huridocs-tech The Dark Side of Free Speech

RIGHTS: The Dark Side of Free Speech By Gumisai Mutume

MEXICO CITY (IPS) Oct 14 - Among the thousands of sites on
the Internet is one that welcomes visitors with a eulogy to
Adolf Hitler and then launches into an anti-Semitic tirade
before declares that it is not a racist site.

A discussion forum within the site pours out a diatribe
against Jews declaring that "Christians have been fooled and
deceived, just like the Bible has warned us. Don't be
fooled, and stop being fooled by the Jews of today...they
are deceivers, liars, anti- Christ and anti-Christian."

Another site spews out a stream of invective against African
Americans. Someone who calls himself "Ku Klux Klan" declares
that "...niggers invented carjacking." It goes on to attack
any political establishment that expounds anything short of
the extreme far-right point of view.

Such inflamatory statements would never be allowed in the
pages of most newspapers of the world, as they would be
categorised as "hate" speech, disavowed by most reputable
publishers.

But in the new information age of the Internet, anything
goes.

The fact that cyberspace allows complete freedom of speech -
unbridled and ungoverned - and anyone can promote whatever
cause he or she wishes, is of growing concern to supporters
of human rights.

"The ability of hate groups to use the Internet to recruit
has made it much easier for them to spread misinformation
and incite violence anonymously," says Karen  Narasaki,
Executive Director of US-based advocacy group, the National
Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC).

"We are in the process of analyzing many of the issues
raised by the Internet. Some countries, like Canada, have
specific exceptions for hate speech from their Freedom of
Speech protections," Narasaki told IPS during an interview
conducted via the Internet by e-mail.

"But the fact that Canadian citizens can easily cross the
border and set up hate websites in the United States  makes
it much more difficult for Canada to enforce its laws.  The
issue of hate speech on the Internet needs to be resolved on
a global level - not just by the United States."

Nevertheless, racial violence continues to exist in the
United States where arson attacks on churches attended by
African Americans have risen to their worst level since the
1960's.

In Europe, the international non-governmental organisation
Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports that at least 41 people
were killed last year as a result of racial violence. In
Britain alone, an estimated 130,000 incidents involving race
occurred in the past 12 months.

Such statistics concern rights activists who must figure out
how to make the Internet a more friendlier place while
preserving the democratic right of freedom of expression.

Advocates of free speech have stuck to their guns against
any regulation or censorship of the Internet.

Last month, at a global Internet policy conference in
Munich, Germany, delegates threw out a proposed
international Internet rating system saying it would provide
governments with a blueprint for censorship.

The 300 executives and experts in the fields of technology,
law and governance - who met to discuss ways to control
illegal or potentially harmful material on the Internet -
agreed that  the way forward should be without government
regulation.

Instead, they emphasize the need for education and parental
supervision.

Barry Steinhardt, Associate Director of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) pointed that to criminalise online
communication would violate the US constitution.

"We said it before, we say it now and we'll keep saying it -
even after software programs try to block us - proposals
like this will transform the Internet from a true
marketplace of ideas into just another mainstream, lifeless
medium," Steinhardt told the Munich gathering.

Still the evidence of racial intolerance among some Internet
users continues to rise.  Earlier this year a member of a
white supremacist organization in the United States killed
an African-American man, a Korean student and wounded nine
other ethnic and religious minorities during a two-state
shooting spree.

He belonged to a racist organisation that hosts a site on
the Internet.

In June last year James Byrd, a black man, was killed when
three white supremacists dragged him behind their pickup
truck near Jasper, Texas. Activists blamed the attack on
racial hatred.

Yet one Internet site shouts: "The White race has suffered
under such a degenerate religion for far too long. It is
time that the White Man wakes up and throws off the yoke of
Christianity. The White Race needs a religion that instead
of considering our folk to be worthless sinners, considers
them, especially the greater people among them, the highest
product of evolution in existence. What the white man needs
is creativity!"

As far back as 1995, the man attributed with bringing hate
speech to cyberspace, Ku Klux Klan member Don Black, had
been quick to notice the potential of the Internet to fan
the white racist movement.

"The Internet has had a pretty profound influence on a
(white supremacist) movement whose resources are limited.
The access is anonymous and there is unlimited ability to
communicate with others of a like-mind," he said at the
time.

During the early 1980s Black was jailed for conspiring to
invade and overthrow the government of the Dominican
Republic and establish white nation on the Caribbean island.

During his time in prison, he learned computer programming
skills which he went on to use to publish white supremacist
propaganda,  notes "Hatewatch", one of a growing number of
Internet watchers that track and fight hate speech.

Black went online with the first web-based hate page in 1995
- "a page that marked a paradigm shift in the use of this
new information medium as a tool for the racist right," says
Hatewatch.

Black realized that the Internet eliminated geographical and
monetary boundaries that had existed for white supremacists
and his site now serves as an organizational hub for
right-wingers, it adds.

The message that Black and others churn out strikes home in
many areas of the world.

"Every time we go out of the house we get spat at and
pushed. They yell at us, 'Paki rubbish, go home.' They come
to our house and kick the door," testifies one victim of
racial violence in Britain.

"They smear excrement on the door...We do not feel free. We
are not safe to leave our house," says 'Mohammed' in the
Human Rights Watch/Helsinki report 'Racist Violence in the
United Kingdom.'

HRW says the irony is that such intolerance takes place at a
time when the world is pulling down borders and trade
barriers, when the world's population is at its most
educated level and when global travel is at its highest.

Still, rights activists remain concerned that
misrepresentations in the past that have created images of
minorities and refugees as a burden will continue unabated
in the  unfettered new Information Age.World Countries since
the colonial era. (END/IPS/gm/mk/99)




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