In Brussels on Tuesday 31 May the European Union got together with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft to announce they reached agreement on a code of conduct to reduce the spread of online hate speech in Europe.
As part of the announcement, the tech companies made a commitment to review and remove illegal hate speech within 24 hours of posting.
Referring to recent terror attacks, EU Commissioner Vĕra Jourová said, “Social media is unfortunately one of the tools that terrorist groups use to radicalise young people and racist use to spread violence and hatred.”
Twitter’s Head of Public Policy for Europe, Karen White said, “we remain committed to letting the Tweets flow. However, there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate.”
But it seems not everyone agrees.
Many social media users in the US, led primarily by conservative groups, say that the move is an infringement on freedom of speech.
“White’s conflation of ‘conduct that incites violence and hate’ is too broad: lots of speech can incite hate, but not very much speech incites actual violence,” Conservative US columnist Ben Shapiro wrote.
#IStandWithHateSpeech has now been trending fast for the past week in the US.
#IStandWithHateSpeech comes at a time where freedom of speech has become a high profile issue in Europe.
The advocacy group European Digital Rights said the commitment was undemocratic. created serious risks for freedom of expression as legal but controversial content may well be deleted.
“It also creates serious risks for freedom of expression as legal but controversial content may well be deleted as a result of this voluntary and unaccountable take down mechanism,” the group said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has recently received a lot of heat for allowing prosecutors to pursue a case against a comedian who mocked Turkey’s President (A section of the German criminal code prohibits insults against foreign leaders).
Touching on the controversy, an editorial in The Economist recently opined that freedom of speech was under attack in the West.
“[W]hen progressive thinkers agree that offensive words should be censored, it helps authoritarian regimes to justify their own much harsher restrictions and intolerant religious groups their violence,” it read.
“Blasphemy laws are an anachronism. A religion should be open to debate. Laws against hate speech are unworkably subjective and widely abused […] Incitement to violence should be banned. However, it should be narrowly defined as instances when the speaker intends to goad those who agree with him to commit violence, and when his words are likely to have an immediate effect.”
