Yahoo News ‘Hacking Hate’ Review: An Alarming Documentary on the Power of Far-Right Social Media Influencers
In case you weren’t aware of the evils of social media, or if you otherwise needed another reason to despise Elon Musk, it’s worth taking a look at Hacking Hate, an eye-opening study of the power that far-right influencers wield both online and in the real world.
Directed by Simon Klose (TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard) and featuring Swedish investigative reporter My Vingren, the film ushers the viewer down a rabbit hole where muscle-bound YouTubers, racist zealots and DJs-turned-Russian agitators pollute the internet in pursuit of personal and political plunder. It’s an ugly world to enter, and one that the brave Vingren never shies away from, putting herself at risk as she tries to get to the bottom of a long and elusive digital trail.
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It all begins when Vingren, whose journalistic exploits and hacking capabilities have earned her the nickname “the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” in Sweden, starts looking into a local YouTuber with a sizeable following who goes by the name of Golden One. His motivational videos, where he pumps iron, drinks protein shakes, quotes Joseph Goebbels and occasionally dresses in outfits that make him look like he’s auditioning for the next He-Man movie, are both disturbing and, honestly, quite lame.
But the journo discovers that Golden One has some even more disturbing followers, including Nordic extremist groups connected to a high school student who went on a stabbing spree in 2022. The whole point of Vingren’s efforts, which require her to assume various fake identities as she infiltrates far-right networks, is to expose the links between online activities and violence that happens in the real world. Hate on social media fuels the fire for hate crimes committed by men (they’re always men) who are groomed on social media, in a cycle that gets worse and worse with every new hit and like.
This is precisely the point made during an interview with Anika Collier Navaroli, a U.S.-based lawyer who was part of Twitter’s Safety Policy Team and tried to ring the alarm bell about online instigators, including former President Donald Trump, whose tweets could have dangerous consequences. Alas, Twitter didn’t heed her warnings, and the result was the Capitol attacks on January 6.
As Hacking Hate goes on to demonstrate, billion-dollar companies like YouTube (owned by Google) and Twitter (now owned by Musk and renamed X), are hardly interested in policing users who help to drive their profits. And the reality is that far-right hate speech is a profitable business, attracting people who spend a lot of time on their phones or in front of their computers, spewing racism to give their own lives a purpose.
All of this is illustrated by the strange and somewhat confounding trajectory of a man named Vincent, whom Vingren discovers while investigating Golden Boy and then tracks throughout Scandinavia, where he pops up at some point in a house in Norway and reveals himself to be one of the worst neighbors in history. It’s not worth spoiling where things go from there, but let’s just say that Vingren’s clever detective tactics and stubborn persistence manage to reveal a rather surprising backstory to Vincent, taking us from Jamaican DJ sets on the West Coast to Moscow and the notorious Wagner mercenary group.
Working without much in terms of visuals but talking heads and screens, Klose manages to make his film feel both suspenseful and informative. He convincingly uses Vingrend’s story — which she eventually publishes in the Swedish antiracist magazine Expo, founded by Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson — as the narrative thread to tie together elements that appear to be disparate on the surface but, thanks or no-thanks to social media, are all connected.
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