Online hate speech: Difficult to police … and define
by Theresa Howard, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2009-09-30-hate-speech_N.htm
NEW YORK — As the real world grows more tolerant of differences, the virtual world grows with hatred.
Complaints against groups on social networking sites that call for threats, violence and hatred toward people who are Jewish, black, gay or have disabilities are on the rise as Americans celebrate the 19th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the country rallies around its first black president, and gay marriage is legalized in some states.
An application on Facebook asks people to answer a quiz so they can see what “famous retard” they are most like. A Maryland police officer hosts a site with more than 100,000 members that tells people to “Stop breaking the law, retard.” In July, a YouTube video hosted by “ExecutetheGays1″ provided graphic suggestions about how to kill homosexuals. The site was taken down after five days.
The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate speech on the Web, says complaints are up this year more than 200% through July, to 1,512 complaints.”This whole era of cyberhate is one of the biggest challenges we face,” says Deborah Lauter, civil rights director of the league. “We’ve gotten to a place where we made it unacceptable for haters to hate in the public space.” So they turn to the Web, where they can be anonymous.
An offensive word all over the web
Hannah Jacobs, 53, a New York mother of two, didn’t know there was so much hatred on the Web about children with disabilities until a recent dinner, when a man sitting next to her used the word “retard.”
“I felt like I was kicked in the stomach,” says Jacobs, a former vice president for Christie’s auction house. She quit her job 10 years ago when she and her husband confirmed that their daughter, Molly, 12, was cognitively impaired. “I went home and Googled the word.”
She found hundreds of user groups with the word in it, especially on Facebook. So she started her own group challenging Facebook to “stop mocking people with disabilities.” It now has 28,000 members.
Jacobs spends about 20 hours a week combing the Web for such sites. When she finds them, she tries to contact the organizers to ask them to take the site down or change the name. Her group members write letters to government officials and to media companies that operate the sites.
“It takes a lot of work,” Jacobs says. “The goal is that once these groups are reported that Facebook take them down. I try to make the world a better place for Molly.”
But making the virtual world better is a challenge. Facebook takes a long time to respond, and hundreds of groups with the word “retard” remain, she says.
But is it ‘hate speech’?
Facebook sees it differently. Spokesman Simon Axter says complaints about nudity, pornography and harassing personal messages are responded to in 24 hours, but other sites require more scrutiny, and use of the word “retard” isn’t considered hate speech. “Our team has had a lot of discussion about … what is hate speech and where Facebook should be drawing the line,” he says. “The mere use of the word ‘retard’ is not a violation of terms of use.”
And it’s not a violation for YouTube or Google. But YouTube has created an online safety center in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League; it explains the effect of hate speech and lets people flag offending sites and videos.
“We don’t permit hate speech,” says Scott Rubin, head of global communications and public affairs for Google and YouTube. “What we mean by hate speech is that it attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status and sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Though sites may include offensive words, content is considered hate speech only if comments or videos target a person simply because of his or her membership in a certain group. “There are 20 hours of video uploaded to our site every minute. We don’t prescreen,” Rubin says. “Instead, we count on our community to know the guidelines and to flag videos that they believe violate guidelines.”
In the end, positive speech is the best way to drown out hate speech, says free-speech expert Adam Thierer.
“When advocacy groups work together and use the new technology at their disposal, they have a way of signaling out bad speech and bad ideas,” says Thierer, a senior fellow with the Progress and Freedom Foundation. “The Internet is a cultural bazaar. It’s the place to find the best and worst of all human elements on display.”
Hannah Jacobs’ group on Facebook may be found here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=63516216741 or on Twitter: http://twitter.com/missionmom1