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By Root 1693 0

and social groups. If the last decade is anything to judge by, the pressure to regulate the Web is as likely to come from concerned parents, environmental groups, or various ethnic and social minorities as it is from authoritarian governments. The truth is that many of the opportunities created by a free-for-all anonymous Internet culture have been creatively exploited by people and networks that undermine democracy. For instance, it’s almost certain that a Russian white supremacist group that calls itself the Northern Brotherhood would have never existed in the pre-Internet era. It has managed to set up an online game in which participants—many of them leading a comfortable middle-class existence—are asked to videotape their violent attacks on migrant guest workers, share them on YouTube, and compete for cash awards.

Crime gangs in Mexico have also become big fans of the Internet. Not only do they use YouTube to disseminate violent videos and promote a climate of fear, but they are also reportedly going through social networking sites hunting for personal details of people to kidnap. It doesn’t help that the offspring of Mexico’s upper classes are all interconnected on Facebook. Ghaleb Krame, a security expert at Alliant International University in Mexico City, points out that “criminals can find out who are the family members of someone who has a high rank in the police. Perhaps they don’t have an account on Twitter or Facebook, but their children and close family probably do.” It’s hard to imagine Mexican police officers becoming braver as a result. And social networking can also help to spread fear: In April 2010, a series of Facebook messages warning of impending gang wars paralyzed life in Cuernavaca, a popular resort, with only a few brave people daring to step outside (it proved to be a false alarm).

The leaders of al-Shabab (“The Lads”), Somalia’s most prominent Islamist insurgency group, use text messaging to communicate with their subordinates, avoiding any face-to-face communication and the risks it entails. It’s not a particularly contentious conclusion that they have become more effective—and thus more of a menace—as a result.

Plenty of other less notorious (and less violent) cases of networked harm barely receive any global attention. According to a 2010 report from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, an international intergovernmental organization, the Internet has created a new market for trade in extinct species, allowing buyers and sellers to find each other more easily and trade more effectively. Kaiser’s spotted newt, found only in Iran, may be the first real victim of the Twitter Revolution. According to reports in the Independent, more than ten companies are selling wild-caught specimens over the Internet. Not surprisingly, the newt’s population was reduced 80 percent between 2001 and 2005 alone.

Another informal market the Internet has boosted is organ trading. Desperate individuals in the developing world are bypassing any intermediaries and are offering their organs directly to those who are willing to pay up. Indonesians, for example, use a website called iklanoke.com, a local alternative to Craigslist, where their postings usually go unmonitored by police. A typical ad from Iklanoke reads, “16-year-old male selling a kidney for 350 million rupiah or in exchange for a Toyota Camry.”

Text messaging has been used to spread hate in Africa, most recently in Muslim-Christian squabbles that erupted in the central Nigerian city of Jos in early 2010 that took the lives of more than three hundred people. Human rights activists working in Jos identified at least 145 such messages. Some instructed the recipients how to kill, dispose of, and burn bodies (“kill before they kill you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you”); others spread rumors that triggered even more violence. According to Agence France-Presse, one such message urged Christians to avoid food sold by Muslim hawkers, as it could have been poisoned; another message claimed political leaders were planning to cut