REPAIR Plan: Fighting Hate in the Digital World

Join us in pushing back on hate in the digital world.

National and state laws and policies require significant updates to hold social media platforms and individual perpetrators accountable for enabling or promoting hate and extremism. With this plan, ADL offers a comprehensive framework for platforms and policymakers to take meaningful action to decrease online hate and extremism. REPAIR addresses many manifestations of online hate, including online harassment, antisemitism, racism, extremist disinformation and domestic terrorism. There is no single fix to the problem, but REPAIR presents a clear path forward.

To push hate and extremism to the fringes of the digital world, we all must prioritize:

Reorient and Resource Government
Expose Platform Recklessness
Put People Over Profit
Advocate for Targets of Hate & Harassment
Interrupt Disinformation
Regulate Platforms

ADL’s three-pronged approach to national advocacy

The REPAIR Plan complements ADL’s COMBAT Plan  to fight antisemitism and PROTECT Plan to fight domestic extremism. Together, these three plans – REPAIR, COMBAT and PROTECT—along with ADL’s Democracy Initiative—round out ADL’s whole-of-society advocacy agenda.  ADL is mobilizing its full resources and capacities in pursuit of these comprehensive policy agendas on the international, national, state, and local levels.

Backspace Hate™

Advocate for Targets of Hate & Harassment

Online hate stokes fear, silences voices and causes harm to people’s personal and professional lives.
 
Backspace Hate™ is ADL's initiative supporting victims and targets of online hate and harassment by raising awareness and passing legislation to better hold perpetrators accountable for their actions online. When harassment pushes targets offline, perpetrators spew hateful messages and silence valuable voices. It’s time to backspace the hate and make room for good.

Stop Hate for Profit

Put People over Profit

Stop Hate for Profit is a diverse and growing coalition that wants social media companies to take common-sense steps to address the rampant racism, disinformation and hate on its platform. It includes thousands of businesses, numerous prominent celebrities as well as some of the most prominent civil rights groups and nonprofit organizations in the country including ADL, Color of Change, Common Sense, Free Press, LULAC, Mozilla, NAACP, National Hispanic Media Center and Sleeping Giants.

Our initial focus in June 2020 was on Facebook. Facebook’s policies and enforcement on hate speech, incitement to violence, and misinformation need to be improved and better enforced, and disproportionately harm BIPOC and LGBTQ+ users. Large groups dedicated to hate and violent conspiracies grow unchecked, and Facebook often recommends users join these groups. Political ads contain bald-faced lies, and even outright voter suppression. Misinformation and conspiracies are considered matters of debate. Victims of online harassment are left with virtually no support. Businesses’ ads are run alongside hateful content. Facebook still has significant work to do in this regard and must do so as soon as possible.

2021 Online Hate and Harassment report: Findings show the high level of online hate and harassment reported by users barely shifted year-over-year.

Exposure to Alternative & Extremist Content on YouTube
Online Holocaust Denial Report Card: An Investigation of Online Platforms' Policies and Enforcement
Free to Play? Hate, Harassment and Positive Social Experience in Online Games 2020
Disruption and Harms in Online Gaming Framework
Computational Propaganda and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election: Antisemitic and Anti-Black Content on Facebook and Telegram
Online Hate Index Report: The Digital Experience of Jewish Lawmakers
The Trolls are Organized and Everyone’s a Target: The Effects of Online Hate and Harassment
Online Hate and Harassment Report: The American Experience 2020