[JURIST] The Internet has experienced a 20 percent increase in militant and hate content over the past year, according to a report released on Monday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance [advocacy website]. The report, titled "Digital Terrorism and Hate 2010," cites [CNN report] to the low levels of regulation of Internet content as one of the enabling conditions of the increase. The increase is most prevalent in social networking sites and personal blogs. The report also singles out some examples of websites whose creators went on to carry out terrorist or hate crimes, and warned that content found online not only incited, but also detailed how to carry out such crimes.

The US State Department 2010 annual rights report released [JURIST report] last week decries Internet censorship abroad. In August, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) [advocacy website] reported that right-wing nativist and so-called "patriot" anti-government militias are again on the rise [JURIST report] in the US. The SPLC said that such groups, which had declined severely since the 1990s, are generally anti-tax, anti-immigration, and increasingly racially motivated since the election of the country's first African-American president, Barack Obama.