Hate Speech — Cortez Baylor на DTF

Every day technology provides people with new and easy ways to make the world even smaller. Nowadays people have become able to share and participate virtually in any activity that takes place anywhere including those with a rather hostile attitude. The policies to prevent hate speech should be revised and even changed because they do not fit the desired goal which is reducing violence and adopting a more peaceful language.

Hate speech is the virtual translation of what might be a violent action in real life toward others. Since the social media websites provide the opportunity to many communities to share their ideas and lifestyles among their members, many of those members do not have the same attitude. Almost all websites have the same characteristics concerning rules that the users must follow in order to remain active and not to lose their membership. The main point found in social media is banning hate speech that could be against religion, race, or nationality. The owners of websites claim that such rules will reduce the violence in real life because the users will be a part of a virtual community and would learn how to be less aggressive and follow a certain way of life. The reason behind this extremity is the translation of hate speech into real life. Citron and Norton show historical facts that took place because of the hate speech:

History and social science confirm that hate speech may facilitate acts of violence against members of targeted groups. For instance, digital hatred helped inspire the 1999 shooting of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Jews in suburban Chicago by Benjamin Smith, a member of the white supremacist group World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) that promotes racial holy war. (1447-1448).

The previous passage shows the exact expression of hate speech when it is no longer locked inside the virtual world and the need to issue rules to prevent this language of hatred. Supporters of this policy argue that the lack of restrictions will definitely result in more violence.

The policy of preventing the hate speech does not fit everywhere; while a bunch of rules proved to be handy in some parts of the world, each country has its own rules which are connected with the country’s agenda and political attitude. Users must follow the laws of both the website and their government; doing so in many cases leads to some kind of confusion. For example, some people may not comprehend according to what law a group, status, or image gets banned. Twitter blocked a handful of the resulting tweets in France, but only because they violated French law. People may not understand why sharing an idea must go through all those obstacles that differentiate and contradict each other in several points. The websites developers will finally find themselves lost because their efforts to make the real world less aggressive are becoming useless. As a result, users will start to believe that each website is devoted to one society, and it does not match the developers’ claim to make it for everyone. The best example is that the two most famous social media websites Facebook and Twitter prohibit the negative and hate speech of nationalities; however, in almost all countries in the Middle East, there is a different story. People in the Middle East and Arabs need to show their hatred toward Israel and Jewish religion; At the same time, they cannot do that on the web because of the policy that prevents the hate speech in relation to nationalities and religions. This situation will lead to many problems for the users, and it proves the above hypothesis that social media target specific societies. This hypothesis eventually leads people to believe that the prohibition of hate speech in social media is actually ineffective or, at least, does not suit other communities that are considered big.

Prevention rules do not consider multiculturalism and deal with users as if they live in the same place. Those who operate the social media must take into consideration that when launching a global website, they are designing it to be used by multicultural users. Those users have their own cultures and beliefs and may not agree with what the developers consider right or wrong. The policy statements for the websites give the impression that the owners of the websites are the rulers of the world, and people must follow their leads. For example, in Facebook’s policy statement, the site owners have the right to delete what they consider inappropriate. Facebook reserves the right to remove content if it believes that it violates the Statement. Facebook may not always exercise its discretion wisely. It leads to the understanding that users must adopt the way of thinking of the website owners in order to become a part of the virtual world. To solve this problem, websites owners must adopt several policies instead of one if they want to be more logical. They have to allow people to express what they really feel or what they are obligated to express in some countries. Policy makers must always remember that with or without their policy regarding hate speech, people will not love each other, and the real world will not turn into Utopia. The goal behind banning the hate speech is impossible to achieve.

In conclusion, prohibition of hate speech in social media seemed to be a good way to reduce hatred between people. Nevertheless, this policy faced several obstacles like the contradiction between the users and the law of the country where they live, and the feeling that programmers wanted to educate the users while the violence in the real life had not reduced. Those facts must push policymakers forward to adopt a new policy that allows people to share what they really believe in as the main goal of hate speech prohibition is impossible to achieve.