ways to curb hate speech

ways to curb hate speech

Introduction

Hate speech is a public speech that expresses hatred towards a particular person or group of people that can result into violence and is based on race, gender, religion, sex among others ( Cambridge dictionary). It is regulated in various liberal democratic countries but not regulated in the United States. It has prompted violence and genocide among certain groups of individuals and this has caused serious human rights concerns especially from the freedom of expression. It has real impacts on the freedom of individuals especially the marginalized groups to speak out and be heard or even their ideas being put into consideration.  Generally, not all hate speech is dangerous and can cause harm to people though some can be harmful. Laws and regulations have been put into place to regulate hate speech. It is classified into different categories including online hate speech, physical, emotional among others. This assay will discuss on various ways to curb hate speech since its regulation will have negative impacts to freedom of speech and at the same time if not regulated it will affect the right of protection against discrimination.

Discussion

In response to hate speech , states should not limit themselves in prohibiting hate speech but adopt a measure to ensure an enabling environment for freedom of expression and equality( Farrior, 1996). It also argued that excessive restrictions on hate speech is only a temporary way of dealing with the issue and with time may result into violation  of international standards of freedom of expression thus undermining the protection of equality. Hate speech should be protected as per the First Amendment due to various reason based on the impact it can foster in a society. This is because it contradicts with the rights of citizens stipulated in the constitution where citizens have right to speech. For instance, the supreme court of United States has opposed government trials to regulate hate speech. Social media platforms have established user rules that regulate hate speech. This has been achieved through increase in the number of moderators that monitor closely hate speech in any text. It is has been found that most hate speech occurs in social media and this leads to cyber bulling and this reduces one’s self- esteem and has been the cause of most death cases witnessed among the young generation and so need for its regulation. Politicians can be source of hate speech either directly or indirectly especially during the speech remarks they make during public rallies. Their words may inflict hatred on a particular ethinic group and this can bring about discrimination among individuals and can either bring violence or more impacts which can be dangerous.

To curb hate speech various measures should be implemented like education, regulation of social media, end impunity against hate crimes among others. Through education on media ethics that focuses on the rights and freedom of people and their role in creating peaceful society (Higashikawa, 2017). Awareness should be raised on the political, social and cultural rights of individuals like freedom of speech, responsibilities and implications that come along with the freedom. Journalists for example should be equipped with skills to identify hate speech and counter it effectively. Encouragement of conflict sensitive reporting and multicultural awareness campaign is another way to curb hate speech. Journalists should be taught conflict sensitive reporting skills and the multicultural awareness campaigns should emphasize knowledge about the diversity of cultures and tradition and this is achieved through writing of articles, air programmes or even a public speaking without taking sides.

Regulation of social media is another way to curb hate speech and this should be done in a manner that will not revoke the right to press freedom which is enhanced through education on media laws and ethic ( Herz,2012). Encourage victims of hate speech and to report as fast as possible to avoid been victimized in the future. Impunity against hate crimes should be tackled and this is achieved through establishment of monitoring and evaluation unit which are tasked with monitoring hate speech trends, compiling reports and reporting to key institutions. Several approaches have been implemented that help detect hate speech in various fields and involve automatic hate speech detection methods (MacAvaney, 2019). Keyboard based approaches is an automated platform that detects hate speech from a text (Kambe, 2018). It achieves this through use of a dictionary that identifies hateful words. For example, Hatebase maintains a database that contains approximately 95 languages. This method is not the best since it is faced by some limitations since the system only relies on the keys words as guidelines to detect hate speech thus use of any other word that is not in the dictionary of the keyboard will not be termed as hate speech.

Machine learning classifiers are also used in detection of hate speech. They make use of a labeled text that produces a classifier that detects hare speech based on labels used by content viewers. Source metadata is used as additional information from social media that helps understand characteristics of the posts and information such as demographics on the posting user ,social engagement platforms  gives more information on a given post  thus easy identification of hate speech. Due to limitations faced by the automatic approaches, different people came up with implementations of other tools to counter the problem. For example, Support Vector Machine and Logistic Regression are used. This helped categorize a text on basis that features do not interact with one another. They also predict classes based on a combination of scores of each given feature. State-of –the-art feature classification model that involves distributional TF-IDF feature, speech tags and linguistic features helps identify hate speech by differentiating different usage of terms (Davidson, 2017). Fast Text model approach produced embeddings of character n-grams and helped identify hate speech in a text among others like  BRET,C-GRU have been put in use lately.

Hate speech is not regulated as per the United States this is because of the robust right to free speech which is stipulated in the American constitution in the First Amendment and this Amendment is part of the United States Bill of Rights that protects freedom of speech, religion, freedom of assembly, press and right to petition. Despite the protection of speech in the First Amendment, there are some categories of speech that are not protected and include, fraud, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats among others. Societal implementation of the freedom of speech has faced a great challenge where the restriction of hate speech in public universities resurfaced with the adoption of anti-harassment led to covering of discriminatory speech. It was suggested that student’s protests should justify their actions and demonstrate understanding on both sides of a debate (Ceci and Williams, 2018). As a result of the effects that rose due to the First Amendment that defended freedom of speech several judges like Justice Oliver debated that freedom of speech gave bad people the opportunity to discriminate and harass the good since they felt they were protected and this caused a lot of problems.

Hate speech regulation has more impact on everyday life like freedom of the press, criminal law, among others and penalties should be fines, imprisonment or even both in severe cases. On international and European level, several mechanisms have been implemented that regulate certain types of speech. It provides regulation of the speech only if it violates the rights of others. It was noted that free speech carried unique duties and responsibilities among them being the obligation not to disseminate racist ideas ( Webb, 2010). The European Union Framework was initiated to curb racism and xenophobia which were expressed through hate speech by virtue of criminal law whose punishment was to be done in public(Alkivadaou,2018).  Hate speech should be regulated since it results into true threats. For instance, A man in Portland, Oregon, that stabbed two people on a train defended himself saying that his stabbing was justified in the First Amendment and he was protected despite his act resulting into violence (Levy, 2000). Free speech reduces people’s sense of security and their participation in society and so there is need to regulate free speech in order to avoid hate speech

It should be regulated since it can result to physical harm to the targeted group .From a study published in the peer reviewed journal psychosomatic medicine in2004 proved that a certain percentage of people who were victims of hate speech committed suicide and thus caused the need for regulating hate speech. It should also be regulated since it affects sex. Sexist hate speech involves expressions that spread, incite or promote hatred based on sex (Graff, 2011). This type of hate speech can take both offline and online and it is mostly hidden since the most targeted group is women and rarely report on it. There are various ways that have been implemented in the United Nations Human Rights Council that deals with cases of stereotyping, stigmatization and recognition of diversity, inclusion and pluralism as the best way of dealing with hate speech. To achieve this, there must be creation of collaboration networks that will build mutual understanding and inspire constructive action in various fields like religion, speak out against intolerance that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or even violence and it also create awareness through educating people on the problems that result from hate speech.

Conclusion

Hate speech is a problem that anyone can experience either through social media platforms or even physically. Despite the right to expression, the right should be regulated in some circumstances to avoid interfering with other people’s rights and the words said are closely monitored. The best way to deal with hate speech is by enlightening people to change the way they think and expand their perspectives by implementation of measures like intercultural dialogue to prevent hate speech based on culture of certain people or through education on people’s diversity. The minority people should be given a voice to express themselves fully on what they experience in day to day life through a more positive media coverage. The government needs to strengthen the freedom of expression that is inclusive and favors all its citizens to express their grievances since freedom of expression is the best way to reach people in different societies and change their mind completely. Social media platforms should be regulated and various models for detection of hate speech put into place. This will promote quick access to any word of hatred that can foster discrimination or even violence. The government should put straight the people’s rights and freedom in the constitution to counter confusion that arises when two rights or more conflict each other. For instance, freedom of speech and right to expression should be made in a way that does not contradict. Hate speech should never be underrated.

Reference

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