Hate forums: What are your thoughts?

[Dystopia]

I'm indifferent to them - As long as they merely exercise free speech, I'm not going to oppose those websites' existence - Obviously some members may take action against what they perceive to be a threat and they should be treated as criminals but a distinction should be made between legitimate incitement to criminality in the website itself and a member who happened to post there and solely decided to commit a crime.

Keep in mind that hate sites are not just white supremacist ones but a lot of anti-gay, anti-women and similar ones - There's also social institutions and associations for that purpose. Some hate groups are openly hateful and you can detect their agenda miles away, others are more subtle and try to justify their hate trough science and so on.

Stormfront, from my experience viewing a few topics, has essentially 2 kinds of members - The first is the most vulgar one and they basically hate anyone who isn't white, the second is more sophisticated, uses science as a "tool" to justify racism and merely wants white people to exist independently without mixing with other races ("Africa for Africans, Europe for Europeans, etc etc"), this person may have a decent/high IQ, listen to classical music and think they're superior and owners of ideas that no one gets b sides them.

Also, I think hate groups are probably symptoms of much larger issues, such as underlying racism and bigotry against groups of people.

Legislation about hate groups depends on the country. In America most of them are allowed, but for example in Italy stormfront was removed from search engines in google and in Germany the police frequently works undercover in stormfront and invites members for "meeting up".

In 2002, Google complied with French and German legislation forbidding links to websites which host white supremacist, Holocaust-denying, or historical revisionist material by removing Stormfront.org from their French and German indexes.[16]

In a 2001 USA Today article, journalist Tara McKelvey called Stormfront "the most visited white supremacist site on the net".[27] The number of registered users on the site rose from 5,000 in January 2002 to 52,566 in June 2005,[28] by which year it was the 338th largest internet forum, receiving more than 1,500 hits each weekday and ranking in the top one percent of internet sites in terms of use.[29][30] By June 2008, the site was attracting more than 40,000 unique users each day.[31] Operating the site from its West Palm Beach, Florida headquarters is Black's full-time job, and he is assisted by his son and 40 moderators.[12][31][32] The popularity of the site attracted attention from groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).[33] The ADL describes Stormfront as having "served as a veritable supermarket of online hate, stocking its shelves with many forms of anti-Semitism and racism".[34]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)