous than organized, visible hate groups, Beirich said.

"You can't find these people ahead of time, their activities are online. If you don't know about them you're not going to be aware of them. And people can very quickly move from propaganda and interaction with fellow racists to action like happened in Minnesota with Black Lives Matter," she said. "This is a serious problem. It's a big challenge for law enforcement."

The U.S. Attorney for Minnesota did not respond to an interview request for this story.

Beirich says hate groups are adept at using social media to reinforce their views and to carefully share information.

"They use every form of social media you can think of," she said. "They took up whole sectors of Reddit at one point, they use every kind of app you can think of and they will certainly harass people online in retaliation for whatever it is you said that they don't like."

The hate groups, she said, are adept at "doxing," the publication of personal information to threaten or intimidate someone.

Kade Ferris has first-hand experience.

Ferris co-founded Unity ND in 2013. The group formed to challenge a white supremacist plan to buy property in a small North Dakota town and create an all white enclave.

Hate groups posted pictures of his family and their address online.

"The reason why they do that is they are encouraging or hoping to encourage lone wolf activism which often times equates to having some whack job find you and murder you," he said.

There is some evidence to support the lone wolf theory.

The Southern Poverty Law Center examined 63 incidents from 2009 to 2015 and found 74 percent of the attacks were carried out by a someone acting alone. One or two people instigated 90 percent of attacks.

"There seems to be something about access to racist propaganda and the Internet that can definitely radicalize people," Beirich said.

While the data offer a clear look at what's happening, it doesn't offer a solution.

"So going forward it's all hard questions for us to address," said Chan. "Should we be censoring such websites, should we simply be just tracing comments on hate sites?"

Privacy and speech rights make such responses difficult, but researchers are looking for ways to identify individuals before they act, he said. "We're interested in developing techniques where we can sort of predict such things that could happen based on available data out there."

Such predictive tools are still in the development stage and it's unclear how accurate they can be in identifying potential attacks among the mass of racist comments online.

Ferris, who's received death threats, sees standing up to racist comments as a personal responsibility.

"A lot of times you'll just say, 'Oh, those are some horrible people,' and you'll walk away. But a brave person will say, 'Hey, wait, no, that's not acceptable,'" he said.

"It might be unpopular and it might make those trolls all of a sudden turn on you," he acknowledged. "Sometimes being brave means taking that hate upon yourself."