Social Media and Hate Speech

Rab Nawaz

Social media plat­forms, includ­ing Face­book, Twit­ter, YouTube and oth­ers, have become a sig­nif­i­cant part of our indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive lives. But with this has also come the preva­lence of hate speech. It is unde­ni­able that the on screen has an impact on the off screen and vice ver­sa. What was pre­vi­ous­ly unachiev­able by dozens of peo­ple in weeks is now with­in the reach of a sin­gle per­son with­in hours. Of all the pit­falls of social media, the murki­est one is its poten­tial to spread hate speech and con­se­quent­ly affect the lives of mil­lions. The fault line lies in the ill-defined nature and bound­aries of both social media and hate speech.

The con­tent on social media dif­fers from tra­di­tion­al media in many respects, includ­ing qual­i­ty, reach, fre­quen­cy, acces­si­bil­i­ty, usabil­i­ty, imme­di­a­cy and per­ma­nence. But the most impor­tant aspect which dis­tin­guish­es social media from oth­er media is the free­dom enjoyed by the user in gen­er­at­ing and con­sum­ing the con­tent. Unlike tra­di­tion­al media, there is no con­cept of any inter­me­di­a­cy, gate-keep­ing or edi­to­r­i­al fil­ter. The lack of such fil­ters, cou­pled with an instant and glob­al out­reach, means an unre­strict­ed, dis­cre­tionary oppor­tu­ni­ty in spread­ing mes­sages of one’s choice.

Mass media in today’s time rests on the premise of free speech. While in some cas­es hate speech is quite obvi­ous, there exists a thin line between free speech and hate speech. Hate speech, as defined by the Coun­cil of Europe, means any com­mu­ni­ca­tion that den­i­grates a par­tic­u­lar per­son or a group on the basis of race, col­or, eth­nic­i­ty, gen­der, dis­abil­i­ty, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, nation­al­i­ty, reli­gion, or oth­er char­ac­ter­is­tic. It can be in the form of any speech, ges­ture or con­duct, writ­ing, or dis­play and usu­al­ly marks incite­ment, vio­lence or prej­u­dice against an indi­vid­ual or a group. As a result it gen­er­ates stig­mas, stereo­types, prej­u­dices and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices against those who are con­struct­ed as being dif­fer­ent. Most of the coun­tries have laws against hate speech, though the vocab­u­lary used varies to some degree.

As the role of social media is con­strued large­ly in terms of increas­ing the bound­aries of free speech through greater per­son­al free­dom and access to infor­ma­tion, the prob­lem of hate speech on social media becomes com­pli­cat­ed. It would be help­ful to see what kind of stan­dards and fil­ters in social media, if any, work to bal­ance out the greater access to infor­ma­tion with that of hate speech.

For the sake of a gen­er­al sense of the prob­lem at hand, we can take a look at the three most com­mon forms of social media, i.e. Face­book, Twit­ter and YouTube. On Face­book the pri­ma­ry edi­to­r­i­al fil­ter is the rules and restric­tions pro­vid­ed in Face­book’s State­ment of Rights and Respon­si­bil­i­ties. Every user has to accept these terms by virtue of sign­ing up for an account on the site. But ensur­ing that Face­book’s com­mu­ni­ty of more than 900 mil­lion users abides by the com­pa­ny’s user poli­cies is a task that requires hun­dreds of employ­ees. In real­i­ty there are not enough peo­ple out there to check the con­tent and ensure the imple­men­ta­tion of these poli­cies.

With regard to hate speech, the State­ment of Rights and Respon­si­bil­i­ties states: “Face­book does not per­mit hate speech. While we encour­age you to chal­lenge ideas, insti­tu­tions, events and prac­tices, it is a seri­ous vio­la­tion to attack a per­son based on their race, eth­nic­i­ty, nation­al ori­gin, reli­gion, sex, gen­der, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, dis­abil­i­ty or med­ical con­di­tion.” Face­book sel­dom takes action on its own; most­ly it is users who report cer­tain accounts, pages, com­ments or any oth­er con­tent they deem to be in vio­la­tion of the Face­book pol­i­cy. After receiv­ing a report, Face­book reviews it and either removes it from the site if found abu­sive, or sends an email to the per­son who has report­ed the page stat­ing that they do not think that the con­tent in ques­tion con­sti­tutes hate speech. The edi­tors who review these reports are based in var­i­ous local­i­ties includ­ing Cal­i­for­nia, Austin, Dublin and Hyder­abad. These edi­tors field user reports of inap­pro­pri­ate posts around the clock.

Some­times con­tent on Face­book vio­lates not just the com­pa­ny’s poli­cies, but the exist­ing law of the land. When­ev­er some­thing is found against the law, but not against Face­book poli­cies, Face­book is at lib­er­ty to share it with cor­re­spond­ing law enforce­ment.

Reply­ing to a crit­i­cal ques­tion about allow­ing hate speech on Face­book, the offi­cial state­ment released read: “We take our State­ment of Rights and Respon­si­bil­i­ties very seri­ous­ly and react quick­ly to remove report­ed con­tent that vio­lates our poli­cies. In gen­er­al, attempts at humor, even dis­gust­ing and dis­taste­ful ones, do not vio­late our poli­cies. When real threats or state­ments of hate are made, how­ev­er, we will remove them. We encour­age peo­ple to report any­thing they feel vio­lates our poli­cies using the report links locat­ed through­out the site.”

Twit­ter, on the oth­er hand, seems to place far more empha­sis on free speech. Unlike oth­er social media net­works includ­ing Face­book and Tum­blr, Twit­ter’s terms of ser­vice do not cov­er hate speech. How­ev­er, accord­ing to a report in the Finan­cial Times, Twit­ter is wrestling with min­i­miz­ing hate­ful com­ments while attempt­ing to pre­serve free speech at the same time. Dick Cos­to­lo, Twit­ter’s chief exec­u­tive, said he was frus­trat­ed by tack­ling the prob­lem of “hor­ri­fy­ing” abuse while main­tain­ing the com­pa­ny’s mantra that “tweets must flow”. Twit­ter, self-described as “the free speech wing of the free speech par­ty”, has large­ly resist­ed any restric­tions on con­tent by either gov­ern­ments or cit­i­zen groups.

YouTube is anoth­er very pop­u­lar social media plat­form. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. Since it is not pos­si­ble to pre-screen this much con­tent, YouTube fol­lows an inno­v­a­tive com­mu­ni­ty polic­ing sys­tem that involves users in help­ing to enforce YouTube’s stan­dards. Mil­lions of users report poten­tial vio­la­tions of Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines by select­ing the “Flag” link while watch­ing videos. YouTube’s Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines pro­hib­it pro­mot­ing hate speech and vio­lence against oth­ers, or even depict­ing ‘gra­tu­itous vio­lence’. Mean­while, YouTube is capri­cious and arbi­trary about con­tent that they’ll take down on the basis of hate speech.

The con­tent on social media, includ­ing that of hate speech, depicts ground real­i­ties. Con­sid­er that accord­ing to a Pew Research around 50% of Pak­ista­nis con­sid­er Shias as non-Mus­lims. So it’s not sur­pris­ing that there is a lot of anti-Shia sen­ti­ment found on social media. Search­es on YouTube return dozens of videos of banned sec­tar­i­an and ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions which pro­vide incite­ment to vio­lence, weapons train­ing, speech­es by Jiha­di lead­er­ship, and gen­er­al mate­r­i­al intend­ed to rad­i­cal­ize poten­tial recruits. YouTube also has the video of a speech by a sec­tar­i­an ter­ror­ist leader named Haq Nawaz Jhangvi giv­ing a so-called ‘fatwa’ pro­claim­ing that any­one who doubts the apos­ta­sy of a Shia is also an apos­tate. Jhangvi’s fol­low­ers can be found killing inno­cent Shias all over Pak­istan.

Face­book and Twit­ter are also ram­pant with hatred and incite­ment to vio­lence against minor­i­ty sects such as Shias and Ahme­dies. Not only sects but indi­vid­u­als hav­ing a crit­i­cal stance against the dom­i­nant reli­gious cler­gy and pow­er­ful estab­lish­ment are tar­get­ed. They are not only called trai­tors and apos­tates but are also issued with explic­it threats against their lives. Face­book pages such as ‘My Ide­ol­o­gy is Islam and my Iden­ti­ty is Pak­istan’, ‘Jaago Pak­istan’, ‘Enemies of Pak­istan’ and oth­ers with hun­dreds of thou­sands of ‘likes’ indulge in unstop­pable cam­paigns of vil­i­fi­ca­tion and incite­ment to vio­lence against oth­er nations, eth­nic­i­ties, sects, creeds, and indi­vid­u­als. Sim­i­lar­ly Twit­ter has active han­dles of a great num­ber of banned out­fits. With a stag­ger­ing num­ber of fol­low­ers, they have been known to engage in active hate cam­paigns from time to time.

This was the domes­tic con­text, but hate speech on social media exists on a glob­al scale too. The most com­mon­ly occur­ring form of this is gen­der stereo­typ­ing, sex­u­al abuse, and pro­mo­tion of vio­lence. A page titled ‘Good Girl Gina’ with mil­lions of fol­low­ers is a cam­paign for degrad­ing women and incit­ing vio­lence against them. Sim­i­lar­ly anoth­er page titled ‘12-year-old Slut’ vil­i­fies female teenagers and calls for aggres­sion and sex­u­al vio­lence against them. The glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of vio­lence is anoth­er online trend. When on July 20 2012, a man named James Holmes walked into a packed mid­night screen­ing of The Dark Knight Ris­es in the Unit­ed States and opened fire, the shoot­ing result­ed in the death of 12 peo­ple and the injury of 59 oth­ers. Bizarrely, var­i­ous pages cel­e­brat­ing and hon­or­ing Holmes popped up on Face­book.

It is dif­fi­cult to con­trol who posts what on social media. Gen­er­al­ly social media sites do have terms of use on what can and can­not be post­ed. YouTube and Face­book say that they review post­ings that are flagged or report­ed as inap­pro­pri­ate to deter­mine whether those post­ings are vio­lat­ing their terms of use. But it is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to mon­i­tor post­ings from mil­lions of users, par­tic­u­lar­ly if the lan­guage used is not one of the inter­na­tion­al lan­guages. More­over, diverse social and legal con­texts which deter­mine the para­me­ters of free and hate speech are not uni­ver­sal­ized. Sim­i­lar­ly what is called hate speech in one coun­try could be free speech in anoth­er.

The con­tro­ver­sial YouTube video ‘Innocence of Mus­lim­s’ is a good case in point. Accord­ing to Google, the com­pa­ny which owns YouTube, the ‘Innocence of Mus­lim­s’ video does not vio­late terms of ser­vice for YouTube regard­ing hate speech because it is focused on the Mus­lim reli­gion and not the peo­ple who prac­tice it. Rachel Whet­stone, senior VP for Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy at Google said: “One type of con­tent, while legal every­where, may be almost uni­ver­sal­ly unac­cept­able in one region, yet viewed as per­fect­ly fine in anoth­er”

In Pakistan’s con­text it becomes much more dif­fi­cult because of the social set­ting. Reli­gious con­tent enjoys such blan­ket immu­ni­ty and unques­tioned accep­tance in Pak­istan that peo­ple find it too sen­si­tive to delin­eate whether some con­tent in ques­tion is just reli­gious or hate speech preached in terms of reli­gion.

Con­tent con­tain­ing hate speech will always exist and social media has made it more inter­ac­tive which aug­ments chances of direct con­flict. There is thus a need to review hate speech leg­is­la­tion. Nev­er­the­less, the law may not always be a panacea to hate, nei­ther is gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship. In fact it’s very hard to cre­ate legal pro­hi­bi­tion or pre­scrip­tion against the free flow of infor­ma­tion on social media.

There is a need to deal with hate speech on social media in oth­er, more cre­ative ways. The best anti­dote to hate speech is more speech. Pub­lic aware­ness of hate speech on social media can do a lot to help sen­si­tize users, Inter­net com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments. There is also a need to pop­u­lar­ize and cir­cu­late reports and mate­ri­als relat­ed to hate speech on the Inter­net. Social media has tak­en our lives from a pri­vate to a more pub­lic sphere. Its influ­ence on our lives grows day by day and it has changed the way we com­mu­ni­cate and inter­act with each oth­er. It is there­fore cru­cial to embed this new com­mu­ni­ca­tion par­a­digm with tol­er­ance so that access to greater infor­ma­tion does not have to be pre­served at the expense of spread­ing hate speech.