Sometimes the only way out is in. Award-winning reporter My Vingren goes undercover online, using fake profiles to expose how extremist movements are using social media to recruit and radicalize. She successfully infiltrates a secret online nazi organization, only to discover it’s an influence operation. Truth and reality twist as My gets closer to the group’s inner circle and starts to question who is really pulling the strings.
Having published some of the biggest investigations into white supremacist movements in Sweden, the media has come to call her the “real life Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. But her investigations come with a price, she has to live at an undisclosed address. Vingren is not alone in questioning the prevalence of hate online. Her investigations connect her with Anika Collier Navaroli, the whistleblower instrumental in Twitter’s suspension of Donald Trump, and Imran Ahmed, a researcher sued by Elon Musk for exposing increasing hate speech on X. Together they unpack the mechanisms of big social media companies that amplify and profit from hate, and share how they are fighting to make tech platforms accountable for their role in real-world violence.
Questions of power thread throughout My’s journey. She researches a far-right influencer in real life, and shows how some of the darkest corners of the web are closer to home than we realize. Hacking Hate highlights the vulnerability of democracy and calls for action against the spread of extreme and authoritarian agendas online.