Agreement on How to Address Online Hate Speech is Elusive

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) isn’t arguing for government blocking, said speaker Steve Scheinberg of the ADL. But it does want strong terms of service that providers quickly enforce. “We need help from industry to take these sites down,” he said. Facebook, for example, has no obligation to host Holocaust-denial groups, he said. And because Holocaust deniers often cloak themselves in the respectability of pseudo-academia, “it’s not just enough to teach kids the skills they need,” because identifying these sites requires such sophistication, he said.

But blocking is a poor response, said member Michael McKeehan of Verizon. “When you start talking about blocking sites, it becomes a game of Whack-a-Mole,” he said. Member Samuel McQuade of the Rochester Institute of Technology said the group still needs to figure out what it defines as “online safety.” “Is it possible to arrive at a relatively bright line with regard to educating on the prevention of communication that underpins criminality? And that’s pretty dicey stuff,” he said. Child pornography is always illegal, he said. Hate speech can be legal or illegal depending how far it goes, but Holocaust denial is protected speech, he said. Whitney Meagher of the National PTA said her group promotes creating parenting moments out of those times that children stumble across hate or other inappropriate sites.

Scheinberg reiterated that distinguishing hate sites isn’t always easy. The ADL has found examples of a hate site against Martin Luther King, Jr., that was included in a list of resources for students to conduct research, he said. Member John Morris of the Center for Democracy & Technology asked how a service provider could possibly identify hate sites if educators and others can’t. There’s a lawsuit in Massachusetts now, he said, over Armenian genocide denial sites, and the Armenian history is less well-defined than the Holocaust. Sites could certainly make a decision that they won’t host certain content, but they're also within their rights to decide they'll host anything that isn’t illegal, he said. Services make all kinds of choices, Scheinberg said. They decide whether to allow porn or whether to allow kids on the site. The “relativity” problem -- determining the relative level of hate on a site and whether it’s actually a hate site -- is overstated, he said. Holocaust denial isn’t a hard question, he said.

Jessica Gonzalez, consultant to the National Hispanic Media Coalition, said the fringes of the immigration debate spawn online vitriol that can spill over into the physical world. She gave several examples of Latinos who have been attacked or killed because of their ethnicity. The hate- mongers don’t differentiate between citizens, legal residents and undocumented immigrants, she said. Still, it’s difficult to draw a line about what should be allowed online, she said. Her group draws the line when people cross over from debating immigration to advocating violence, she said.

One tool for dealing with such sites is the power of community, said member Michael Kaiser of the National Cyber Security Alliance. Meagher said her group is challenged by the two ends of the parenting spectrum -- parents who are somewhat neglectful and parents who “know too much.” And often parents just don’t understand the digital world in which their children live, she said. Telling a bullied child to turn off the phone and not look at the messages isn’t enough and doesn’t acknowledge how they live, she said. Magid asked how to educate the general public and particularly how non-profits can keep up with the latest research. He said he’s embarrassed to admit that some of his older publications, based on the fear model of education, continue to be among the most viewed on his site. Judi Westberg Warren of Web Wise Kids said keeping up-to-date is a funding issue for non-profits.

Henry Jenkins of the University of Southern California, speaking about how youth use social media, said the idea of blocking sites at schools and expecting young people to figure out appropriateness on their own doesn’t make sense. Instead, teachers and adults need skills to guide students, he said. Jenkins, who described himself as a hard-core civil libertarian, said it’s a balancing act in asking whether to block hate sites or pages. But he expanded the question beyond mere hate sites. “I'm horrified by the comments on YouTube,” he said. Minority-generated content on YouTube is pushed down in the ratings, partly because people seek content from people like themselves, but also because of the intimidation used in comments. Any video by a minority attracts racial slurs, he said.

Ideally, communities create their own norms, he said. Behavior such as that seen on YouTube would get the commenter drummed out of fan sites that have a strong sense of appropriate conduct, he said. But because YouTube amalgamates many subcultures -- which is exciting in itself - - there are no overarching norms, he said. Nor has YouTube itself sought to lead, he said.