Hate groups surge online

It's a rare image, but Neo-Nazi groups still take to the streets these days, wearing brown shirts and swastikas. One such group, the National Socialist Movement, marches all across the country.

The group is headquartered in Minneapolis and considers itself more of a political party. Others consider it a hate group. "We believe that they are the largest of the neo-Nazi movements out there," Brian Marcus, of the Anti-Defamation League says.

He believes the group is growing and it's not alone. The Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of extremist groups - like the KKK, skinheads and Nazis - is up from 602 in 2000 to 844 today. That's a 40 percent increase.

One reason for their growth is the immigration debate, which is now a vital recruiting tool for the groups. Jeff Schoep, leader of the National Socialist Movement, says that's why interest in his group is higher than ever. "We've got people that are calling us and contacting us that, five or ten years ago, wanted nothing to do with us," Schoep says.

"It definitely has an impact on their size, their ability to grow and their ability to gain new members," Marcus says. He monitors online hate for the ADL. KARE 11 asked four journalism students from the University of Saint Thomas to comb the web for hate.

After we gave them a few search terms, they quickly found websites for various groups. They felt many of those sites were blatantly targeting young people. One student, Dietrich, found a site for the KKK's Youth Corps.

"It's like a corrupt version of the Boy Scouts," he said. Marcus says the groups are targeting kids through music and video games. Schoep insists the National Socialist Movement is trying to recruit college-aged kids, not teenagers.

To do that, the group started its own record label last year. It also markets its own violent, anti-Semitic video games. Samples of those items aren't just found on the group's webpage.

The Saint Thomas students found webpages for some of the NSM's music groups on MySpace, and videos promoting their video games on YouTube. "I think about YouTube and I don't think about these kind of sites being on there," one of the students said. Extremist groups now post videos of their rallies, meetings and other propaganda online, and many of those clips are viewed by thousands.

In mid-January, the Southern Poverty Law Center found about 12,000 such clips on video-sharing websites. "You just randomly come in contact with this stuff and it hurts," says Fabian, a Saint Thomas student who says this is not the first time he has stumbled onto racism online. Some of it is more subtle.

For example, when you search for "Martin Luther King" on Google, one of the top sites is www.martinlutherking.org.

"It doesn't look bad at all," said one student after first viewing the website. But after reading further, she realized it's run by a white supremacist group. "This looks just like a general Martin Luther King website that maybe a kid could go on and use as references for a school project," she says.

It's so tricky, MTV's Rock the Vote Campaign linked to that website on Martin Luther King, Jr. day this year. "They did apologize for it and it was only up for a few hours," Marcus says.

"But the extremists caught right onto it. They said, 'Look at this, we fooled them.'" Online racism doesn't just come from organized groups.

Rassacin Lee, a University of Minnesota student, recently found a couple of anti-Hmong groups on Facebook.com, a popular website for college students. One group was for "all people in favor of ridding Hmong hunters from the State of Wisconsin.

" "Some of them even said if you see Hmong hunters in the woods that you should shoot first and ask questions later," Lee recalls. The web pages featured pictures of Chai Vang, who killed six white hunters in Wisconsin in 2004. It appears the pages were created by college students in Wisconsin.

Even if it was a joke, it's just one of many recent examples of racism at college campuses spreading to the internet. Earlier this month, at the University of Delaware, some students dressed as landscapers for a Cinco de Mayo party. Their name tags said "Pedro" and "Jose.

" On the back, their shirts said "Spic and Span Gardeners." The photos ended up on Facebook, to the disgust of many Latino students at the university. In February, white students at California's Santa Clara University dressed as Latino janitors, gardeners and pregnant teens at a "South of the Border" party.

And at Clemson and the University of Connecticut, so-called "Gangsta" parties offended African-Americans. "I think we really have to be mindful about what we say about other people," Rassacin Lee says. As disturbing as these examples of online hate might be, most students realize it's a very small part of society.

"I feel like they're wasting their time doing that because the rest of the world is moving forward," Dietrich says. "If they want to do that with their lives, that's their business, just as it's my business to spread diversity." Even though the Constitution protects free speech, websites like YouTube and Facebook don't condone it.

They have policies banning content that's "hateful" or "racially offensive." But they need people to report the offensive material. "As a company, they just simply couldn't police it all if they wanted to," says Brian Marcus of the ADL.

"If they started now, by the time they got to the end, they'd have to start all over again." The National Socialist Movement is upset its members get kicked off so frequently. Schoep says his group even started its own "all-white" version of MySpace.

Partners Against Hate provides resources to help parents deal with hate online. As always, it's important for parents to know what their kids are doing online. It's recommended that families keep computers in public places.

And it's always good to talk with your kids about racism and discrimination.