The Real-Life Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Battling Online Nazis

The internet is a bottomless pit of intolerance and disinformation, and in Hacking Hate, Swedish investigative reporter My Vingren dives headfirst into the ugliness. Known as the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo of Journalism” for her coverage of far-right extremism, Vingren is committed to unearthing and publicizing the myriad ways in which such malice flourishes online, and in Simon Klose’s documentary—premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival—she employs her own duplicitous sleuthing methods to immerse herself in a world of neo-Nazi memes, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and rancid populist politics. What she finds is a morass of the worst of humanity and, also, a tech industry that seems perfectly comfortable profiting from it.

It’s not news that Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and their social media ilk are platforms for noxious bigotry, and yet Hacking Hate provides a bracing insider’s look at the grossness that proliferates throughout these venues’ right-wing regions. To access those areas, Vingren has become something of a master of disguise. Using facial recognition software to alter her visage into various male and female forms, she creates a fictional virtual family of white supremacists: father Andreas, mother Johanna, and kids Svea and Ellie. Vingren concocts entire backstories for her avatars, the better to sell them as real, and by posting from their accounts with key nationalism-related hashtags, she swiftly attracts the attention of far-right users.

This process culminates with her first triumph: receiving an invite to join an exclusive group on Telegram (an instant messaging service) for the Nordic Federation, an outfit that recruits from Scandinavian countries and advocates for armed revolt in order to establish a for-whites-only Nazi Nordic region.

Vingren first attained national prominence in 2018 when she won the Prix Europa prize for European Radio Investigation of the Year for her Swedish Radio report, “The Bombings, the Security Service, and the Nazis.” It also earned her the ire of right-wingers, who subsequently made her life a living hell and forced…