Hate Speech on Social Media, Why Self-Regulation could be the best approach

My guest writer this week is Jeremy Murphy, a writer, book editor and digital marketing strategist based in Ireland. Jeremy runs a content writing and digital marketing service called YourStory – you can discover more about it HERE 

BY JEREMY MURPHY

If you use social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, or a content-sharing site like YouTube, there is high chance you have either participated in, or observed from afar, a lively debate. People often use these channels to debate social issues, promote a cause, or vent frustrations and anger over some injustice, wrong or iniquity.

If you do use them, you will also have, most likely, seen the darker side to these debates. Some users are less than polite, and some users are downright hateful and inflammatory. Social media has brought us enormous benefits. We are more inter-connected than ever, knowledge and information is shared seamlessly, and small businesses have access to invaluable tools and potentially unlimited markets; I know just how significant the latter is through my work as a content writer and digital marketing strategist. However, social media has a dark side; these platforms have caused a substantial rise in so called ‘hate speech’.

Social Media, Why Self-Regulation could be the best approach

Which brings us to this week’s announcement: the negotiating teams from Fianna Fail, Fine Gale and the Green Party launched their programme for government. Some of the more controversial aspects, like housing and environmental policy, have received much traction. However, hate speech has largely passed without comment. They plan to introduce a new hate speech law, following last year’s ‘consultation’ by Charlie Flanagan, Ireland’s Minister for Justice.

Heavy-handed legislation is not always the best way to combat hate speech on the internet. In another context, the document derides the concept of social media giants ‘regulating themselves’, but they have, in recent years, took significant measures to police online content.

Before we get to that however, what exactly is ‘hate speech’? Hate speech is speech that endorses and/or encourages violence, hatred or discrimination against a particular group, based on their race, religion or some other distinguishing feature of that group.

Many countries have laws that cover hate speech. Ireland’s equivalent is the Prohibition Against the Incitement to Hatred Act of 1981. Critics say this act needs to be broadened, strengthened and expanded. The ICCL (Irish Council for Civil Liberties) for example, although eager to protect freedom of expression, agree that it needs to be broadened to include more variations of hate-speech.

I agree in part. Anti-hate speech law does have a place in our society, and the internet has made this clear. But there is a way of drafting hate speech legislation that protects all the rights involved. True, people have to right to be protected from harm and violence, but persons also have a right to hold controversial views, beliefs or opinions.

I think the old, common law understanding of incitement could help us find that balance. According to a landmark ruling, People (AG) v Capaldi, incitement is: ‘(A) person may truly incite another to commit a crime by the action of stirring up enmity in his mind against another, or by offering some pecuniary or other inducement.’ A person was guilty of incitement, if he or she directly incited another person to commit a crime. The important word here is ‘incite’. To be guilty of incitement, the prosecution has to prove that you specifically compelled, or incited, the person to commit the crime. For modern advocates of hate-speech laws, what is important is the belief, whether the belief is wrong and inherently offensive. For some advocates of hate-speech, if a belief is wrong and repugnant to society, it should be censored regardless of whether it incites a crime or not.

This can be illustrated by the recent controversy over trans-gender rights, sparked by a tweet sent by the novelist JK Rowling where she criticised the use of the term ‘people who menstruate’. Rowling had previously caused controversy when she supported activist Maya Forstater. Forstater was sacked from her job at the Centre for Global Development, an NGO. The organisation dismissed her for holding the view that men who ‘transition’ to female, ie undergo gender reassignment surgery, should not be permitted to identify as women on their birth certificates and other official documents. She sued her former employer for unfair dismissal, and lost; the courts holding that her view did not qualify as a belief under equality legislation. Whether a biological man who undergoes this surgery can call him/herself a woman, is an argument for another day.

The question here is; is it a belief that someone should be prevented from expressing? While Ms Forstater was not prosecuted for hate-speech, some advocates of hate-speech claim views like hers should be. I disagree.

Prosecuting someone for promoting a belief system, however wrong and repugnant you find that belief system, is never right, unless it directly incites a crime.

Moreover, laws like this could fundamentally change the internet landscape. Our existing social media landscape is dominated by platforms like Twitter which, despite all their flaws, are extraordinary confluences of different backgrounds, creeds, and views. We risk creating an internet of virtual ghettos, where communities are divided by pixelated walls.

While social media giants have been slow to act, they have a role to play, and there has been some promising signs over the last few months.

Facebook have recently expanded their definition of what constitutes ‘terrorism’, appointed a new oversight panel to review decisions made to ban certain inflammatory content and, most significantly, they now used artificial intelligence in the form of algorithms to scan (‘crawl) their site in order to flag hateful, inflammatory content.

Facebook algorithms use some complex artificial intelligence but, to simplify, bots or spiders are fed hundreds of thousands of datasets, which include a variety of examples of hate speech. The bots are then able to grade the material they crawl on a spectrum. If the material crosses a certain threshold, it is flagged or removed.

Facebook insist there is still a role for human adjudicators, and this is good because when it comes to policing the internet, context is everything. YouTube, for example, have encountered this problem when trying to eliminate far-right propaganda from their platform. While it sounds simple enough, algorithms crawl sites for keywords and, depending on the frequency of certain words in the content, the content is flagged. However, words can mean very different things, depending on the context the word was used in. So, while words like ‘Aryan race’, ‘world Jewish conspiracy’, and ‘the fatherland’, can signify Neo-Nazi, far-right material, they can also signify a benign historical documentary on Nazi ideology.

Context, tone, and meaning is everything. Artificial intelligence is still not intelligent enough to appreciate these nuances; humans are. Another difficulty is language. It is easier for the bots to ‘machine learn’ English, Mandarin or Spanish, as these languages are spoken by ten of millions, and its therefore easier to compile datasets that can be built into complex, scanning and crawling algorithms that can flag hateful content.

However, when it comes to languages with small numbers of speakers, like Assamese or Burmese, it is more difficult. The importance of this was emphasised recently, in the most sinister of ways. While only 5% of the population of Myanmar (formerly Burma) have internet access, Facebook was used to spread hateful propaganda against the Rohingya Muslims of Rakhine province in the north of the country, during the Rohingya crisis of 2015; it is widely accepted that the Myanmar government subjected the Rohingya population to acts of terrorism, including indiscriminate shooting and bombing of villages. Ditto for the Bengali-speaking Muslim minority in Assam state in Northern India. Assam-speaking nationalists, allegedly used Facebook to generate hate against the Muslim minority; on a Facebook group, they were referred to as rats, their cultural influence on the region likened to a virus, and others called for a genocide/forcible repatriation of them.

Facebook have recently addressed the problem of crawling languages with fewer speakers. Recently, rather than bots crawling for individual words, which of course vary from language to language, they identify conceptual similarities on a statistical map.

I think governments like the Irish government should be mindful of these developments, before they go rushing in to police and regulate the internet, when companies, that know their own product, can often regulate themselves in a fairer, more equitable way. If Facebook and other giants don’t act, they will suffer; there is only so much hate the social-networking public can endure.

While they have been slow, in some cases they are right to be. In our society, we often focus excessively on rights. The right to free speech, against the right to be protected from harm. But free speech isn’t merely a right, it is also a virtue, something good for human society. Being exposed to views you don’t agree with, that challenge your basic assumptions, is good for self development and social development. If you don’t allow yourself to be challenged, your views won’t develop, mature and account for change; they will die in stasis, insulated by a false sense of invincibility. Banning and excluding people you do not agree with does not mean they disappear, they just become even more frustrated, bitter and hateful. Better to let them expose their views to public scrutiny, and if they are as wrong as you think they are, their views will die in the open market of ideas.

For more information on Jeremy visit his website here

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