A/HRC/41/55 B. Recruitment of young people 19. One recent report indicates that the demographic of supporters of neo-Nazi and related ideologies in at least one country is increasingly younger and more violent. 35 Seen as “impressionable, lonely, marginalized, and left wanting for a sense of identity and acceptance within a group”, children and young people often lack the capacity to distinguish between truthful and inaccurate or misleading information. 36 20. The involvement of young people in neo-Nazi or Nazi movements has historical precedents. Between 1933 and 1945, German young people experienced constant, widespread exposure to Nazi ideology through school programmes, newspapers and radio programmes and through formal participation in the Hitler Youth. Nazism also relied on indoctrination of young people as a strategy for ensuring its future survival. The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls existed to ensure this indoctrination, and the former provided military training to boys who would later enter into the armed forces or the Schutzstaffel. In 1936, membership in Nazi youth groups become compulsory for all boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 17. Those groups transmitted values and beliefs to German young people, transforming their world views. Today, contemporary hate groups take a similar approach in their recruitment strategies. 21. The editor of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer stated that the website was “mainly designed to target children” for radicalization. 37 To attract children, such sites incorporate music, activities, games and cartoon characters. 38 Some hate sites present themselves as educational websites, and are filled with false information and intentionally distorted interpretations of credible academic works. Additionally, hate groups frequently employ memes as a means of steering children into sharing racist beliefs. 39 22. Hate-group leaders also focus their efforts on targeting college-bound teenagers on the basis that those groups include the future leaders of the movements. 40 In the United States, there were around 300 documented incidents of circulation of racist flyers across more than 200 campuses. After the most recent presidential election in the same country, white nationalist leaders increased their recruitment of college students. 41 23. Hate groups have increasingly infiltrated the “gaming” world as a new way to target potential members, including children as young as 13. Video games and game-related forums, chat rooms and live streaming sites (YouTube or Twitch, for example) are among the most popular spaces for neo-Nazi recruitment and radicalization. One former neo-Nazi sympathizer described the process used by hate groups as starting with slurs about different races or religions, “dropped” to test the waters. He reported that “once they sense that they have got their hooks in them they ramp it up, and then they start sending propaganda, links to other sites, or they start talking about these old kind of racist anti-Semitic tropes”.42 A media manipulation researcher observed how those groups communicated and spread out to other spaces online with the intent of not telling people specifically that they were white 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 6 Hope not Hate, State of Hate 2019: People vs the Elite?, p. 3. Julian Baumrin, “Internet hate speech and the First Amendment, revisited”, Rutgers Computer & Technology Law Journal, vol. 37, Nos. 1–2 (2011), p. 229. Michael Edison Hayden, “Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer is ‘designed to target children’ as young as 11 for radicalization, editor claims”, Newsweek, 16 January 2018. Available at www.newsweek.com/website-daily-stormer-designed-target-children-editor-claims-782401. Baumrin, “Internet hate speech”, p. 230. Hayden, “Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer”. Mark Potok, “Internet hate and the law”, Intelligence Report (March 2000). Available at www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2000/internet-hate-and-law. Southern Poverty Law Center, “The year in hate: Trump buoyed white supremacists in 2017, sparking backlash among black nationalist groups” (21 February 2018). Available from www.splcenter.org/news/2018/02/21/year-hate-trump-buoyed-white-supremacists-2017-sparkingbacklash-among-black-nationalist. Kamenetz, “Right-wing hate groups are recruiting video gamers”.