Left: police at the crime scene in Tel Aviv. Right: anti-gay cartoon circulating on the RuNetStudying the RuNet is no unmixed pleasure. For those of you who follow it closely, it will have been hard to miss last month's news about a gunman attacking an Israeli gay support centre. Feeding into the rich discourses of hate that crowd Russian-speaking social media, the incident sparked an outburst of hate speech in the Russian blogosphere. In the popular blog drugoi only, it generated a discussion thread of more than 2000 comments.The discussions were traced meticulously by Adi Kuntsman, who is a research fellow at Manchester University's Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures. Adi has been haunting the darker sides of the RuNet for quite some time, as a recent book publication attests. On her blog, she posted her findings on this particular incident in the shape of an essay, "Сетевые практики ненависти" ("Web Practices of Hate"), which scholars in new media, theories of emotions, and discourse studies won't want to miss. Probing the question "what is hate speech, and how does it take shape online?," Kuntsman raises a plethora of thought-provoking questions and ideas. How do processes of linking and redirecting readers "from blog to blog and from comment to comment" affect discourses of hate, for instance? How does the repetition and quotation which marks hate speech work in digital realms? On sites which compile jokes - a prized genre among Russian web users -, what is the effect/affect of anti-gay humour? And how does anti-queer hate speech relate to online expressions of hatred against those other stereotypical "Others": the Jew, the Black Man, the emigrant, the Arab...? Adi intimately nears the conclusions of Vera Zvereva's recent talk on Russian online newsreading practices when she takes Sarah Ahmed's ideas on hatred to online spheres. In Ahmed's view, as paraphrased by Adi, hatred is distributed amongst different socially marginalized groups, who - in their role of objects of hate - "связываются между собой как через сходство ('они' все не похожи на 'нас' . . .), так и через взаимозамещение (. . . черные, как и сексуальные меньшинства, заполняют наши города)."Elucidating quotations which are as grievous as they are violent, the text is unlikely to make you a cheery reader. The essay does fulfill another role, though. It sheds light on a topic which - as both Adi's and Vera's work effortlessly proves - scholars of (Russian) new media can impossibly ignore: the tendency to hate, rather than connect with, the virtual Other.ER