Question: I came here to seek truth and I assume others also look for the same, which means I should expect beliefs against mine and rejection of my basics in religion. All good, but I've seen recently where some posts link to sites in which explicitly hate-speech and insulting to other beliefs is common.

In the interest of providing particulars, the incident which prompted this discussion was seeing an answer reference material from <http://shia.bs> (which is clearly anti-Shi'a). I don't want to link to that answer since I'm not interested in calling it (or the author who posted it) out in particular, I just want a general discussion on how and when such sites should be used, if at all.

For me this is very disappointing since this goes against rational reasoning and Q&A norms. And we are helping such sites spread hate and hurt the unity and peace between Muslims, which is for sure tricks of our enemies.

Should we forbid such sites?

Answer: 
I think the real question here is, **why is the link there in the first place**?

In my experience, this sort of issue typically shows up in one of three use cases:

1. A question seeking the context and/or veracity of a claim made on the site:

> 
> According to **badsite.foo**, Muslims eat babies for lunch. Does this actually happen?
> 
> 
>
2. A poster is actively trying to drive traffic to the site:

> 
> To find out what Muslims *really* believe about babies, check out **badsite.foo**.
> 
> 
>
3. A poster is actually using it as a reference:

> 
> According to one hadith (e.g. as posted on **badsite.foo**), babies are particularly delicious. While Muslim scholars have unanimously declared this particular narration as *mawdu*, it is still commonly accepted by certain fringe groups.
> 
> 
>

In the first case, I don't see anything particularly wrong with that. Such a link provides valuable context which is useful for (a) making sure that the OP is accurately understanding and representing the claim and (b) determining exactly what arguments were presented to *make* this claim so they can be verified/refuted accurately. If you're concerned that people might click through on this link in ignorance, adding a warning that it's clearly anti-whatever is easy enough, but I don't see any value in removing the link entirely.

In the second case, however, I see absolutely no value to the link: It's basically just an unsolicited advertisement and an attempt to drive people to a third-party site. When such links are tangential to the actual post and can be removed entirely without affecting anything, they should simply be removed.

The third case is where things get tricky, and these should probably be taken on a case-by-case basis. If such a site is being referenced, it should be clear exactly what value (if any) this reference has to the actual post. Anti-whatever sites are typically so full of bias, fallacies and bad rhetoric that they are just terrible sources period (from any academic perspective): If the entire answer is built around references to such a site, whether it's directly linked or not the answer is probably just a terrible answer and should be downvoted into oblivion. And when such posts are simply a better-disguised version of the second case (i.e. active attempt to drive traffic to the third-party site, rather than an honest attempt to answer the question) they should probably be deleted entirely.
If the site is marked by a reputable organization as a hate group, then I think we should not link to them. Instead, leave the link in footnotes without the http:// like I have done in [this question](https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/33364/answering-the-protagonists-of-the-misinterperted-islamic-jihad).

linking to them helps their site by driving more traffic to them. We are here to promote rational prespectives of Islam not drive traffic to irrational sites.