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UN Wants to Combat Online Racism
Ristoril writes "There's an article on Yahoo! News about the United Nations World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination and Xenophobia, taking place in 2001. The goal is to get nations to start 'doing something' about racist propaganda on the Internet. While no specific policies are mentioned, I seriously doubt they're planning the sensible thing -- education." Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?
For those concerned about the US position on such proposals, at the Holocaust conference the US envoy said that freedom of speech issues would prevent the US from supporting restrictions against racist activity on the Internet, but that hate groups could be monitored for "planning destructive activity."
As for what the Expert Commission is actually discussing in February in regards to the internet, it's a three hour session (part of a three day seminar) on the remedies available to victims of acts of racism and incitement to racial hatred on the internet; technical problems linked to prosecution of acts of racism on the internet; and the legal and technical questions of the issue (such as defining the act, the perpetrator of the act, responsibility of the servers and providers, competence of prosecutors, international cooperation in the judicial aspects).
What the United Nations is concerned with is the systematic use of the internet to exacerbate conflicts, facilitate 'ethnic cleansing', and target migrants or refugees by stoking ethnic hatred and intolerance - not people randomly using 'hate speech' in a chatroom or on usenet, or even the typical idiotic webpage spewing 'white vs. black' ideas. In this regard, the internet is seen as just another mass media tool in the arsenal of those promoting such ideas, similar to radio, television, and the press (as was used in Rwanda where the horrific genocide was sparked by inflammatory radio broadcasts and newspapers). I spent most of 1997 as a senior intelligence operations noncommissioned officer in support of the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, and I've seen firsthand the use of the internet in this manner by all sides in that situation (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniac), and the misrepresentations and lies became so bad that the High Commissioner (of the international community) in Bosnia had to place restrictions on the news broadcasts and webpostings of each sides' press agencies, lest they renew the conflict. The same tactics were used when the NATO action againt Serbia was ongoing, when all sorts of anti-Serb and anti-Kosovar sites sprang up online. You can see similar sites regarding nearly any major dispute in the world today: try Kashmir, or the ongoing Ethiopia-Eritrea war. The question we need to address is where the line lies between legitimate representation of views and propaganda sparking and leading to criminal acts, outright conflict and genocide.
As for the foreseeable future, the international community isn't even at the point of coming up with agreed upon definitions concerning the issue, much less finalizing guidelines, and plans of action for effectively combating such speech online, and is nowhere near the paranoid view expressed elsewhere in the thread that the United Nations is coming up with international laws, treaties, conventions, restrictions, etc promoting censorship or banning free speech on the internet.
For more background and information on the Third World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, check out their website at http://www.un.org/rights/racism/
By the way, this is my first post to slashdot after lurking for a year. :) Hi everyone!
SenshiNeko (representing the Republic of The Gambia in the Security Council at the National Model United Nations Conference this year)
Honestly, I doubt that education would help the worst offenders. It seems to me that the ones with the most hate are impervious to reason OR education. Sometimes it's a maater of faith, which IMO is the height of irrationality.
If you don't teach em when they're kids, except in rare cases, you're just not going to teach them. You can't teach a door to be a window, so you can't teach a racist to be tolerant.
No, I don't have any other solutions. I wish I did.
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I can't really say that I'm surprised. We're moving so swiftly towards the New World Order, where any views which go contrary to the masses are labelled thoughtcrimes, and the offenders forced into re-education camps or simply silenced in the night, that it makes sense that the UN would go after this.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but even if I strongly disagree or become deeply offended at what someone else is saying, I'm still willing to defend to the death their right to say it. It doesn't matter to me if it's the KKK, neo-Nazis, the Nation of Islam, or the Scientologists. And yes, I realize that the freedoms I seen deteriorate in the States aren't necessarily granted anywhere else in the world. That doesn't stop me from believing everyone should have those rights. We don't seen to have that freedom anymore in the US, so why not have the UN going around to ensure that no one does?
Whatever happened to diversity? Diversity of opinion is just as important as any other kind of diversity.
The best way these things is the way a state government official in one of the southern states (can't recall which right now) where the KKK has adopted a stretch of highway through one of those adopt-a-road programs is handling it. They can't deny the KKK the right to adopt the highway. Instead, this person has introduced legislation to rename it the Rosa Parks Memorial Highway.
That is, IMHO, the best way to handle these things.
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Yeah, this is pretty fscking disjointed. It's been a long day, a long night at class, and I really should be asleep, but . . .
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
When you start nitpicking on what people can and can't say, you have fiascos like the Seattle "riots" over the WTO. When you silence your opposition, you are infringing on their right to express their ideas how they see fit. You don't have to endorse them but if you value your freedom of speech, you have to respect theirs. Who are you going to let judge whether your words and ideas are deserving of censorship? Are you going make the courts determine whether any word you utter is proper? What if you piss off the wrong group, like with the DVD case? What about the guy whom was fired for using the word niggerdly because someone thought it referred to black people in a derogative way or the guy who was fired for talking about a Seinfeld episode?
If someone were to start the National Association for the Advancement of White People, would the NAACP get to have them shut down for being racist by excluding blacks? What if someone started the United White Guy college fund? Are they more discriminitory that the United Negro College Fund? What of so called reverse discrimination? Do proclaimed minorities have greater rights than the "white male majority?"
Is is worse to kill someone because they're black than it is to kill someone because they parked in the 7th parking space from the left of the center of the parking lot? Is it appropriate to hire a less qualified minority rather than hire a better qualified white male? Affirmative action and so called hate crimes only create further tension between the races. When you begin banning opinions and start waiving special protections for certain groups, you're giving people a reason to hate MORE.
When it comes down to it, words are just words. Regardless of how someone feels, words are necessary to convey how people feel and they have the right to express their feelings whether or not a single other person agrees with them. Judge by actions, not words.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
One of the things I cherish about the Internet is the freedom from racial prejudice. Unless I choose to reveal it, no one knows my race, my sex, my age, my religion or anything else. They can judge me by my words and actions.
I'm franky disturbed by this. The article seemed to imply that there was a need for some kind of censorship. Instead of wasting your time trying to silence these groups, publish rebuttals and spread your own message. If you think that reading some words on some poorly written Neo-Nazi web site is going to start a race war, you've got deeper problems already. This quote jumped out at me, "Sweden has one of the world's highest rates of Internet usage, with more half of adults online. The country has found itself at the hub of European neo-Nazism, with a rising racist crime rate."
They seem to be implying a positive correlation between internet usage rates and neo-Nazism. Sounds like the Internet has once again become the scapegoat. Obviously there must be some deeper issues going on in Sweden. Anyone there want to fill us in on the story?
Anyway, if we are going to embark into this brave new world, let us do it right! Let's ban all speech that is hateful, further lets ban all speech from parties that have committed crimes against humanity. We don't need those messages being imparted onto our impressionable youth.
I guess the first thing to do is to shut down all the United States Government sites. Here is a quote I found on a Native American site:
"Over 300 Million Indigenous Peoples were brutally tortured and murdered by an invasion of foreign forces in an act to Exterminate an Indigenous Peoples so as to Steal their Land and Resources. Those who were not exterminated were Forcefully Removed from their lands (either at gunpoint or the point of a bayonet or by Forged Treaties) and driven off to Federal PRISON Camps called RESERVATIONS. "
I'll leave it to you to decide the validity of their claim. Maybe we should shut this site down for implying that the U.S. Government slaughtered millions of Native Americans? Or should we shut down other sites because they deny the Native American Holocaust?
Or perhaps we can start teaching critical thinking and reasoning so our citizens can make informed decisions! But we couldn't have that, after all once citizens can think logically they might actually start taking back their rights. *sigh*
The more you know, the less you understand.