Freedom of expression and hate speech – the dilemma of reconciling freedom of expression with combating racism – WS 05 2011
31 May 2011 | 11:00-12:30
Programme overview 2011
Freedom of Expression (FoE) is part of the universal and fundamental rights (Article 19 UDHR and Article 10 ECHR) and is considered as substantial – like the right to Access – in the information age as well. In this EuroDIG Workshop we will consider and discuss conventional threats.
People
Key Participants
- Andrea Cairola, NEXA Center for Internet and Society
- Denis Huber, North-South Center, Council of Europe
- Yuliya Morenets, Together Against Cybercrime
- Zeljca Lekić, ERNO
- Oksana Prykhodko, IGF Ukraine
- Rolf H. Weber, University of Zurich
Co-moderators
- Wolf Ludwig, EURALO
- Ludo Kaizer
Session report
It was difficult to discuss freedom of expression and hate speech. Different national definitions of hate speech were referred to together with internationally accepted principles.
It was pointed out that the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime is open to all. The Council of Europe has taken specific initiatives to promote restrictions on hate speech and tolerance education, with more emphasis on the latter. The role of education, rather than legislation was also highlighted as was the importance of educating children from a younger age.
Attempts to make service providers and other intermediaries responsible for preventing hate speech were seen as a disturbing development. South-East European television news exchange (ERNO) was presented as an example of positive incentives being used to turn ”something for which hate speech is a mild expression” into successful co-operation among broadcasters.
After the session, a remote participant raised (by e-mail) the perspective of different platforms (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) adopting different rules and creating a new geography of cyberspace with new jurisdictional problems.
Transcript
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
>> WOLF LUDWIG: Hello?
Okay.
Welcome to our workshop 5 on Freedom of Expression and hate speech. I have to apologize for the delay. We had some sound problems. We had to sort out to include the remote participants. That’s the reason why we are a little bit behind and we have to catch up a little bit on the schedule. Therefore, I will try to make my introduction as one of the co-moderators. My name is Wolf Ludwig. More details you can see on the Web site.
My co-moderator is Arudo Kaiser, and we keep all the ceremonials and introductions short.
Let me quick, before we enter into a discussion, let me present Yuliya, one of our speakers from France.
We have Denis Huber from the north-south center of the Council of Europe in Portugal.
We have Oksana Prykhodko from the Ukraine.
We have a representative +++++ from the University of Turina.
And from the Balkan region and we have a representative +++++
And we have Rolf Weber from the University of Zurich.
>> MODERATOR: And we have all of you.
>> WOLF LUDWIG: And we have all of you. As you know, Freedom of Expression is enshrined in article 19, Universal Declaration on Human Rights in article 10 of the European Convention.
This is on paper, these are our commitments, this is nice to read and this is something that we like to refer to, but as we all know the realities in Europe in different parts of Europe or outside Europe are quite different. Freedom of Expression was a strong, major concern during the Arab spring movements starting in Tunisia and going on, et cetera. So it’s in the media. It’s on the political agenda. But the realities are quite different.
I will immediately now give the floor to our speakers, and I invite them to make a short introductory statement on the realities in the context where they work.
I start with Yuliya.
>> YULIYA MORENETS: Thank you so much. I’m from an NGO called Together Against Cybercrime and we work in Strasbourg and Paris and in France. We launched in September 2010 a study with the University of Strasbourg in order to know how the young people, because we work a lot with the target group that are young people and children, how the young people and especially vulnerable young people use the ICTs in France and especially in socially distressed or other areas. What they call – what we call vulnerable children, especially children and young people with migrant background, victims of trafficking, and with social and family problems.
And I would like today to share our first data that we have with you. And the first problem that they face and the directors of schools face at least in this areas in France is the creation of hate speech groups and what we can call cyber bullying. So I would like to give you three examples that we had during our interviews, because we use qualitative and quantitative methods. So we use personal interviews in order to have the data afterwards. And this is an example that we had during the interviews.
The first example, the young people, they created a hate group against one boy because his father had a car accident. It was traumatic because his father had a car accident a few weeks ago.
The other one, the young people had a chart online, they were creating insults and creating – containing these expressions, and the parents were at home, thinking that they were working in their rooms. So in order to resolve the problem, they agreed to meet in the real life. So they left the apartment, the parents were still thinking that they were working, and half an hour after they were supposed to meet in the real life, the boys called for a fire. So we don’t know the reason for this fire but now they can be responsible because they are older than 13 years old.
And the third example, which is incredible, today we see that the parents enter into the circle. What do I mean? The young people, when they are exchanging hate speech and insults, the parents in order to defend the child start posting online expressions against the child from another part of the computer. And after they come to see the directors of the schools. And in order to measure the problem, I would say that the directors, they had to spend 80 percent of their working time, 80 percent of their working time in order to try to resolve the problem. And they don’t know how to resolve the problem, how to deal.
Because, first of all, these cases arrived during the nonschool time. And, secondly, they don’t know where to go to all the things, what to do, how to advise legally the parents and the children. So it’s a great today problem.
I don’t know if I have to say a few words about –
>> MODERATOR: No. It’s about three minutes so let’s go to the next speaker.
>> DENIS HUBER: I’m the Director of the North South Center of the Council of Europe. Denis.
First of all, I want to share with you my previous experience. I’ve been working ten years in the Council of Europe and I’ve been the witness of a growing concern by the Member States of the Council of Europe on the raising intolerance and hate and racism within the Council of Europe countries. 20 years ago, when the burning wall fell down, we thought that we would be able to build up better societies. Some people even thought that it was the end of history, if you might remember. And we found out very quickly that this is not so easy.
And as soon as ’94, when there was the first summit in ’94, when there was the first summit of the Council of Europe, the Council of Europe has adopted an action plan to tackle, to fight against racism, intolerance in its Member States. And this has been a very important change in the philosophy of the Council of Europe. Because before that, the Council of Europe thought that these things have to be tackled at the national level. And the Council of Europe was only controlling without the restrictions, which are adopted at the national level, are compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, through the case law of the European court of Human Rights. After that, after the summit, there was a more offensive stand by promoting two Member States to two things. The first one, recommendation 97, on promoting a culture of tolerance. And the second one is a recommendation on hate speech, bringing to the Member States a number of principles. How can they fight hate speech? Of course in the media, at that time Internet was not or almost not existing yet. Now, but these are principles that are also very varied, still, on the Internet site.
Now, being the Director of the North-south, I have to say that the problems which have been tackled 15 years ago in those texts are not solved, perhaps even at the country. So we have to ask ourselves about the solutions that we have tried to implement. Perhaps we can come back to that during the discussions. Are there values? Are they enough? Being Director of the North-south Center which has the responsibility to promote the values and the acts of the Council of Europe outside of Europe, we have also to find the ways of having cooperation with these countries which are claiming the right to Freedom of Expression after having been deprived so long of this right.
And this is now a good moment to tackle those issues, but these are the serious concerns.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you.
>> OKSANA PRYKHODKO: I’m on the IGF platform from the Ukraine. Freedom of Expression was declared part of our revolution five or six years ago, but now, Ukrainian, German, media experts and international organisations say that freedom of speech is disrupted in the Ukraine. Our government States that there is no risk of Freedom of Expression, but we have another opinion.
What is the relation to hate speech? Hate speech is a very popular tool of our habilitations. We proved that in the headquarter was our main political forces of hate comments on forums, on Internet chats, to provoke hate responses. But this content can be used to block Internet resources and to introduce direct censorship. And that’s why we try to deal with this issue.
Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you.
>> ANDREA CAIROLA: I’m from Italy. And I’ve been a bit like you, the perspective of someone who is an advocate of Freedom of Expression, so hate speech is one of international jurisprudence, one of the things that makes occasions where there can be restriction, but the issue is abuse.
And the perspective of my own country, Italy, what actually, this is probably the reason why you invited me here. We are one of the founding members of the European Union. We are a sort of all European democracy and we have been passing through sort of emergence in terms of media freedom. Almost two decades, our Prime Minister, coming and going, and this is the case of a big development of the Internet.
So we as the center, we have been a bit trying to investigate, to research, to see if this has any impact.
So the first hypothesis is that a government that is building its own consensus through controlling most of the traditional media will be less likely to allow, enable, Internet to flourish and to develop.
And we have been making research, and basically this hypothesis has been verified by the fact that now a day, Italy in comparison with other senior countries, let’s say France, Spain, UK, has a lower Internet threshold, a comparatively less efficient Internet infrastructure, and also the contribution to the GDP, to the economy of Internet as yesterday the person from Google stated, stated that it’s much lower in France and especially in the UK.
So why this happened? This was intended, of course, to be demonstrated, but we have been seeing that there were basically two actions – or nonactions from the government that lead us to this situation. One was not being proactive. For instance, in investing into the Internet infrastructure, into investing, of course the government is taking its own responsibility as duty bearer, because in Human Rights they are also rights holders and duty bearers.
The other one were a number of regulation attempts that normally isn’t really working, but of course they could not implement Draconian laws, because still we are within the European context. But there were a lot of like draft laws or laws approved that had an effect, a chilling affect of Freedom of Expression online.
For instance, in implementing an audiovisual European regulation, they are making sort of a similarity in between traditional television, traditional television media and Internet, multimedia content, which makes no sense and creates a number of useless and unnecessary constraints and limitations.
The same goes with a law called El Fanil law, which is basically really affecting press freedom and the right to seek information in general.
>> MODERATOR: Please keep it short, Andrea.
>> ANDREA CAIROLA: There is also a component, saying that basically blogs should be considered as traditional newspaper. And again, this can have a chilling effect.
>> AUDIENCE: I’m from Aetna in Bosnia.
We are subject of the European Broadcasting Union. I’m a bit of outsider here in the conference from the Internet, because I’m representing mainstream or traditional media. But according to the opinion of organizers and my modest opinion, you cannot complete the discussion about media freedom and hate speech without reference to the public broadcasters here. Because it’s still the major source of information for the people here. And because in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and we have that history, hate speech is a mild word for what was broadcast here not to mention the complete absence of media freedom. So how we contribute is, and that’s why I’ll need 20 seconds extra to explain this, is that the major activity of the Umond network is the exchange of news items. We exchanged more than 11,000 news items in the past years. The major source of material is from the broadcasters in this region. At the time when we were established in November 2000, it was easier to get freedom material from New York or Middle East than from neighboring countries. Now everybody has newscasts. And that is a major source of information. That is mostly political news. But there are stories about ordinary people, how they live across the region. That’s how we have break-even that role between us and them and that is the one way of contributing to media fram freedom.
The second thing is the way how the stories are prepared. Because the main principles of the news exchange is reciprocity. You prepare something and you’ll get something from me in exchange. Very important is the way how you prepare the story. If you prepare the story which includes hate speech, which is insulting for anyone, then your fellow journalists and other TV stations will not use your story. It will not reach the public of the region and you just spent your efforts and time on nothing. So what is the point is that stories which are exchanged are really prepared on professional and objective way, without hate speech and without the interference of politic, economy.
And the third important thing is that we actually established the network of professionals working for public broadcasting services in the region, working together.
In the past ten years, we covered several very sensitive stories, like war crime, like independence of Kosovo, independence of Montenegro, it doesn’t matter. But we still managed to produce professional objective journalistic stories. So professionalism and cooperation among media are according to our experience the key words for the freedom of media in this region. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you.
>> ROLF WEBER: I’m from the University of Zurich. I’m not directly involved in the media business, but I’d like to enlarge the scope of my reflection a little bit, of course, as has been mentioned in the introduction. We do have Freedom of Expression in most substantial legal instrumentS, but having this freedom on paper is not having it in reality.
And in particular, as far as online Freedom of Expression is concerned, we experienced a lot of it state interventions in the past, not only in some countries which we know for a very long-time, as being inclined to intervene into the free flow of information, but also from countries in particular as has been mentioned in North Africa, with the objective just to avoid the Freedom of Expression for political reasons. And in my opinion, it is important that we tackle this topic. It goes along with the efforts of the Council of Europe to implement some general guidelines, based on the principles –
(Captioning interruption)
– for breaking down, lobbying the Internet in the last days, as presidents.
So this is – this is a track which we should follow. And since I have some 20 or 30 minutes left, just a provocative final remark, four-days ago, the G8 declaration was called renewed commitment for freedom and democracy. The G8 declaration encompasses 7 chapters, from global economy to peace and security. But you don’t find freedom and democracy in any of the titles. So I’m wondering whether we should push more for Freedom of Expression.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks for the introductory statements. I would like to immediately hand over to you as a question from your side.
(captioning interruption)
>> TRIIN GAMBINI: Hi. I’m Triin from the New Media Summer School. And my question is going to Yuliya. You were only speaking about working with the kids. So in that sense I would like to know if any of you have the experience of working with also so-called privileged or normal kids, in the sense, and with the freedom of hate speech. Because, for example, I come from Estonia from, a small parish, which is nowadays known as the place where rich people live.
And, for example, when I was still years ago, back in high school, I was suffering from that, that I was coming from that parish.
So, for example, when I went to other institutions or programmes to get some funding for the youth activity, they would say – they were telling me that what are you complaining about? You come from a posh place. So at that time I was also getting messages from my peers that I mean, Triin, you’re from a posh place. I mean, and this is what was going to the direction of hate speech.
Of course, I wasn’t that vulnerable. But at the moment in Estonia it’s really, really affecting young people. As you know, Estonia is having the leading position in the rate of depression and committing suicide. And committing suicide is lowering and lowering after years. And now they are questioning what has Internet and hate speech to do with that.
>> YULIYA MORENETS: The question is, like in other kinds of children, they also face these kinds of problems. I think everybody faces these kinds of problems after we work and we start to work with vulnerable children. Actually, they are vulnerable. They don’t always have access to information, what to do to come to address, and they don’t know how – and, actually, they don’t always have access to information in the language comprehensible to them. And also, in France, nobody works with them.
So, that’s why we start to work with more vulnerable children. But of course in other schools you have also the same cases.
>> MODERATOR: Can you address what she asked about, the relation between suicide and hate speech? Can you mention anything from your research?
>> YULIYA MORENETS: Well, we had any cases, but this research is only for the – in France region. So probably – it’s very difficult to speak about this case. When you have like a personal individual interviews, it’s very difficult to make children speaking about these cases. So we had any case, but probably there is a link between these things.
>> MODERATOR: Can somebody address the topic of hate speech online and what that means in the offline world, if there is arise when it comes to, you know, hate groups, for example, in the offline world?
>> YULIYA MORENETS: As I said, we have an example that they created the hate group speech, the young people, and there were these – they had this problem with the fire. So it was – well, it was a huge problem in this area in France. So now we don’t know who is responsible. The police don’t know. They don’t have information how it’s possible. These young children or maybe it was just by accident that we were here. So it’s a concrete consequence, because creating and developing these hate group speeches and this content online, for sure it has consequences in the real life.
>> MODERATOR: I mean, I know research from the last couple years didn’t show exactly the relation between online and offline. I don’t know if any of you have more input when it comes to that.
>> I’ve seen –
>> MODERATOR: But yes, you can have the floor.
>> Thank you. I’m working as a media lawyer for the Austrian government. I think it’s important about hate speech. It has to be first of all very clear. Are we really speaking only about hate speech as a kind of criminal offense or really an intervention by the state? It’s also legitimate in Freedom of Expression. But then the problem starts there, where we have speech, which is just detrimental to society, so saying it between the line, I ask for a concrete case.
For example, there is an Ethiopian institution of the Council of Europe, it’s called ACRE, so it’s the monitoring body coming to the States and asking what is going on in your country and what problems do you have. And they come, for example, to us and me as a government representative and asking questions about one of the most popular tabloids in Austria, which really often has articles which are certainly not criminal, which are certainly covered by Article 10 when we talk about the shopping disturbing for society, it is of course covered.
But they say why don’t you do something against Conensickle, for example, when they write about whatever immigrants in a very negative style? So what would be your answer? Also those working in the media field, what would you expect from the state on one side who should recognize unpopular, shocking, disturbing content. But on the other side, they ask to be more active, proactive against media that are not only doing hate speech in a criminal way but in a detrimental way to society.
>> The best answer against hate speech is pure and simple journalism. So good journalism, basically. So this has to do with the professionalism, and that I think is a very good case. It has to do with the company of Germany and vis-a-vis their own public.
So it should be, before the government intervention, a system to maintain protectional standards, without interference from the state. Then if we move up to the legal level, it’s very important that as everybody has been saying, including me, it’s legitimate to restrict the press. Why is it legitimate? To protect the rights of others. But this is to pass through, as was recently restated by the UN special Rapporteur Frank LaRue, a three part test. So this should be set by law and implemented by a just decision credible system with no interference by government. It should be professional and necessary. And then when we move to the Internet, this is the key word, because really what is the impact?
Let’s include this, Maria’s group, right now, which is saying that if we participate in EuroDIG, we should be killed, and still what is the impact? Do they deserve to be disconnected because they say this is in terms of proportionality and Nets, which is really that?
And then of course is this legitimate? And then it’s protecting those affected? Of course there should be a risk and we should justify this.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks. At least try to be as precise as possible, because we have somebody from the remote participation and I see three more hands.
To reply to your question, I think that when a body like this is asking to a government what are you doing? I think it’s not tackling, I don’t know the specifics, I did not read the report, but I think it is tackling not so much the legal aspect, but the political responsibility of the government.
And there is another document which I would like to mention. It’s the very recent report, which has been published by a group of imminent persons of the Council of Europe, chaired by Josaf Mishna, the former Foreign Affairs of Germany. “Living together in the 21st Century in Europe in freedom and diversity.” This is really putting a strong emphasis on the political responsibility of European leaders, which too often are following their paths for – electoral paths. They are afraid of losing or being criticized by tabloids instead of leading with an inspired vision and going against public opinion if it’s necessary.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks.
I know we have a question from a remote participant. We should try to keep it open.
>> I think we might have a possibility to give the chance for him to ask the question by himself.
>> BERTRAND? The remote?
>> Adana?
>> He cannot – okay. Okay. Then I will announce that there is no possibility. ber in order is asking handling of hate speech and the very definition is very different between the U.S and Europe, not to mention other regions of the world.
How to find common rules for a global Internet, is it even possible? And if it is, where to discuss them. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Good question. Thanks a lot Bertrand. We will ask this aspect. But let me suggest –
>> There two questions here as well.
>> MODERATOR: Yes, we include some more questions, and I will come back to this international aspect.
>> MODERATOR: Can we start over here? This lady was first.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. Louise Bennett from the British Computer Society in the UK.
In the UK, there has been a lot of concern about online bullying, hate speech and defamation of teachers. And in response, quite a lot of areas and regions have set up partnerships between the police, local authorities, school teachers, school children and their parents, to tackle this.
And they have been very successful. And there is actual evidence that it’s about half of the problem in the areas where this has been done.
I’d like to know if it’s done in the area of other countries represented by the panel and people in the audience.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Thank you very much. Remember, also from the crowd, you can react to a question. It’s not just one way traffic. Anybody who would like to react on this question?
>> MODERATOR: Yes, okay. Go ahead.
>> YULIYA MORENETS: I want to go back to the question about governments, but, also, touch on the last question.
Well, actually, about the role of governments and the legal approach, we can take France and I would say like in the case of one state, France notified the political – so we have legislation in front. But the fact that teachers and parents don’t know what to do, they don’t have a lead between legal assistance and the problems in the field, so maybe the solution and maybe it will be with the assistance of government, and it could be the role of the governments is to help and maybe have a mediation where parents, children, teachers could come to have legal assistance but also to have trainings how to deal, what to do, you know, just to be assisted, to have access to this information.
Yes?
>> MODERATOR: You will answer that one question, right.
>> AUDIENCE: Ivana coming from the New Media Summer School, from Macedonia. I have reaction about the hate speech and the question. First, I’ll go with the first. I see the hate speech on both levels. One is the individual among people, that you said is happening between the students. It’s not only for the one group, it’s everywhere. The other one is also coming from the more mainstreamed media towards even – at least my local experience is towards a particular community, ethnic community groups. It’s very present in my country at this moment.
But for me, the question will be what is done to prevent this? Because I mean now we are talking okay, what happens with the hate speech and how we deal with it? But I think especially with students, no matter what kind of groups, it can be done in prevention, because they do it – this hate speech happens mainly because of – there is some need that needs to be reacted on.
And this is because they are not present enough by the teachers or parents or whatsoever? Is it because they are not explained well, how they can use the tools of the Internet? Is it because there is not enough diversity promoted on the Internet and there is too much commercial promoting one particular group or whatsoever?
And you mention also that there are some recommendations going for the states, and I’m interested what is it – is it something about the prevention? And yes?
>> MODERATOR: And that’s it for now.
>> AUDIENCE: I will try to answer all questions together.
>> AUDIENCE: Awesome.
>> OKSANA PRYKHODKO: And I would like to begin from the governmental role. We are afraid to offer a governmental reaction. The most reaction is to block, restrict, shut down and so on. So we would like to rely on self regulation. You have traditional tools, such as monitoring of hate speech. You have some projects, for example, hate speech against Ukrainian students, and the results are simplistic but we do have some problem on this direction.
We have decisions of the Commission on journalistic ethics regarding hate speech. But, unfortunately, the authority of this Commission is not as high as we would like to have it.
And, of course, media education, media literacy and so on, they are working on these programmes, and the hope is that we will have results.
But we have a very untraditional approach. In 2012 the Ukraine will host the European championship on football, and now we have programmes that rule against this. So it’s a programme for common activity or for football from different countries, from different clubs, to – to avoid anonymous, to avoid violence during football games.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks, Oksana. And now I think we are responding to the question.
>> Well, very short, an easy answer would be that if we have different levels, interpretation of hate speech, we would have to harmonize international law. The question of course is how easy it could be done. Whether we would like to achieve a high level of harmonization or a low level of harmonization. And probably we also have to ask the question of expanding the global nature of the Internet, whether we really want to harmonize. Because hate speech has to do something with cultural identity. And if you harmonize, countries lose to a certain extent the right to regulate cultural identity.
>> MODERATOR: And what is your personal opinion? This is really abstract, but what do you think?
>> I think it will not be realistic to believe that we will agree on an international instrument regulating the level of hate speech.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I have a question here.
>> ELFA YR GYLFADOTTIR: Thank you very much. My name is Elfa, from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture in Iceland. And I’m also representing my country in the Council of Europe on media and new communication services.
I think when listening to this conversation that we need to make a clear distinction between what individuals are saying, for example, online, and what media is doing. Because when we have individuals, that is usually being dealt with in the penal code in the country. And you have, you know, defamation, hate speech and so forth.
But then you have a different set of rules when dealing with media. Because media is so important in every Democratic society. Media has both responsibilities but it also has, you know, source protection and all these rights that they need to have in order to do their job. And included in the responsibility part is of course the liability rules. So, I think that we need to make this kind of distinction.
But, having said that, this is very difficult, obviously. Because what is media today? And then I just want to mention that –
>> MODERATOR: Keep it short, please.
>> ELFA YR GYLFADOTTIR: Yes, I will be very brief.
– that in the Council of Europe now we are actually doing work on this, trying to define media in a new way. And I think that I just wanted to add this for the conversation.
>> MODERATOR: Right. Thank you a lot, Elfa. We will read this in the plenary, please, this afternoon after the lunch break and we will come back to your point. Thanks a lot.
>> MIKOS MILOVICH: I had two questions. The first one I want to get your input on the relation between Freedom of Expression and freedom of access. When you have rules like the three strikes rule, and when someone’s access to the Internet can be cut off in the digital age, what does this mean and how great a threat to Freedom of Expression, in your personal opinion, it is?
And the second one would be is there such a thing as a critical mass for hate speech to go unnoticed? Basically, because we had some – I’ll try to give an example. There were some groups over here on Facebook with like 17 or 18 people issuing threats against our President I think a year ago, and it was prosecuted really fast. All the services reacted and whatnot. But when like 10 thousand people made Facebook hate groups against the gay pride parade, when they issued threats, when people recognized them, not so many people were prosecuted. It was for vandalism, maybe protection of property, maybe 200 people tops. But is there such a thing as too many people for them to be...
>> MODERATOR: So that is two questions. Andrea?
>> ANDREA CAIROLA: Relying to the reetion between administration and the right to process, the best thing is to go back to the text of the article 19, the rights. The people said they require the right to seek, impart and seek justice. So this is a corollary, absolutely. They have the right to access to information.
>> There are so many questions that I have lost a bit of the account. But I wanted to react on two things. The first is international cooperation, and I share the opinion of Rolf, that it’s unlikely that we will find a common ground between so different approaches as the U.S. On one end and Europe on the other hand.
But it’s also not really necessary. We respect that we are different cultural backgrounds. Some things are acceptable in the U.S. and not Europe. That’s fine. But what is important is that we continue to cooperate and this is why we have something like IGF existing.
The second thing I wanted to say is the importance of prevention and education. This has been mentioned by Ivana I think just right now. And there are many things which exist, like intercultural education, education for Human Rights and democracy and citizenship. This is teaching not in a national way, these things are not really implemented.
I would like to ask, there are many young people here, is there anybody who has received a specific training during its school time on Human Rights? On intercultural education?
>> MODERATOR: Let’s make it easy. If you had a yes, say yes.
>> MODERATOR: Hands up.
>> So there is a problem there, because these pedagogical instruments, which in my opinion are the best way to combat the problems of hate speech, are not implemented in the Member States. But they exist.
>> MODERATOR: Yes. I perfectly agree with you. This is an aspect that is not only the responsibility of media, it’s the education system which also has to play a role in this, and media Internet education.
I think there was a question from you.
>> Not a question. I’m from Iceland, Finland. I would like to applaud the success of the Southeast European Regional News Exchange, which is ERNO, which Erika talked about. And I don’t hide the fact that Finland was a little bit helpful in the beginning of that. But the main point is that ERNO, this – this news exchange system, it created positive incentives both for the participating broadcasters and individual journalists. And that is why I – I mean, if they – if they leave the hate speech and start cooperating and engaging in objective journalism about – I think that’s a key point, and the one thing that could be used instead of just prohibitive.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks a lot for this comment. I see one more.
>> MODERATOR: The young people and now we move on to –
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I’m it from Macedonia. And I would like to say something in addition of the speech of the lady from Bosnia about mainstream media.
I will say that I agree with everything that you said. It is really okay that everything that is published in the media must be censored first. Of course, everyone knows that if we write something – some hate speech in, for example, I want to publish something in the published media or magazine or newspaper or something, can I put some hate speech in there? All the world will read that. And, firstly, it will be in the – it will be censored and not everything will go in public. But don’t you think that the only media, the only place where youth and people can express themselves freely and tell everything that they have, even that is hate speech or something that – I have no other way to tell it out, it’s the Internet.
Now, we use Internet. In much more instances it’s published media and everything. And that’s the only place where I can express myself in every kind I want to.
>> MODERATOR: One small correction. I didn’t understand the way that she said traditional media Censor.
>> MODERATOR: Am I correct that if you say – you said professionalism and journalism is important. And if you are a blogger, that professionalism might be Gunk. And the new media, the bloggers do not have control when it comes to professionalism?
>> I’ll be careful mentioning censorship. It’s totally prohibited in the field of journalism. And I don’t believe in censorship like censorship implemented by the government or state. But I do believe in self regulation by the professional communities of journalists. It’s a huge difference. Because government – I mean, that is changing. Politics change.
And, for example, during the wars in former Yugoslavia, some story that was considered patriotic now is shown in schools like an example of the hate speech. So our governments change and politics change, and I don’t believe in the government interference in the media world. But I believe in the profession of journalists themselves. And I believe that blogs are very good for the interconnection, for the expression of European personal opinion.
But mainstream media should be the way to get professional news, made in accordance with the journalistic standards.
>> MODERATOR: Now, a member of this row. And then we are handing over to your side. There is one more question from here.
>> SIMON KENDALL: I won’t go into the international space again, needless to say there are significant changes with the first amendment. There is a lot of talk about legislation and governance and law enforcement. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of discussion about the contract between the user and the service provider. Given the volume of material, it’s probably more than an effective route to tackling this problem. How can we all work together – government, industry and the user – in terms of community guidelines, community service, are more visible and enforced.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you.
This is another aspect. This is a part that we will cover in the plenary on media after the lunch break. So I would like to refocus the debate again. We have two or three –
>> MODERATOR: There are a lot of questions. We want to get to the reaction of Bertrand.
>> MODERATOR: Yes make it short. Bertrand.
>> MODERATOR: We move on to somebody else and we get to Bertrand later.
>> I have his direction to that. If the microphone will not work, his follow-up is Rolf is right, and he thinks that you are, in saying that there will be no global harmonization, then what are the applicable jurisdictions? National territories or global media platforms? The internal rules of Facebook on YouTube, for instance.
>> MODERATOR: This is a good question to be followed up by I would say the work in Nairobi.
>> ELVANA THACI: This is Elvana from the Council of Europe. I think we shouldn’t be avoiding the question of hate speech on the global Internet. Because there is no national Internet. There is just a global Internet. And – so, hate speech in one country is not hate speech in another country. How do we make sure that there is free flow of information on the Internet? Because it comes down to that question and I think Bertrand is right. It may be a difficult question but we have to address it. How do we address it? How do we make sure that there is free flow of information on the Internet across the borders? And hate speech is just part of that question.
>> MODERATOR: Anybody out there, you want to respond?
>> I think you are right, Elvana, and you are correct, the question is how can we talk about this in a one hour seminar. If we don’t have globalisation, we only have regional or national laws. We can have partial harmonization. As you said, at THE far end, at the user end, we don’t have any other option than national law at least for the time being.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. There are two or three more questions over here.
>> AUDIENCE: I’m trying to get one from the Columbia from the University of New York University. I have a question for our Finnish friend.
>> Huber.
>> You spoke of incentive. I was interested in what might constitute incentives to overrule or to transcend or to limit or at least contain hate speech? Whose incentives? How would they be organized, regulated, et cetera?
>> Well, in this case, what happened was that Finland funded the beginning of this news exchange thing of course under the auspice of the European Broadcasting Union. The incentives for journalists and broadcasters were training, equipment, which was badly lacking in that area after the war, and also the framework for cooperation, which includes seminars and meetings and so on and so forth. And last but not least, these 11,000 news items that was talked about, that would be impossible without the news exchange system, that Zeljca was talking about.
>> MODERATOR: Can you extrapolate from that system to address the more general questions raised about harmonization and where the boundaries are between different units?
>> Well, I think that within this available time – I just wanted to point out that there have been cases where positive incentives have been used, and this is one of the cases. But how far that is applicable to those, that would require deeper treatment.
>> MODERATOR: I believe you both followed this up during the lunch break. I think that there is considerable interest in this aspect.
>> Okay. Thank you.
>> Triin again from Estonia. Actually, I’m really concerned now about the freedom – freedom of speech and expression. We are going for the declarations and all kinds of laws on that. But actual life and the reality shows to be completely different. We have good examples of the Arab spring when the offline communication was cut off. In Estonia now they are going for the law that the journalists need to reveal their sources. So in that sense, where is the freedom of speech. And how can we assure the freedom of speech if we are more driving for the censorship?
>> MODERATOR: Okay. One response from Denis?
>> DENIS HUBER: I want to say something that is not the official position of the Council of Europe, which is my personal position. I believe that we have gone too far on the restrictions. As I mentioned in my introduction, in ’97, the committee adopted two texts. One text was the recommendation of hate speech, which was promoting restrictions in legislations by the Member States in order to improve the number of hate speech, racism. And the second one was a recommendation promoting a culture of tolerance prevention. Working at the school level, working in journalist school, learning to journalists, to students, everybody, to promote tolerance. But a lot has been done on the first one and very few on the second one, as my question has shown. And we should make far more effect on the second one.
I just want to give an example which concerns my own country, France, just to show how far this prohibition has led us. After this recommendation, there has been a law called law Gesu, which is prohibiting hate speech and the denial of Holocaust. And I remember after this law there was debate on TV between a socialist leader and Mr. Lepan. And at the moment, Mr. Lepan was not denying the Holocaust but was saying that it was a detail in the Second World War. And the socialist said this is not an opinion, this is a crime. And I felt uncomfortable with that, that you can stop a political conversation with such a phrase. Is it a crime? Of course. Many people don’t agree with this, but should it be a crime?
And then we came to other combinations, because if it’s prohibited to conveying some things it should be prohibited from portraying other things, like slavery.
And the last one was more ridiculous is that there has been a declaration of the French Parliament that in Armenia there was a genocide in 1915, and many people believed there was a genocide. And on this basis discussions have started to put a law which would prohibit the denial of the Armenia genocide. Can you imagine, for example, in Turkey such a law being applicable? So we have gone I think too far in prohibiting too many things, which are bad ideas, ideas which have to be fought against, but not by the law.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks a lot. We have one more.
>> A question before we go to you.
>> BOGDAN: I’m Bogdan from Romania and I’ll follow-up on the answer that you gave. I was thinking that here we have already had a discussion. But at the same time we have the French President that wants a civilized Internet, the same French Internet that imposed the three strikes for IPR infringement. So why don’t you think that when we discuss the hate speech on the Internet as a problem, doesn’t that lead to some of the minds who are not used to the Internet to impose a law that would have three strikes for hate speech on the Internet? So how do we discuss the subject of hate speech on the Internet without going into a Censorship module? And that is especially for the ones who have done work on the hate speech on the Internet.
>> MODERATOR: Do you want to directly respond to this?
>> Well, I think maybe the solution, it will be completely the education, and what we called just before, the implementation of the existing recommendations that we have.
And also I believe it’s also in the involvement of the young people into the discussion. But when I speak about young people, I don’t speak only about students. And when we were giving the examples, the teenager, 13 or 14 years old who start using the Internet today. Because they are the new users of the Internet that we can create the Facebook when we have 13 years old. So it’s to create different groups of the people, and to make and promote the act of citizenship between and to have their message from young people in order to be able to combat this.
>> MODERATOR: A reaction here?
>> MARTIN BOYLE: Not to that particular one, no. It’s Marten Boyle. I’m with the .uk Internet domain name registry.
I’d like to go back to that international versus national discussion, because really we are back down at the root of the problem. Bertrand has often got the ability just to be able to identify what the really difficult question is. And I think the answer that we got was a bit of a cop out. You only have an hour lecture or you admit that it’s just too difficult.
And that pushes us down the route of national action. And of course, yes, nationally there are a lot of laws. And people have to obey the law locally.
In the UK –
>> MODERATOR: Please get to your question.
>> MARTIN BOYLE: Okay. My question really is: Are there some basic principles on an international framework that we could at least put into the headlines as to whether internationally we would expect to see some other reaction? Is it something like threat to life? Is it something like insight to criminal damage?
Where I’m particularly worried is a comment from Simon Kendall, who started talking about the role of the service provider.
>> MODERATOR: I think that’s a good question now.
>> MARTIN BOYLE: Can I just finish?
>> MODERATOR: Hurry up then.
>> MARTIN BOYLE: The role of the service provider, the intermediary suddenly having to take responsibility for defining what is hate speech, and what is not. And as an intermediary I would not like that role. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Anybody I see here three hands.
>> Quickly of course, we have some general basic principles. And, for example and in particular, since I have been partly involved, the Council of Europe has elaborated general Internet principles. The problem is that they are just too wide to decide whether in case X if is this hate speech or not hate speech. And this brings us back to the question what does the service provider have to do in a specific case? And of course no service provider likes to be responsible for blocking or not blocking. Indeed, it is very difficult. But the more we can really look for general principles and the more we can reinstate Freedom of Expression, contrary to G8, as I said at the beginning, the better.
>> MODERATOR: Second comment from Andrea?
>> ANDREA CARIOLA: I would like to add something to this. We have the Council of Europe to the convention on cybercrime, which is the open not only for the Member States, but it’s already the international – we can say kind of international or could be kind of international centers in this regard.
>> MODERATOR: Reactions? There is a question over there. Andrea, can you keep it short? Because he has been waiting for a long time. I know he has a good question.
>> AUDIENCE: I’m from the Netherlands and I’m a participant at the New Media Summer School as well. Haramon. The difficulty with regulating hate speech on the Internet is all about the interpretation of hate speech. Because on many occasions you don’t have the body language and like the offline things you have about communications.
For example, in the Netherlands there was a girl that was – that posted a tweet on Twitter that she was – she said she planned to place a bomb in the school. The next day she was arrested. Yesterday, she was just joking. So how can we ensure that the freedom of making jokes is not restricted with regulating hate speech?
>> MODERATOR: Okay.
>> MODERATOR: Well, there is a lot of laughter in the panel. So...
>> If you consider that putting on the Internet that you would put the bomb somewhere tomorrow is a joke, then I’m afraid your freedom of the joke should be restricted, because this is not the joke. This is just stupid. And people should – people should be – people should be responsible and be accountable of what they are doing.
But I wanted to say something else about another question, where Freedom of Expression and the restrictions, what is legitimate and what is not legitimate? I think the basic has to remain the freedom. You should be free. “Freedom of Expression is the basis of all liberties.” That is a quote from Voltaire “and we should only accept those restrictions which are completely indispensable,” clearly saying which are depriving other people from their rights or which are giving a threat to other people or to society.
And I would just like to give you an example. You remember that a few months ago there was a prayer in the U.S. Which threatened to burn the cross. At the end – first of all, he did not do it. And at the end, he finished by doing it on the Internet. And Obama explained to the Muslim country, sorry, there is nothing I can do. He can burn the Koran. This is allowed in the U.S.
We had another example in Strasbourg of somebody who was drunk and felt nothing more intelligent to do than being drunk, burning a Koran, and he filmed that and put it to the Internet. He was condemned and he made prison and I don’t know the end of the judgment, but there was a legal sanction for this.
Now my question is to you, what is right? Sanctioning a person for that or saying there is nothing you can do?
>> I’m Mehan from Macedonia. The problem with what you’re proposing is that you can actually give a lot of power to someone with a terrible sense of humor. And who will decide who gets to decide? Essentially, it has to be decided upon, following your system.
I don’t believe in deciding, yes – well, limiting people’s jokes, for example, limiting people’s opinions and things. For example, I might think that that school –
>> MODERATOR: Think about the consequence of the joke.
>> Yes, formulate what you want to formulate.
>> I think you should listen to me. I think you should listen to more jokes.
>> MODERATOR: It’s always the responsibility component involved in the freedom. And I think that we have also freedom with liberty. And we say there is also responsibility involved.
>> It’s a matter of opinion and I disagree with what you just said.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. This is part of the discussion.
>> MODERATOR: Freedom of debate. Beautiful.
>> Elvana?
>> MODERATOR: And we have a remote question I think.
>> ELVANA THACI: I would like to share with you the disagreement that Bertrand mentioned, that he doesn’t agree that there is no other option than national original rule. Internal rules on social media platforms may be the solution.
And also we have a question from another remote participant. Sarah – I’ll announce now her name. From Italy. Sara Montinaro. She – sorry. This mouse doesn’t work well. But...
>> MODERATOR: It’s not Sara, it’s the mouse.
>> SARA MONTINARO: We talked about community of peers regulating themselves, meaning journalists, but what about when we come to the Internet? Is a nonprofessional community of peers, meaning Facebook users, for example, the good subject to define what is allowed and what is not? And how can we deal with hate speech restrictions without affecting the right to anonymous access to the Web, if we consider anonymous access as a right. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: I have a microphone but I have no answer to this question.
But I would like to react to the previous discussion. I’m not lawyer and maybe my understanding of hate speech is very naive. But it seems to me that it’s content based on difference of sex or religions or for nationality, and so on. Each provokes aggression.
And I’d like to give you an example from the Ukraine. You have a very deep economic crisis, and the journalistic tabloids about use of public dollars, these materials evoked aggressive reactions. Is it hate speech?
>> MODERATOR: A question in the back? Just with Sara’s question. I think we addressed that topic earlier. Maybe she can read back a bit as well.
>> AUDIENCE: Can I go now? Thank you. I’m I’m Miran from the Private Park in Serbia. I’d like to say this is a very lively conversation. And I would like to make a statement based on my opinion, that neither one of you addresses the cause. All of you address the consequence. So I’ll just rephrase some of my tweets earlier this morning on the plenary.
Do not try rigid censorship on the Internet. The Internet is a living organism. It’s a part of human collective consciousness. It will retaliate, I can promise you that. We had WikiLeaks. We had tries to censor WikiLeaks and we have all seen how people united to defend it. People will unite to defend their rights to speech, their rights to make jokes, even about bombs in schools. In Serbia it is a part of the folklore to make severe jokes about Croats, about Bosnians. You cannot do anything on the Internet before dealing with it in reality and in schools and in education.
This is in league with the kinds of jokes. I think we have to ask ourselves: Could it affect other individuals’ human rights? These kinds of jokes, it will have an effect on Human Rights that have to be restricted online or in the real world. So how to deal with it? How to restrict another individual’s human rights? We have to respect other individuals’ Human Rights and other individuals.
>> It’s a favorite statement from Rosa Luxemburling: My freedom ends with the freedom of my neighbor or my kids or my wife starts. And I think there must be a censorium for this feeling of responsibility. Of course, I always like to make use of my liberties of my freedom, but I must be aware there are limits of my freedom. My Freedom of Expression doesn’t exclude to insult my wife and I’m not happy about an opinion of her. We easily enter into tolerance debates, which is good for a respect debate. And therefore I think I’m a promoter as a journalist of Freedom of Expression. But for me, Freedom of Expression always goes along with certain responsibilities.
And we talked about the qualities, standards traditional media has to apply. You are trained to check your sources before you publish something. And we have this kind of standards that is the reason why we came (inaudible) and now we are talking about a new media system, et cetera, peer-to-peer system.
There are other rules applied, but it’s part of the discussion to think about are the possibilities for Freedom of Expression but other limits.
This was just a personal contribution to the debate. We have to sum up shortly.
And there was one more from here and from Elvana. Afterwards, I close the list.
>> MODERATOR: Let’s do the three questions. See if we can combine the questions when it comes to a question and then do the wrap up.
>> AUDIENCE: First of all, you talk about responsibility. The joke that was made was made by a kid. How much responsibility does a teenager – how much responsibility or – can a kid have? I mean, to a joke?
>> She was 16, to be exact.
>> AUDIENCE: And I mean it’s what she gets from society and her environment.
And, secondly, this is Freedom of Expression. It’s just expression. It’s the response to what the writer is feeling inside. It’s not something that is just stirred up all of a sudden. It’s what they have been holding in. And if you Censor them, what other outlet do they have? They will go out and do something worse and they will actually take action. So maybe by expressing themselves it’s a good outlet. I think maybe by going and censoring you can –
>> MODERATOR: Just a short reaction. I know this example very well. Just to say the girl knew that she was – she mentioned the next day that, well, she knew that she was wrong. She was the President of the journal of the school. So she tried to trigger a bit and she knew what was happening.
>> MODERATOR: Elvana, the final one.
>> ELVANA THACI: Thank you. I’m from the Council of Europe. Thank you.
We discussed a lot of issues, a lot of topics, and I’m just a bit worried what kind of message are we taking to the main messages from EuroDIG for this session exactly?
I hope the jokes will not be in the messages. But – the bad jokes that we have been hearing about.
What I’d like to see in the message is the issues that we – that Bertrand identified and Martin also raised after that. What are the liabilities of intermediaries in terms of protection of free speech? And how do we ensure a free flow of information of Internet content in the global Internet? Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Elvana, thank you very much. It’s a very good point. And I would like to have you raise this question after the lunch; so in the plenaries, in the plenary on new media. So this will not be the end of the debate. You can continue this reflecting on these regulation issues after this.
>> And quick perhaps, difficult question from Rudy Vosnic from Belgium. What can governments do with regards to the so many hackers defacing Web sites with hate speech? Maybe take down procedures? This was the question.
>> MODERATOR: This was the last question for now. We are running out of time. So, I – it’s a possibility now to all speak as to comment to the last question. But please try to make it short. Rolf, you will start?
>> ROLK WEBER: Okay. I would concur with Elvana. There are the possibilities to implement general principles. There are possibilities to Harmonize international traffic in the sense that there are no obstacles or legal obstacles. And there are possibilities to impose responsibilities on governments blocking Internet access, and that’s a plea for Freedom of Expression.
>> MODERATOR: I close –
>> MODERATOR: No? We can’t do it?
>> MODERATOR: No. We closed it for all. Two opinions and two freedoms of opinions, what do we compromise?
>> The compromise will be that you’re a bit older than me, so I respect your opinion in this.
(Applause)
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Thanks a lot. And who is next? Andrea?
>> ANDREA CAIROLA: You don’t want to – just reacting to the various things a bit as a sort of wrap up. It’s true that all of these – okay.
But as was said, I think, what the people call human rights of human expression is that there is – you know, Human Rights are interrelated as an advocate rather than replies to the issues, roles of government and international standards. So on the sort of guidelines I apply is whether we should ask ourselves who is the arbitor in this case? And we should also see is there any hidden agenda, so whether it’s EG8 or like Chinese government or whether it’s a commercial entity. And I think this is a bit of a sort of like way of.
And then in the end we should remind the international standards are there, it’s applied, there is a continuance between the past and traditional media and now. And also, that technical like innovation in itself, sort of like enabling Freedom of Expression. So we should be sort of watchful and careful about that.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. Andrea, I think this is again an aspect that we have to discuss after the lunch break.
Oksana?
>> OKSANA PRYKHODKO: Just final remarks. The most simple and most obvious way to put responsibility on content is if this is a direct way towards Censorship. As I speak about user generated content and we speak about literacy and education for everybody, maybe this is a problem. And again cultural development and cultural authority, this is not solving the problem.
>> I want to just emphasize one more time, because perhaps I was not well understood by people in the audience, that the basic principle is freedom. Restrictions should be exceptional. And that if you want Freedom of Expression it includes the right of making bad jokes. But the people who are making bad jokes should be accountable and responsible of the possible consequences, not by going to prison, but if I understood well what was said about the story, this young lady, 16 years old, understood that she has done something wrong and she felt comfortable with it. And that’s fine with me.
>> MODERATOR: The last comments go to you.
>> YULIYA MORENETS: I tend to agree with what you just said. And I really don’t want to end up with having that we should have Censorship or have – or work against the tools. But raise the awareness about the responsibilities that come and also about the rights. And work on the causes, rather than on the tools.
And just to – I really need to address one comment that was mentioned that really triggered me. Bad jokes about Croatians is not part of the Serbian culture. That is pure racism.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for the clarification.
We are at the end of the workshop but we are not at the end of the debate. And I think we need to continue debating on this. Because as long as we are debating, we are contributing to solving problems as the problems start when people don’t talk and don’t debate anymore.
>> ELVANA THACI: Just to be very short, I think we have a lot of campaigns to raise tools and training for professionals, parents, and teachers, and those working with children. And we have to include young people into the debate, but young people including teenagers, not only students.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Thanks a lot. I would like to thank our speakers for their good inputs.
(Applause)
I would like to thank the participants, the remote participants.
>> MODERATOR: The remote moderator, –
>> MODERATOR: And Yrjo Lansipuro, who has the pleasure of doing the report. I think there are a lot of aspects of Freedom of Expression and its limits.
We will continue after the lunch break now. Like yesterday, lunch is downstairs as far as I know. And we will see each other at plenary after the break. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: People from the sound and camera, thank you as well.