Rohingya Social Media Harassment and Hate Speech
Just a short post on social media harassment and hate speech directed at the Rohingya. Reuters has recently done an article on Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani. Ghani is a well known Rohingya rights activist who runs a refugee rights organization in Malaysia. Ghani has been targeted with hate speech and harassment on social media to the point where he doesn’t feel it is safe to leave his house and his family could be in danger. Before the Tatmadaw shut down the internet most people in Myanmar got their news from Facebook. Ghani’s experience is not atypical. In 2018, An investigation by Reuters found that there was more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and pornographic images attacking and spreading hate against the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook. Most social media companies have failed to take action against hate speech and harassment against the Rohingya even though they easily could shut it down. This reminds me of a story from the Rwandan genocide where the US government failed to shut down radio stations spreading hate propaganda against the Tutsi despite the fact we easily could have shut down these radio stations (The reason why we didn’t shut them down was it technically violated international laws about free speech). The point is that both the government and the private sector often can easily shut down hate speech against minorities on social media who are the victims of genocide but choose not to take action.
Why do social media companies fail to take action?
Most of the major social media companies are in the US and fall under section 230 which says, “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”. This means that social media companies like Twitter and Facebook are not regulated as publishers and are protected from being held liable for illegal posts with some exceptions. Social media companies are legally distant from the content that is posted on their websites and have no financial incentives to deal with hate speech or harassment. I think we should adopt the 2019 IDI/Yad Vashem Recommendations that argues “social media companies have a legal and ethical responsibility to reduce online hate speech. In other words, the recommendations reject the notion that social media companies should have blanket immunity from liability for harm they could and should have prevented.”
Why has the US government failed to make better regulations of social media companies that force them to take action?
This is a very complex question, and I will only make one point here. The political class in the US, especially members of Congress, really don’t understand the current regulations/laws of social media companies, how these social media companies operate or how these regulations/laws should be reformed. If you watched the recent congressional hearings on section 230 three things were very clear:
1: Most members of Congress don’t understand what section 230 is or social media regulations/laws in general and have no idea how to reform section 230.
2: Most members of Congress don’t understand how social media companies operate and what they could do to stop hate speech, hate propaganda or extremist content. For example, during the most recent hearing very few questions were asked of Google’s Sundar Pichai because they simply don’t understand what Google dose. A good question an informed member of Congress could have asked would have been this “We know that the Google/YouTube algorithm doesn’t recommended extremist content to most users. However, if someone is already into extremist content or clicks on extremist content even by accident your algorithm recommends more extremist content to them because they have shown an interest in that kind of content. Why don’t you change your algorithm not to do this?”
3: Members of Congress have no interest in actually making new regulations/laws for social media companies or reforming the current regulations/laws. In a hearing that was supposedly about section 230 reform, there was only one question about section 230 during the whole 6-hours long hearing.
