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In December, all three companies, together with Microsoft, announced an ambitious plan to curb the online spread of extremism through the creation of a joint industry database of 鈥渃ontent that promotes terrorism鈥� 鈥� a move that has been widely interpreted to mean that the companies will focus on propaganda created by jihadist terrorist groups like the Islamic State.

Yet when it comes to tackling right-wing extremist content and hate speech, the companies seem mysteriously helpless.

Twitter is probably the worst offender: Despite explicitly banning 鈥渁ccounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories,鈥� it has done remarkably little in the way of enforcement. In late November, it won applause from progressives when it strengthened reporting tools and banned numerous 鈥渁lternative right鈥� accounts that pumped out racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and misogynistic content, most notably that of prominent white nationalist leader Richard Spencer.

But in December, Spencer鈥檚 account was back up, and it emerged that Twitter had only banned him for violating a policy that prohibits individuals from running multiple accounts with overlapping uses. (The social media platform has not restored the account of Milo Yiannopoulos, an Alt-Right 鈥渢roll鈥� whose vicious online attacks even Spencer acknowledged as 鈥渉arassment.鈥�)

Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin has led his 鈥淭roll Army鈥� in some of the more vicious online attacks seen in recent years. But he is far from alone among haters who are increasingly using social media to intimidate and harass their enemies.

Facebook and Google, meanwhile, have done little to counter the use of their platforms to spread hateful, false 鈥渋nformation,鈥� from conspiracy theories accusing various minority groups of plotting against America to websites promoting Holocaust denial and false 鈥渇acts鈥� about Islam, LGBT people, women, Mexicans and others. Facebook鈥檚 hate speech policy, as leaked to the German newspaper S眉ddeutsche Zeitung, prohibits attacks on individuals based on their race, national origin, religion, or sexual orientation, but seemingly permits attacks on religions and nationalities more generally. And a recent report by The Guardian found that Google鈥檚 autocomplete function, which predicts what people mean to ask when they start typing, filled in 鈥渆vil鈥� after a user typed 鈥淎re Jews鈥� and 鈥淎re women.鈥�

The platform altered these particular autocomplete answers following The Guardian鈥檚 article, and appeared to take steps to assure that the top results no longer included hate sites. But if past is precedent, these Whac-A-Mole efforts are unlikely to significantly reduce the spread of hate online.

As Elon University communications professor Jonathan Albright, who studies the spread of online hate, told The Guardian, promoters of hateful false information 鈥渉ave created a web that is bleeding through on to our web. This isn鈥檛 a conspiracy. There isn鈥檛 one person who鈥檚 created this. It鈥檚 a vast system of hundreds of different sites that are using all the same tricks that all websites use. They鈥檙e sending out thousands of links to other sites and together this has created a vast satellite system of rightwing news and propaganda that has completely surrounded the mainstream media system 鈥� like an organism that is growing and getting stronger all the time.鈥�

Indeed. Even as Reddit, a major platform for online hate, announced that it would ban some of its most vicious users, Andrew Anglin, neo-Nazi editor of the viciously racist online Daily Stormer, was rallying his followers for their next attack. Urging them to create 鈥渇ake black person accounts,鈥� he wrote: 鈥淲e wish to create a state of chaos on twitter, among the black twitter population, by sowing distrust and suspicion. 鈥� Chaos is the name of the game.鈥�