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A Safe Space for Racists?

A new report by a prominent anti-hate group has found that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms are slow to act on online harassment and abuse.

By Hamish AlexanderPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Image by Krzysztof Kamil from Pixabay

I got banned from Twitter, not so long ago. I stood up for a moderately well-known Jewish TV actor in the US who was being hassled online by a neo-Nazi — at least that’s how the neo-Nazi presented himself — from an East European country I won’t name here. Why stain the good name of an entire country because of a vocal minority of aggressive, loudmouthed losers?

I replied to the neo-Nazi using the exact same language he used to harass the Jewish TV actor, and in Twitter’s eyes, I was the bad guy.

Because it was my third strike — I also had a habit of calling Trumpist racists and climate deniers on their own, erm, bogus science (BS) — Twitter closed my account for good.

I appealed. And lost. I was guilty of, to use Twitter’s own words, “hateful conduct.”

I appealed again, several months later. And was turned down again.

Okay, okay. Fair play. I suppose.

Twitter, and the other social media networks insist they are trying to make their space a kinder, gentler place for decent folks everywhere, and I suppose I wasn’t helping.

You can imagine then how, erm, annoyed — to put it mildly — I was to learn earlier today that a new study has found that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok routinely fail to act on most anti-Jewish posts. Those that have been reported, anyway.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

This isn’t me making stuff up, by the way. This is an actual study, titled Failure to Protect, by the US/UK non-profit organization Center for Countering Digital Hate. And the center’s report makes for uncomfortable reading, whether you’re reading it here in the US, the UK or in Hungary.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) flagged hundreds of anti-Semitic posts over a period of six weeks, earlier this year. The neo-Nazi posts racked up some 7.3 million impressions. I suppose mine was one of those impressions, though perhaps not the impression the neo-Nazis were expecting.

The report noted during the six-week time period that more than 700 of these posts violated the social media sites’ policies, but fewer than one in six of those posts were removed and their accounts deleted, even after the violations were pointed out to moderators.

The report identified Facebook as the worst offender, having acted on just 10% of the offending posts, despite updating its hate speech policy last November. Twitter was little better, acting on just 11% of the posts. YouTube was the faraway frontrunner, but even YouTube acted on just 21% of the offending accounts. Forty videos identified by researchers as containing hateful content are still on YouTube, according to the report. Those videos have racked up a total of 3.5m views, over an average of six years.

Image by Michael und Marrtje from Pixabay

Jews are not alone in being abused on social media. Neo-Nazis and others of their political and sociological persuasion also seem to have it in for black people, the LGBTQ community, women, Asians, climate campaigners, non-Christians, teachers, epidemiologists, health workers, vaccine advocates and anyone who reads The Guardian.

The Guardian reported this week that CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed says the research shows that “online abuse is not about algorithms or automation, (because) the tech companies allowed bigots to keep their accounts open and their hate to remain online, even after alerting human moderators.”

There goes one of my own theories.

I always thought my problems with Twitter had to do with my running afoul of their lousy algorithms, not actual moderators.

“There is no such thing as bad AI,“ a friend who works in tech told me. “Just bad programmers who don’t know what they’re doing.”

We all know there’s a problem with social media. The bigger problem is what to do about it.

Social media is a powerful means of communication and a wonderful tool for good. I’ve used it myself, to campaign for climate science, to help save endangered species, to connect with good friends halfway round the world, and to try to make the world a better place.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

And by a better place, I mean a place with fewer neo-Nazis — or at least a place where neo-Nazis can’t expect to spew their misogynistic hatred and spiteful bile without getting some blowback in return.

Some of social media’s more active critics — myself included — have suggested a number of solutions. More short-term remedy than long-term fix, but a remedy just the same. Online safety legislation, of the kind that is before legislators in both the UK and across Europe, is designed to test whether social media platforms can be made to enforce their own rules or face consequences themselves.

“We recognize that thereʼs more to do,” The Guardian reported a Twitter spokesperson saying,“and we’ll continue to listen and integrate stakeholdersʼ feedback in these ongoing efforts.”

Nonsense. Integrate stakeholdersʼ feedback in these ongoing efforts? Seriously? That’s not even English —not the kind you and I speak, anyway. It's corporate-speak, the kind of non-language that helped create this whole problem in the first place.

Social media is how we connect as a society, Ahmed says, or should be anyway. Instead, it has become a safe space for racists, a place to normalize “hateful rhetoric without fear of consequences.”

You know, I’m starting to like this guy, Imran Ahmed. Perhaps he should run for something.

The board of a social media company, perhaps?

Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay

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About the Creator

Hamish Alexander

Earth community. Visual storyteller. Digital nomad. Natural history + current events. Raconteur. Cultural anthropology.

I hope that somewhere in here I will talk about a creator who will intrigue + inspire you.

Twitter: @HamishAlexande6

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