Social media, like most technological advances before it, has become a highly effective tool for bigots, racists, and revisionists. It is up to those of us who wish to rise above prejudice to respond and correct “misinformation” (a gentle word for lies) when we see it.

I just came across an excellent post On Reem Abeidoh’s blog on this very subject. Reem asks:

“The real people in the online world bring their prejudice to the communities they belong to. However, if there is a strong enough brigade who shuns and demotes these people, would their muscles deflate? Can the community establish an internal code to ensure that everyone feels comfortable online?”

I am not sure how enforceable a code would be. I do agree strongly that those of us who are intelligent and skilled writers and researchers (bloggers), sometimes with sizable audiences, can do much to counter the lies with a reasoned, well-researched response.

I am Jewish, and recently found myself on a Facebook group where a conspiracy theorist was explaining how the Jews control the media, the government, the banks and big business. They also incidentally helped found Nazism! In this case, one of the “sources” used to prove this was The Protocols of Zion, a book that has long been recognized by scholars as a fraud, but which is still popular with anti-Semites.

Conspiracy theorists claim that the Protocols of Zion are a master plan by “the elders of Zion.” This is patently absurd. The source material was written about Napoleon III, and was not written about Zionism, nor influenced by it. How then could it be what propagandists claim it to be? It isn’t. The Times of London exposed the hoax of the protocols in 1921, but over the years it has been convenient to ignore this, and subsequent evidence, that the protocols are bogus, because the fraud is the foundation of so many claims of a vast, global Zionist conspiracy.

When I posted this information to the Facebook group, the person I was arguing with eventually conceded this point and went on to quote other sources. I feel I made a small victory, and either embarrassed the author for his being so easily dran into this 100-year-old scam, or perhaps influenced others who might have thought his claims valid.

Based on my Facebook experience, here are my suggestions for responding to online hatred:

• Respond factually and unemotionally
• Cite reliable, unbiased sources. There are no truly unbiased sources, but don’t for example, quote a Jewish source in a Jewish argument.)
• Be logical and methodical
• Choose your cause, become an expert on it and use social media tools like RSS, Google News Alerts and Technorati blog search to track interesting conversation
• DO NOT link to racist sites and material unless you have to. This only propagates this information and improves its search engine ranking. Obviously if you are responding to someone, you have to link to that person’s blog or web site, but don’t succumb to the temptation to provide a number of links to racist content to illustrate the problem. Don’t help these people.

I’ve just started thinking about this in the past six months or so, and I would love to hear your comments on the seriousness of this problem and what bloggers can do about it.