How can we fight hate speech
on the internet?
Hate speech is referenced often in the media. In many countries, people are discussing what social media companies, the state, and society can do against it. But what is exactly? Why is hate speech an important problem? And what can we do against it? These are the topics that will be discussed in this article.
First of all, hate speech covers angry, discriminating, cynical or offensive language on the internet. Generalizations of individual cases to defame whole groups are also covered by the term. In social networks, political topics are an important part of the communication there. As there are controversial topics, there are also different opinions, world views, and personalities. Especially in social networks, we can see that many of these discussions get out of control and that people don’t try to discuss based on facts. Instead, they are only insulting other discussion participants, politicians or the initiator. An important point here is to realize that banning hate speech does not necessarily mean banning controversial opinions. A comment is not hate speech because of the opinion, which is behind. Often only the way it is presented and whether the author allows different opinions makes a comment to hate speech.
However, hate speech is often difficult to recognize. Racism can be hidden behind kind words and very often the context makes a comment being hate speech because there can be complex references to daily politics or occurrences. So, a complete understanding of the current situation is needed to detect hate speech.
A big part of the discussions is nowadays held online on social networks. Hate speech poisons the climate there while moderate opinions don’t seem to be represented at all so that discussions tend to be dominated by extreme positions. This is a problem because discussions and competition based on arguments are the glue of democracy and society. Only through discussions and opinion-forming, a society can face new problems and come to a good and moderate solution, where most or all people can agree on. If argument-based discussions stop taking place and people start insulting each other, extreme opinions remain extreme, people’s opinions remain immature and public decision-making is impossible. The effect, that people start withdrawing from those discussions because they are disgusted enhances the problems with decision-making even further.
But what can societies do against it? What can we all do against it? One reason, why we have these problems with hate speech is because the fight against hate speech is extremely difficult. In basically every democratic country, there are discussions about how we can face hate speech online. Some countries made laws against it, which are supposed to help in the fight against hate speech. In many countries, hate speech is at least in some parts forbidden. So e.g. in Finland, insulting a group because of race, nationality, ethnicity, religion or conviction, sexual orientation, disability, or a comparable basis is forbidden. Most European countries have similar regulations, while on the other hand in the USA almost only direct calls to violence are forbidden since freedom of speech is a traditionally very important right there. However, many countries lack a good prosecution of hate speech. The laws were made for analogous contexts to restrict hate statements of mainly well-known people in the public. But on the internet, basically everyone can have a huge reach and the number of statements increased a lot. Prosecution of all these hate statements would require a huge capacity in the justice system and would also take too long. When a judge has decided, the hate statement is very old at that point and has no impact anymore. So Germany passed a law in 2017, where social media platforms are obliged to take care, that content on their platforms does not violate laws in case of discrimination, insults or similar. Hate speech shall be deleted by the platforms themselves, otherwise, they will be punished. But this raises other problems. Social networks want to stay safe, so they tend to delete everything, which may violate any laws. The deletion of controversial opinions may be collateral damage in this case.
Also, the decision, which content gets deleted is made by a private organization and the justice system is completely out. All of these problems with that law can lead to a limitation on freedom of speech and many people are against it. But in general, all current regulations have problems dealing with hate speech since they are still a big (and probably growing) problem.
There are also some actions, everyone can do to fight hate speech. Participating in the comment sections of social networks might help. The goal is fighting hate speech, where it is possible in the public parts, so it is clear to the people who are hating that their behaviour is not ok. If all people make the internet a bit to a better place, there may be a chance to fight hate speech in a better way, than all regulations could do. Also, it is your responsibility to take care that you don’t produce hate speech by yourself. This may seem obvious, but sometimes hate speech is hard to recognise, and comments appear to be hate speech only on the second view. The short times between writing a text and its publishing can lead to premature publishing without thinking enough about the content. So more emotions than are good for a text can be there and unreflected statements are the consequence.
So hate speech on the internet, especially on social networks, is a big challenge in the future. Hate speech is difficult to recognize while laws fighting hate speech are difficult to design so that they are currently not effective against hate speech or are affecting freedom of speech on the internet. Therefore, it is also the responsibility of everyone to maintain a good discussion culture, so not the hate and the loudest people win the debate, but the facts, at least in public sections.
