In her powerful, unrelenting TED Talk, the actress and activist says enough. Enough with online hate speech. Enough with sexual harassment. Enough with threats of violence against women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community. Now is the time to take the global crisis of online abuse seriously and to recognize the offline harm of online violence.
‘As a Muslim woman who was born a Christian, Susan Carland gets quite a lot of hateful messages from ant-Islamic bigots. After trying different ways to fight them, she came up with the best idea of all – she would turn their hate into something positive by donating $1 to UNICEF for every hate tweet she received.
Carland, is a sociologist with a PhD at Melbourne’s Monash University, converted to Islam when she was 19. She is now 34. “I’d tried blocking, muting, engaging and ignoring, but none of them felt like I was embodying the Koranic injunction of driving off darkness with light,” she writes on The Age. “I felt I should be actively generating good in the world for every ugly verbal bullet sent my way. And so the idea of donating $1 to UNICEF for every hate-filled tweet I received came to me.”’
“Donating to them every time I was abused felt like tangible good in response to virtual hate”
Now, Schmidt wants tech companies to make it harder to express those traits: “We should make it easier to see the news from another country’s point of view, and understand the global consciousness free from filter or bias. We should build tools to de-escalate tensions on social media — sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.”
(…)
It’s also unclear what Schmidt means by “hate and harassment.” The former CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, once expressed surprise at the number of people who came to him with complaints of “harassment” on the platform that were in fact mere political disagreements.
But others, especially feminists, have been doggedly attempting to expand the definition of “online harassment” for some time. Notable examples include the arrest and trial of Toronto artist Gregory Alan Elliott for disagreeing with feminists on the internet, and the push by feminists at the U.N. to make “cyberviolence” a major political issue.
Children of color are old enough to face racism when they’re born. Old enough to bear the weight of stereotypes & hate before their little eyes can focus. But somehow white kids are supposed to be too delicate & too shielded to even know race exists because somehow that might hurt them. When your definition of innocent child doesn’t include my babies? I know what you’re on & I don’t have any patience for the lies you tell yourself or your children.
“Allison said that her intention was to scare Jewish people, and people of different races, other than white,” the affidavit states. “Allison spoke at length about her racist beliefs and her efforts to ‘wake people up.’”
“One of her writings said, ‘Every race but white will die this WILL happen.'”
"Spray painted swastikas, Nazi symbols, and threats of violence were found at two churches, two public schools, two homes, an art center, and a political office in Norman.”
I’ve been mulling over this message for a bit since there are so many problematic aspects of it and I can’t decide which is the most upsetting:
- that someone thinks a fifteen year old girl deserved to be murdered for being female, Jewish, or both. - that someone thinks a strange woman on the internet deserves to be murdered for voicing opinions on feminism. - that someone created a tumblr blog for the sole purpose of sending vitriolic message(s?) to strangers. - that someone felt strongly enough to voice this hate, but not strongly enough to be held accountable for it. - that someone might not actually feel this way, but thinks it’s a funny joke or an effective way to shut down people they don’t like. - that someone thinks this is an acceptable way to behave because they’ve seen it happen repeatedly all over the internet and don’t think there are any consequences. - that someone equated themselves with Ahab, often considered a devil-worshipping man on a doomed quest to destroy greatness out of spite and impotent rage, and probably was not considering it ironically. - that someone thinks captain is spelled captian.
U.K: Lesbian couple forced to move home after being hounded by neighbour
U.K: Lesbian couple forced to move home after being hounded by neighbour
A lesbian couple were forced to quit their home after they were hounded by a neighbour who spotted them kissing through their living room window, a court heard
Nurse Faye Mallon and counsellor Lydia Henshall were subjected to foul mouthed homophobic abuse by former gym owner Kim Armstrong who called them ‘naughty disrespectful girls.’
During a hate campaign father-of-two Armstrong would…
U.S: Tesla Sued by Lesbian for Racism and Homophobia
U.S: Tesla Sued by Lesbian for Racism and Homophobia
A Black gay woman who worked at a Tesla Inc. factory accused the electric-vehicle maker in a lawsuit of “festering” racism by ignoring the racial and homophobic slurs and physical harm she endured.
Kaylen Barker, a former contract worker who inspected brake parts, is the latest to complain that Tesla ignores discrimination based on race, sexual orientation and gender at its plants. According to…
Back in May, when the streaming platform Twitch announced the release of more than 350 new “identity tags” that could be used to sort streams into distinctive categories, Jess Bolden was excited.
The 25-year-old FACEIT Games Esports analyst, who lives between France and Italy with her female partner, streams the game Rainbow Six Siege, a largely male-dominated pursuit. Bolden was once Samsung…
Again, this is a complicated saga and some of the points I would make would be repetitive. But a few points are worth (re)emphasizing here:
Some of the most damning statements by Masuku do not seem to be in the record the courts have been reviewing – I’m not sure why (I assume it is for some procedural reasons regarding how the challenge was brought, not that the courts are just studiously ignoring them, but I’m not sure). For example, Masuku reportedly expressly said that his comments were meant to “convey a message to the Jews of South Africa”, which seems quite germane to assessing whether his comments should be seen as targeting Jews.
Likewise, I have no particular knowledge about South African law, and so cannot comment on whether this decision is correct or not as a faithful application of the current (or “best”) reading of the relevant constitutional clauses and statutes.
Finally, while I oppose “hate speech” rules on principle, South Africa has elected to take a different approach on speech than does American constitutional law. Given that, there is no reason why the Jewish community of South Africa should not be able to avail itself of these protections.
The Court analyzed four (but really two) comments by Masuku to see if they qualified as hate speech. The first was a blog comment where Masuku said:
1. [A]s we struggle to liberate Palestine from the racists, fascists and Zionists who belong
to the era of their Friend Hitler! We must not apologise, every Zionist must be made
to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine. We
must target them, expose them and do all that is needed to subject them to perpetual
suffering until they withdraw from the land of others and stop their savage attacks on
human dignity.
(In the realm of “damning comments not discussed”, during this blog discussion Masuku reportedly said that he had come to conclude that “Jews are arrogant, not from being told by any Palestinian, but from what I saw myself”).
The other three all came during a pro-Palestine university rally (and the court analyzes them together, hence why I think it’s perhaps more sensible to view them as one statement rather than three). There Masuku said:
2. “COSATU has got members here even on this campus; we can make sure that for that side [the pro-Israel side] it will be hell.”
3. “[T]he following things are going to apply: any South African family, I want to repeat it so that it is clear for anyone, any South African family who sends its son or daughter to be part of the Israel Defence Force must not blame us when something happens to them with immediate effect.”
4. “COSATU is with you, we will do everything to make sure that whether it’s at Wits, whether it’s at Orange Grove, anyone who does not support equality and dignity, who does not support rights of other people must face the consequences even if it means that we will do something that may necessarily cause what is regarded as harm.”
The Court ultimately concluded that the first statement (in the blog) was hate speech, while the other three are not. The deciding factor was the Hitler reference, which, the Court concluded, would reasonably be seen as targeting the Jewish community insofar as Hitler of course is famous for targeting Jews (and not specifically “Zionist Jews”). The other statements, by contrast, however hurtful or offensive they might have been, appear to be in the context specifically of opposing “pro-Israel” persons rather than the Jewish community as such.
Overall, I think this should be viewed as a pretty sizeable victory for the Jewish community. I might suggest that the fourth statement, too, could be seen as targeting the Jewish community insofar as Orange Grove is apparently well-known as a heavily Jewish neighborhood and its inclusion therefore seems to be specifically about referencing the Jewish community as Jews (that is, just as a Hitler reference is evocative of Jews, not Zionist Jews, Orange Grove is also associated with Jews, not specifically Zionist Jews). I think the Court’s assessment of the second and third statements is fair enough; there is no doubt those words represent sharp blows thrown, but they expressly relate to persons who are by some form of action taking a side and are commentary on that side. One need not like or approve of them to think they fall within the bounds of protective speech.
But on the whole, the Court seemed quite thoughtful here. It recognized that words which on face might appear neutral or nonsectarian may, given social context, historical usage, or other considerations, nonetheless evoke hateful tropes; this was very important in avoiding what I thought was some too-quick moves by the appellate court to simply intone the truism that Zionism and Judaism are not synonymous and call it day. On this point, the Court said something that may well be worth framing:
Due regard to this context and history must be observed when dealing with expressions that are allegedly anti-Semitic, because many socially acceptable words may become a proxy for anti-Semitic sentiments. Focusing on the plain text and ignoring the objectively ascertainable subtext would be ignorant, inappropriate and antithetical to what our Constitution demands.
Couldn’t say it better.
In any event – Masuku and COSATU have been veryaggressive in fighting this case (and, I’ll be honest, I expected them to prevail). It will be interesting to see how the court-ordered apology plays out. But it appears that, as a legal matter, the Masuku saga has finally come to a close.
