K. Jaishankar –Editorial – Cyber Hate: Antisocial networking in the Internet © 2008 International Journal of Cyber Criminology. All rights reserved. Under a creative commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 India License 16 Copyright © 2008 International Journal of Cyber Criminology (IJCC) ISSN: 0974 – 2891 July - December 2008, Vol 2 (2): 16–20 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License , which permits unrestricted non- commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This license does not permit commercial exploitation or the creation of derivative works without specific permission. EDITORIAL Cyber Hate: Antisocial networking in the Internet K. Jaishankar The multi cultural aspect of the human beings provides diversity and uniqueness. However, the same issue which provides color for the human lives is scorned off as many find it offensive if they find people who are not similar to them. History, Geography, culture and society makes us non-identical human beings and it provides us a unique identity. The unique identity makes people to like those who look like themselves and makes them to hate others who do not look like or identify with their values and norms. If hating others stop with just a feeling, it would have been fine; however, killing people in the name of hate cannot be acceptable by any civilized society. Hate crimes was there since time immemorial, for which examples can be cited from Bible or Quran or Hindu Texts. "From the Romans’ persecution of Christians and the Nazis’ “final solution” for the Jews to the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda, hate crimes have shaped and sometimes defined world history. " (Hamm, 1996, p. 1-2, cited in BJA, 1997, p. ix) Earlier, the proliferation of hate crimes was tied to geography of the place, but now due to the advent of modern technologies such as internet, their proliferation has defied boundaries. Cyber hate or hate in the cyberspace dates back to a decade. Initially hate was spread in emails and chat rooms. But now social networking websites is being used as the medium to spread hate. Social networking websites like Orkut, Facebook and Myspace was originally intended to allow people to "socialize with known or unknown individuals for the purpose of research, entertainment, establishment of friendships or relationships due to feelings of loneliness, and sexual gratification" (Fraim, 2006, para 1). But these sites are now misused to the greatest possible extent. The use of these sites has surged in the recent past. Sinrod (2009) cites a research of Nielsen Online: The time that Americans spend on social networking sites is up a staggering 83% from just one year ago. Facebook has become the dominant social networking site, with total user minutes on the site at 13,872,640 for April 2009, up 699% from 1,735,698 comparable minutes in April 2008. Twitter is coming on like gangbusters, with total user minutes increasing a phenomenal 3,712% from 7,865 in April 2008 to 299,836 in April 2009. Meanwhile, while total user minutes for Myspace comes in at a hefty 4,973,919 for April 2009, this is down 31% from 7,254,645 in April 2008, perhaps because of the surge in use of sites like Facebook and Twitter (Para 2, 3, and 4).