After Facebook banned the Ku Klux Klan, a cluster of Ukrainian users continued to post on VKontakte, a Russian social media and networking site. When the Ukrainian government banned VKontakte, that cluster moved back to Facebook, where they referred to the KKK in Cyrillic, making it difficult for Facebook’s English-language detection algorithm to catch their posts and allowing them to spread hate to other users.
Researchers outlined this phenomenon in a study released Wednesday in Nature. In it, they observe that hate spreads online like a diseased flea, jumping from one body to the next.