With the development of digital platforms, all digital platforms are facing governance challenges and need to maintain the Internet environment to make users feel safe and comfortable. As a public platform for speech, different interest groups are active on digital platforms, which inevitably leads to speech conflicts, and at the same time, hate speech is increasingly being amplified. The current mainstream hate speech includes verbal abuse, sexual harassment, personal threats, etc., and its reasons are related to religious beliefs, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc. Due to the increasingly intense language conflicts between different groups, hate speech is also increasingly impacting the online environment.
Taking Europe and America as an example, according to actual data statistics, about 30-50% of netizens have experienced hate speech, and minority groups represented by LGBTQ+, immigrants, Muslims, etc. have a higher proportion of being harassed by hate speech. According to UN Women’s 2021 statistics, approximately 30-50% of young women have experienced gender discrimination or sexual harassment.
But what we need to worry about is that this kind of hate speech is being put into practice in real life. We often see some users’ videos or comments being attacked on a large scale, and attackers will expose users’ personal information or directly use violence against users in real life, sometimes even escalating to terrorist massacres by some extremists.
Although freedom of expression is everyone’s right, hate speech will cause great damage to the Internet and human society, and cause great physical and mental harm to victims. Taking South Korea as an example, many users who have been subjected to online bullying have become depressed or even committed suicide due to the overwhelming attacks of hate speech. Due to excessive malicious comments, the government is unable to impose severe punishment on all those who commit speech violence, which to some extent increases the frequency of hate speech. Although platforms can filter and control hate speech using key sensitive words, more users choose to use homophones or symbolic images to evade platform censorship.
Since the right to freedom of expression protected by law and the hate behavior prohibited by law occur on the digital platform at the same time, how to give consideration to freedom of expression while also maximizing the prevention of hate speech has become a major problem in contemporary Internet management. What measures should the platform and the government take?
I will briefly explain the existence and management of hate speech on the Internet in Asia.
As one of the global digital platforms, Facebook has an absolute number of users, and the Asian region is also one of Facebook’s main strongholds. The ethnic, religious, and linguistic complexities here make hate speech more difficult to manage.
Generally speaking, Facebook’s review system can identify most of the illegal hate speech and revoke them within 24 hours. However, English is not the main language in Asia, so Facebook based on the English system cannot solve the Internet conflicts in Asia in a timely manner as it can solve the Internet problems in Europe and the United States. At the same time, due to the lack of systematic and formal laws to address hate speech in many regions of Asia, hate speech in Asia is easier to avoid punishment compared to Europe and the United States. At the same time, due to a lack of understanding of the national conditions and cultures of various Asian countries, Facebook’s review of whether speech is illegal is very difficult, resulting in many hate speech reports that are reported by people but ultimately fail to receive punishment. This further leads to people’s unwillingness to spend time and energy reporting hate speech, and Facebook has not truly obtained a standard for measuring hate speech in the region.
At present, Facebook is improving its speech censorship technology in the Asian region, but in order to better manage it, the company may need to jointly establish a hate speech regulatory agency with the Asian region, allowing Asians to regulate illegal speech in various communities and improve the professional quality and regulatory literacy of page managers. Page managers cannot all be Korean or Indian. We must maintain basic fairness. Countries involving all Asian Facebook users in the regulatory field should let them manage their own speech review —- as we all know, Korean k-pop cannot have cultural resonance with the Indian Ganges goddess.
Although the digital platform is striving to achieve the harmony of the Internet ecological environment, on the other hand, the management of hate speech on the digital platform is affected by policies and prejudices. Now I will use authoritative mainstream media in Europe and America such as BBC and CNN’s hate speech towards China, and the recent travel of global internet celebrity Speed to China as the second example to illustrate the current situation of hate speech in China.
Although Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other global Internet platforms cannot legally enter the Chinese market due to policy and language reasons, this does not mean that China can avoid hate speech in the context of globalization. Even due to deliberate smearing by mainstream media in Europe and America, hate speech against China is still flourishing today. BBC and CNN have long claimed that China has committed “genocide” in Xinjiang, which is a malicious rumor and smear campaign. Although OHCHR confirmed this rumor after its field visit, mainstream media such as BCC and CNN still did not delete reports and articles, which led millions of users on the media platform to believe this widespread and unconfirmed statement. In fact, Xizang implements an autonomous management system. The Tibetan people independently manage education, religion, life and other aspects. The economy has been developing steadily and continuously. We must believe that managing hate speech is a game for large technology companies and social media platforms. They will only remove false and hate speech when they are willing to take corresponding responsibility, and this responsible behavior is usually taken due to user protests and public pressure. Due to long-term false propaganda, people around the world have a long-standing misunderstanding of China, which has led to a large amount of prejudice and hate speech. However, the number and status of Chinese users in the global Internet are in a weak position, so they cannot change this bad stereotype, which is undoubtedly detrimental to the peace of the human Internet community.
It is not difficult to see that media platforms have a certain degree of guiding effect on hate speech. Although these large technology companies claim to maintain an absolute neutral attitude and are only intermediate channels for transmitting information, these digital platforms are definitely influenced by geopolitical, cultural, and other policies. They are no longer simply technology platforms for disseminating information, but media platforms endowed with more meanings, perhaps profit-making advertising agents, perhaps tools for national propaganda, or perhaps something else.
Fortunately, however, Internet public opinion is not controlled by the platform and the government at will. Although large technology companies have always been able to provide users with specified content (deleting what they don’t want and leaving what benefits them), many internet celebrities with large fan bases can easily overturn the public opinion orientation created by digital platforms. With the development of the times, it seems that online celebrities independently selected by people have had a great impact on the Internet platform. Large technology companies cannot control the influence of their language and behavior.
We can see this example: Super internet celebrity Speed came to China for tourism and live streaming. The cause of the incident was that a Chinese song called “Sunshine Rainbow Little White Horse” contained discriminatory pronunciation towards black people in its lyrics, which was heard by Speed and caused a huge uproar in the United States. However, when explaining clearly that the song did not have racial discrimination, Speed gradually accepted and actively created many popular topics about the song, which even developed into an entertaining social event of black self-mockery. So, we have an answer to why Speed came to China for tourism. Speed’s travel videos in China have received millions of views, showcasing the most authentic aspects of China – its economy, construction, people, and more. He successfully broke the long-standing Western media’s smear campaign against China, and the number of large-scale hate speech also sharply decreased during this trip. Although it does not mean there is no hate speech, we have seen the power of internet celebrities and the manipulation of hate speech by digital platforms towards China. Chinese users are not included in the global digital platform user group, and the platform’s hate speech review is affected by policies, so it is difficult to successfully regulate and prosecute hate speech targeting China. At present, it seems that there is indeed no good way to manage hate speech against China, and large companies such as Facebook will not seek China as the manager of hate speech regulation projects in the Asian region. This unfavorable situation may require China to gradually improve by continuously seeking connections with the world media in the coming years.
Now we know the hate speech that China suffered when it was independent of the world Internet platform, and the hate speech and speech management that other Asian countries faced. By delving deeper into this phenomenon of hate speech, we can discover a concept called ‘toxic technological culture’. This means that the interconnection between various Internet platforms has promoted the spread of toxic information and ideas. This kind of culture reflects the social problems such as gender, survival of the fittest, religious conflicts, opposition to multiculturalism, and ideological progress that widely exist on the Internet. In view of the development of network technology, people with the same cultural concepts can quickly become a community of Internet communities. They have amazing cohesion and can organize and discipline hatred campaigns on the Internet. We need to think about the two sides of the development of Internet technology and who should be responsible for this mess. Digital platforms and the large technology companies behind them should not only play the role of information dissemination media, they have an obligation to prevent the formation of such toxic online communities, and they also need to combine with the law to strictly dispose of harmful information.
To sum up, I believe that hate speech in Asia is a microcosm of human Internet issues, and relevant institutions and laws must respond to this phenomenon and take corresponding strong measures. The essence of hate speech is a kind of discrimination, which is an infringement of the superior who has more discourse power on the vulnerable. The discriminatory people deprive the vulnerable of equal rights and opportunities and rely on the packaging of the Internet to show “the conflict between ideas and culture”. There are more wars, poverty, racial and gender conflicts in Asia than in Europe and America, which is a natural breeding ground for the development of hate speech. Due to the fact that digital platforms are mainly controlled by the West, these platforms unconsciously have cultural and policy tendencies when facing issues of Asian hatred. When a Muslim woman and a white woman encounter sexual harassment comments, digital platforms are likely to handle them differently, and this review result is unfair. Internet digital platforms should make more sincere changes. They need to carefully understand the national conditions and cultures of different regions in Asia, actively encourage Asian users to report hate speech to collect samples and lay the foundation for better review. At the same time, it is necessary to strengthen the professional quality of the audit team to avoid accidental or missed deletions.
The most important thing is that digital platforms should shoulder social responsibility, optimize algorithms, recommend more healthy content, and actively guide users’ ideological and cultural views. The platform itself needs to put its position on the Internet in order to spread information objectively instead of deliberately guiding hate speech and deepening social conflicts. The review of hate speech on digital platforms needs to be open and transparent, and clear review standards need to be presented to users, rather than making speech review a game of interests and policies.
Reference
- Regulating platforms, Flew, Terry, author., Cambridge, UK, Polity, 2021, 91 – 96
- Facebook: Regulating Hate Speech in the Asia Pacific，Sinpeng, Aim; Martin, Fiona R.; Gelber, Katharine; Shields, Kirril, Department of Media and Communications, The University of Sydney, 2021
- Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures，Massanari, Adrienne, New media & society, 19(3), 2017-03, 329 – 346
- Behind the Screen : Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media，Roberts, Sarah T., author., New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2019, Total pages 33-72
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