For roughly the thousandth time, the masters of social media in Silicon Valley are promising to do something about online hate speech. Bloomberg reports that an impressive-sounding group of tech giants — Facebook, Twitter,Google and Microsoft — have “pledged to tackle online hate speech in less than 24 hours as part of a joint commitment with the European Union to combat the use of social media by terrorists.”
This announcement comes with more pomp (the EU! combating terrorism!) than previous vows to start taking internet abuse seriously, but it’s wise not to get too excited about our supposed future internet featuring 50% less racist vitriol. Users of these services have been subject to innumerable promises to do better, and invariably people find that the internet continues to be the toxic waste dump that it was before the promised clean-up. Skepticism isn’t just warranted, but mandatory at this point.
Not that these companies haven’t tried to do better. Twitter, for instance, partnered with Women, Action and Media! in 2014 to combat online misogyny and earlier this year, they unveiled an even bigger coalition, with about 40 groups, to help beat back online abuse. Facebook, too, has engaged in dialogue with groups fighting hate speech on it site and announced initiatives to combat extremist rhetoric that stokes bigotry and violence.
And there have definitely been some marked improvements. It’s a harder to run a hate group on Facebook than it used to be, since it will often get reported and taken down. It used to be unheard of for Twitter to ban users, but now you’re seeing some of the most mean-spirited harassers losing their Twitter handles.
But these moves are doing very little to stem the overwhelming tide of bilious hatred pouring out on social media. As the Bloomberg story reports, a French Jewish youth group, UEJF, decided to monitor how well Twitter, Facebook, and Google were doing in response to complaints about hate speech on their social media platforms. What they found was disheartening.
“In the course of about six weeks in April and May, members of French anti-discrimination groups flagged unambiguous hate speech that they said promoted racism, homophobia or anti-Semitism,” the Bloomberg piece explains. “More than 90 percent of the posts pointed out to Twitter and YouTube remained online within 15 days on average following requests for removal, according to the study by UEJF, SOS Racisme and SOS Homophobie.”
Dealing with bigotry online is very much like trying to bail out a leaking boat. Ban someone on Twitter for harassing people, and odds are that they will simply start another account under a new name and start right back up again.
There’s also a volume problem. Social media giants like Facebook already employ an army of overworked and underpaid moderators who toil endlessly to remove porn, violent images and other extreme content off their sites. Often these people work from foreign countries, like the Philippines. Just keeping people from seeing porn or photos of gruesome accidents is an unbelievable amount of work. Removing all the racism and sexism, which are in abundance and often context-dependent, would expand that workload exponentially.
