Countering Hate Speech Online
For years, social media has come under fire for how it enables the likes of hate groups and authoritarian governments to spread hatred and misinformation. Many have argued that social media platforms have not taken adequate responsibility for cracking down on these issues.
The genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar is a textbook example of how social media has been utilized as an engine for hate (and ethnic cleansing) by malevolent actors. Facebook is so popular that many of the country’s 18 million Internet users mistake it for the Internet itself. The military led a hateful and pervasive campaign that included creating troll accounts and pages seemingly devoted to Burmese celebrities and war heroes as a cover [1].
The military shared fake news and hateful posts — including those of Rohingya-perpetrated crimes that didn’t occur. Though Facebook removed the senior Myanmar leaders’ official accounts in August, it failed to take timely action when extremists used its platform to stir up communal hatred against the Rohingya in 2017 [2].
The relationship between social media hatred and real-life violence has been seen elsewhere. In Germany, anti-refugee Facebook posts by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party were positively correlated to violence against refugees [3]. In India, hateful comments on WhatsApp groups have been connected to a rise in communal violence like lynching [4].
In light of not only the noxious and abusive nature of hate speech online but also its potential to cause or contribute to real life violence, it is clear more needs to be done. Social media companies need more staff fluent in local languages. The lack of which proved to be a problem in Myanmar, when Facebook had only two Burmese-speaking staff members around early 2015 and a great amount of inflammatory speech was being circulated online for an audience that had long been without any connection to the Internet [5].
It would be counterproductive to depend solely on social networks to address hate speech. As noted in a Council on Foreign Relations article, online platforms’ business models and algorithms inherently depend on maximizing reading or viewing times — in turn maximizing the risk of promoting extreme content likely to generate controversy, such as conspiracy theories or content that is “otherwise divisive, misleading or false’’ [6].
There may be other ways to deal with hate speech beyond simple censorship, which can be circumvented [7]. One can learn from #Jagärhär, a Swedish group that collectively rebuts hateful comments made on Facebook news articles. On its Facebook page, administrators share links to articles with hateful comments, directing members to “counterspeak’’ there [8].
The group consists of around 74,000 members, and its model has been imitated in 13 other nations as well. In the bigger groups (the groups range in size from 64 in #iamhereIndia to 74,274 in #Jagärhär), “their posts regularly have the most interaction, and therefore become the most visible comments’’ [9].
They tag their posts with #Jagärhär, so that fellow members can track and like them. Most news outlets on Facebook have their comments ranked by “relevance,’’ determined partially by how many reactions or replies that one receives. Liking counterspeech posts drives said posts up in terms of relevance, allowing them to rise and potentially drown out hateful posts [10].
Another alternative would be to share hateful messages more widely, as Alexandra Tweten’s Instagram account Bye Felipe does. Here, users submit images of conversations where men verbally attacked women after being ignored or rejected, spreading awareness of harassment online. Another model would be Logan Smith’s @YesYoureRacist Twitter handle, where he retweets posts he finds to almost 400,000 followers to raise awareness of racism [11].
Drawing the attention of a larger audience than before to hateful speech can prove educational. It is also probable that at least some members of larger, newer audiences may oppose the original author’s message, paving the path for counterspeech and progressive action [12].
According to recent research, banning the more numerous small hate clusters on social media before they grow can make larger ones easier to take down, as can randomly banning a small fraction of individual online haters (so as to avoid multiple lawsuits). Anti-hate members can be encouraged to form their own clusters to neutralize hate clusters [13].
At the end of the day, hate speech on the Internet is an ever-evolving problem and there is no one solution to it. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies have a responsibility to clamp down on hate speech. Readers can, through their representatives, push social media companies to adopt the above and other policies so as to ensure those who spread hate on social media meet resistance. #Jagärhär, Bye Felipe, and @YesYoureRacist (links to which are featured below) are all excellent models to emulate as to how this may be done.
References:
[1] Mozur, Paul. “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military.” The New York Times. The New York Times, October 15, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html.
[2] Ibid
[3] Müller, Karsten and Schwarz, Carlo, Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime (November 30, 2018). Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3082972
[4] Gowen, Annie, and Manas Sharma. “Lynch Mobs, ‘Cow Vigilantes’ and Whatsapp: What Hate Looks like in India.” The Washington Post. WP Company, October 31, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/reports-of-hate-crime-cases-have-spiked-in-india/?utm_term=.2712573765d9.
[5] Stecklow, Steve. “Why Facebook Is Losing the War on Hate Speech in Myanmar.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, August 15, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/.
[6] Laub, Zachary. “Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons.” Council on Foreign Relations. Council on Foreign Relations, June 7, 2019. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons.
[7] Sloat, Sarah. “‘Global Hate Highways’ Reveal How Online Hate Clusters Multiply and Thrive.” Inverse, August 21, 2019. https://www.inverse.com/article/58681-online-radicalization-hate-cluster-map.
[8] Jones, Daniel, and Susan Benesch. “Combating Hate Speech Through Counterspeech.” Berkman Klein Center, August 9, 2019. https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2019-08/combating-hate-speech-through-counterspeech.
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] Johnson, N. F., R. Leahy, N. Johnson Restrepo, N. Velasquez, M. Zheng, P. Manrique, P. Devkota, and S. Wuchty. “Hidden Resilience and Adaptive Dynamics of the Global Online Hate Ecology.” Nature News. Nature Publishing Group, August 21, 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1494-7.
Bibliography:
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-fake-news-intl/
https://theglobepost.com/2019/04/18/fake-news-war-libya/.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/548170525365320/
https://www.jagarhar.se/kolumnen/this-is-iamhere/
https://twitter.com/YesYoureRacist?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
