Table of content - Jugendschutz.net

Transcription

Table of content
Alexandra Beyersdörfer: Preface
Stefan Glaser: Acknowledgements
Ulrich Dovermann: Opening Remarks
Christopher Wolf: Introduction - Hate Speech on the Internet
I
2
3
5
8
How does the Internet influence lives of children and
youngsters?
Bernd Schorb: The use of the Internet by young people
Jan Keilhauer: Young people opposing hate and exclusion on the
Internet
18
26
II Which discriminatory content are web users confronted with?
Thomas Pfeiffer: The Internet – a tool for anti-democratic
organizations
Rafal Pankowski: Internet hate propaganda in Poland
Ronald Eissens: A flavor for anybody that loves to hate
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45
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III What can media education achieve?
Floriane Hohenberg: OSCE/ODIHR – Tolerance and NonDiscrimination Programme
Anne Taylor: A media education approach to online hate
Stefan Glaser: Guidelines for the media educational work of
jugendschutz.net
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62
75
IV Which educational tools and projects do exist?
Barbara Liegl: The educational program of ZARA
Brian Marcus: Anti Defamation League (ADL)
Daniel Milo: Trainings for police officers as a tool to counter the
extreme right
Valentín González: Education and hate speech on the Internet
V
81
85
92
98
Appendix
Resolution
The authors
INACH and its members
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103
109
Documentation – INACH Conference 2007 – Hate on the Net
Alexandra Beyersdörfer
Preface
The danger of being confronted with discriminatory, racist and extreme right-wing content on the Internet is omnipresent. Adults
have the choice to consciously decide whether or not they want to
see such websites. For children and youngsters, it is much more
difficult to identify dangerous web content right away and to protect
themselves against it. Therefore, it is important for all of us to not
leave young Internet users on their own. Bringing forward protection measures should still be one of the main goals, even if different
national laws make it all the harder to establish universal rules. Media educational approaches cannot substitute the lack of technical
tools and efforts on the part of the Internet industry to protect children and youngsters. However, they can be a fundamental support
in helping them to find suitable ways of using the Internet in an ageappropriate manner and to better estimate dangers. Eventually children and youngsters become competent in critically assessing harmful content and can then develop their own protecting strategies.
For this purpose, particularly with regard to an international
appeal, the annual conference of the International Network Against
Cyber Hate (INACH) in Berlin on 8 & 9 November 2007 made an
important contribution concerning educational tools to combat
online hate. The conference called "Hate on the Net – Promoting
tolerance by means of (media) education" was a forum attended by
fifteen nations. Those attending heard speeches about the general
use of the Internet by young people and examples of extreme rightwing and racist web propaganda. In addition, pedagogical approaches were explored and different countries presented their own
concrete education projects.
Jewish people throughout the world are still the target of neoNazi and racist groups, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are very
present in the world of media. Considering this, it was all the more
significant that this conference could be held at such an impressive
location as the New Synagogue Berlin with its wonderful premises
on the memorial day of pogrom night (November 9). It was a
thought-provoking setting for a conference with very interesting
speeches and exciting discussions. In the end, it was an inspiring
experience and a benefit to the work of all of us fighting against
hate on the Net.
2
Stefan Glaser
Acknowledgements
The INACH conference 2007 was at the same time the celebration
of the fifth anniversary of the International Network Against Cyber
Hate. When we, jugendschutz.net and the Dutch Magenta Foundation founded INACH in 2002, our vision was to unite organizations
that combat online hate by measures of law and jurisdiction, but
also by means of education and awareness raising. Looking at
INACH today, I see 18 members from Europe and abroad, all with
a great deal of expertise in the field of counteracting hate speech on
a daily basis and in training and educating youngsters in order to
sensitize them to racist and discriminatory hate propaganda.
The last two INACH reports give an impression of the multidimensional approaches of INACH members and they show what
the partners and the Network as a whole have achieved within the
last few years. Especially the combination of legal measures, wherever possible, and established notice and takedown procedures by
asking ISPs to take over their responsibility lead to the removal of
thousands of hate expressions from the Net, not only in Europe but
also in the United States. There are new challenges today, for example social networks or video platforms that are used for disseminating hate. And there is still a lot to do, especially in terms of structural and financial support of our INACH partners, which in most
cases is still missing.
The INACH conference 2007 made educational approaches to
combat online hate the subject of discussion. Appointed by the
German Federal States to deal with all kinds of illegal and harmful
content on the Internet, jugendschutz.net as the organizer has been
tackling right-wing extremism since 1999. From the very beginning
this work has been including both: measures to get hate content
removed and a media educational approach. Therefore it was also a
great opportunity to host this event, which aimed at initiating an
exchange of expertise and information on this topic and helping to
learn from each other's best practices.
We ourselves recognized that racism is an everyday reality, not
least in youngsters’ lives, and that kids using the Internet are easily
confronted with discriminatory content. So developing educational
concepts and tools in order to foster media literacy and critical
thinking amongst youngsters still is an elementary dimension of our
strategy to counteract hate.
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The fact that so many experts from the education sector
enlightened the minds of the participants from scientific and very
practical points of view made this conference a special event. They
gave us an insight into how children and youngsters use the Internet, what kind of hate content they are confronted with and which
different educational approaches, projects and tools exist.
This conference took place in the New Synagogue in Berlin.
We feel very honored and thankful that the rooms and services had
been made available for us in this very impressive place of Jewish
culture. Mrs. Cohen-Sauerbaum from the Centrum Judaicum welcomed us warmly and gave us the opportunity to learn something
about the New Synagogue, its treasures and history.
It was a big challenge for jugendschutz.net to host this INACH
conference in Berlin, nearly 600 km away from our home base in
Mainz. All this would not have been possible without the support of
the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb), the Federal Agency
for Civic Education in Germany. The bpb is currently funding the
work of jugendschutz.net against hate on the Internet and especially
financed this conference. And, of course, no such event can be organized without the people working behind the scenes: My colleagues Alexandra Beyersdörfer, Thomas Günter and Michael
Wörner-Schappert during the stressful months of preparation, never
lost their patience, gave all their best and thus made this conference
possible.
The conference ended with a resolution addressing the EU, the
OSCE and governmental organizations to strengthen media educational approaches countering the harmful effects of online hate. The
resolution was adopted by all INACH members and was passed to
the representative of the ODIHR’s tolerance and nondiscrimination program of the OSCE. As the work of INACH and
this conference documentation show: Education is a very important
tool to prevent hate online and offline and there are many promising and highly-developed concepts. However, they can only become
sustainable if they are used on a stable and reliable basis. I hope that
the requests to support and promote educational efforts to raise the
awareness of young people will be heard by responsible bodies and
will be followed by support.
4
Ulrich Dovermann
Opening Remarks
As an introduction, I want to provide very briefly some facts about
the Federal Agency for Civic Education. The Agency was founded
in 1952 to teach the Germans democracy. Before 1952 there had
been the American way – we call it the pragmatic way - of installing
democracy: “Just give them a parliament, a constitution, elections
and the other equipment and they will become democrats.” But
Germans have never thought that way, they always think in terms of
education. So we set up our own agency for civic education in the
Federal Republic, paid for by taxes, and there are agencies in all the
German federal states except Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony).
I myself am the Director of the Department of Extremism, but
I have to emphasize that we are not a part of the secret service or
the police; we are an agency for civic education. That means we try
to deal with the problem through education and what we in Germany call “Bildung”, which is a little bit different. But it is really and
truly an honor and a pleasure for me to welcome you all here at the
annual conference 2007 of the International Network Against Cyber
Hate in the Neue Synagoge in Berlin, a building so full of memories,
of dignity, of culture and of importance here in Germany and in
Berlin.
We have a problem and in response to all, who want to keep
this problem under the carpet, I say: Yes, we have a problem with
racism, with right-wing extremism, with anti-Semitism, with violence in Germany. We have it here in Germany, we have it in
Europe and in all countries of the world. We have it in schools, in
communities, in cities, in smaller towns. We have it in the countryside, too. As we know from several surveys, both international and
national, we have it between youngsters, adults and especially between seniors, between men and women, and I really have to say
that we have it between the poor and the rich in the same way. The
problem exists between well-educated people and also between
those with lower levels of education. There is – thank God – no
majority support in Germany for right-wing extremist ideas, but the
minority is strong, and in recent years it has been growing.
The grand old man of civic education in Germany, Wolfgang
Hilligan, taught us - and he taught it personally to me, too - that the
main challenge facing our subject, civic education, is to highlight the
so-called “world problems”, in German: “Weltprobleme”. By that,
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he meant the problems which must be solved, otherwise we will not
survive in dignity and freedom. It is my opinion that in a world of
migration and globalization, in our world here and now, right-wing
extremism, racism, hate, intolerance and violence have become a
world problem in this sense. They are a basic problem, a problem
that must be solved as a necessity; otherwise we will not be able to
survive in dignity and freedom.
For of all these reasons, the Federal Republic of Germany has
now been running major programs for nearly ten years. In 2001, the
former chancellor Gerhard Schröder founded “The Uprising of the
Good”, den "Aufstand der Anständigen”, against right-wing extremism, racism and violence. Each year, the Federal Government
spends nearly 20 million Euros to support initiatives, projects and
ideas in this field. The Federal Agency takes more than one million
Euros per year. The federal states also provide some funding – not a
great deal – but in total we have about 35 to 40 million Euros per
year, in Germany to set up programs and projects, to develop ideas
and to evaluate the results. All the projects, initiatives and ideas are
working. Social workers and teachers, trade unions and churches,
clubs, unions, societies, colleagues, involved parents, seniors; since
2001, more than 4,000 projects and initiatives have been founded
and have developed their ideas in our country. Naturally, some of
these initiatives are better than others, some of them are more successful than others, some of them can become enduring so-called
“structural projects” or in German “Strukturprojekte”. Other ideas
have now expired. But we have developed a culture of combating
right-wing extremism and violence; and jugendschutz.net is one of
the most important parts of this culture.
Please, this is not just a compliment given to this conference as
a courtesy. All the work of encouraging youngsters, of helping
schools, of youth centers, of street work, of re-socialization of rightwing extremist perpetrators in jails; none of this work will really be
successful anymore, if the racist and violent propaganda of the Nazis re-enters the heads and the hearts of the people every day via the
Internet. The success of the whole movement and the whole culture
depends necessarily on the success of the fight against right-wing
extremism in cyberspace. We need the success of jugendschutz.net.
The president of our agency, Thomas Krüger, who sends his greetings to this conference, has decided to support jugendschutz.net
financially to ensure that they can do their important work. I can
promise today that we will continue this support in the coming
years.
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I myself want to thank jugendschutz.net for their wonderful
work and for their easy and friendly cooperation with us. I thank
you all for you engagement, for the support you give to those who
need it, and I wish you all a good, interesting conference here in
Berlin. I hope you will develop new ideas and strategies in our
common challenge, and finally I really and heartily wish you success.
We need it.
Thank you.
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Christopher Wolf
Introduction
Hate Speech on the Internet
It is a great honor for me to be here today. And it is a great honor
to continue to serve as chair of INACH. For me, INACH is an
important activity in addition to my “day job” as a practicing lawyer.
Fighting online hate speech is a noble and important endeavor and I
am proud to be associated with it, and your work. I take great pride
in the work the member organizations do. For you, the work of
INACH – fighting hate and extremism on the Internet – is what you
do, day in and day out. I commend all of you for your dedication,
your devotion and your accomplishments.
I want to thank Thomas Günter, Stefan Glaser, Alexandra
Beyersdörfer and everyone at jugendschutz.net, as well as Ronald
Eissens and Suzette Bronkhost, for their incredible work in putting
together this conference. And I want to thank the panel of extraordinary participants who will be with us today. We truly have the
world’s leading thinkers and actors on the issues we will be discussing over the next two days.
Even though we were together just a year ago in Warsaw, much
has changed. We have complicated new issues to consider today,
adding to our already full list. It probably comes as no surprise that
the problem of hate on the Internet is getting worse, and the
changes in technology and how people use it make a difficult problem even more complicated.
For twenty years, hate mongers have had technological tools
available to them to spread globally their messages of intolerance,
conspiracy, historical distortions and denials, and calls for violence.
Even before the birth of the World Wide Web, some organized hate
groups recognized the potential of technology to disseminate their
messages and further their goals. In the 1980s, a leader of the Ku
Klux Klan and a neo-Nazi publisher collaborated to create a computerized bulletin board accessible to anyone with a computer,
phone line and modem. The bulletin board, “Aryan Nation Liberty
Net,” was subscription-based and designed to recruit young people,
raise money and incite hatred against the “enemies” of white supremacy.
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In the early 1990s, many bigots united in organized online discussion groups called USENETs. USENET newsgroups were similar to the “Aryan Nation Liberty Net” but were more easily accessible to anyone with Internet access. USENETs were free and provided a venue for participants to write, read and respond to messages of hate.
The evolution of the Internet into the World Wide Web, with
its easily accessible and inviting graphic interface, provided people,
including extremists, with new ways to communicate with each
other and with a vast new potential audience using not only words,
but also pictures, graphics, sound and animation. Just last month,
the New York Times had a front page headline that read “An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers”, and the story beneath chronicled
how terrorists routinely use the Web in all languages to recruit and
to incite violence.
Over the past couple of years, the Internet toolbox available to
hate mongers has had several new items added to it. Our focus last
year, as in years past, was on the proliferation of websites advocating hate and violence. Today, such hateful and dangerous websites
still exist. But today, we are in the world of what is called “Web
2.0,” which has transformed the way the Internet is being used.
Certainly, the problem of hate-filled websites still exists, and in fact
is getting worse. But more problematic is the sudden and rapidly
increasing deployment of Web 2.0 technologies to spread messages,
sounds and images of hate across the Internet and around the
world.
I should probably define my terms. When I refer to Web 2.0, I
mean a second generation of web -based communities and hosted
services — such as social networking sites and user-generated video
sites whose purpose is to promote new connections, collaboration
and sharing between users. MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are
the most prominent examples of Web 2.0 technologies.
MySpace and Facebook are popular social networking websites
offering interactive, user-submitted networks of friends, personal
profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. MySpace was
started in 2003 and purchased by Rupert Murdoch in 2005 for $580
million. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload,
view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid February
2005. In November 2006, Google acquired the company for 1.65
billion dollars.
To show you how fast these new technologies are growing,
videos on YouTube created more traffic on the Internet in 2006
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than existed on the entire Internet in the year 2000. My Space and
YouTube, along with Facebook are what are known as “killer aps”
on the Internet today, used by millions.
And the virus of hate has infected these new technologies. On
YouTube, for example, hundreds of hate videos have been uploaded. The BBC recently reported a video which appeared on
YouTube showing uniformed soldiers exchanging Hitler salutes.
And British neo-Nazi groups post videos hoping to recruit kids to
their cult. Another video portrayed Zyklon-B tests on humans purportedly to show that gassing at death camps did not really happen.
YouTube has also recently included music videos from the neoNazi band “Landser,” which contain images of Hitler and swastikas.
One of the band’s hits is a tribute to Rudolf Hess, a top Nazi deputy
of Adolf Hitler. YouTube also features clips from the 1940 antiSemitic Nazi film “Jud Suess” made under the supervision of Joseph
Goebbels to justify anti-Semitism. It is considered one of the most
hateful depictions of Jews on film.
If offered in an educational context, with explanation of their
hateful origins and of how they glorified or played a role in the
deaths of millions, perhaps such material would serve history. But
they are not offered in that context; they are posted to provoke hate
and to recruit haters. The “comments” section which allows users to
post their reactions to the videos makes clear that the purpose and
effect of the videos is to inspire hate and violence.
The situation is no better on social networking sites. The New
York Times recently reported that an anti-Islamic group with a profane name using the “F” word has formed on Facebook with the
purpose of bashing Islam and its followers and inspiring hatred. At
the last count, the group had more than 750 members. The creator
of the anti-Islam group denied that his group is hate speech and
claimed that his attack on the religion is covered by his right to free
speech.
Facebook initially removed the group when people co mplained,
but was reinstated shortly after. I have not been able to find the
group on any of Facebook’s lists, meaning that it may have been
deleted for good. Facebook’s editorial control seems isolated. There
have been repeated instances on Facebook of Jews depicted in
stereotypical and hateful ways, portrayed as spiders and rattlesnakes,
and referred to as dirty Zionists. Yet, apparently Facebook decided
not to act with respect to that hateful content, allowing it to remain
online.
Such hate material violates the terms of use on virtually all of
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the mainstream Web 2.0 sites. YouTube, MySpace and Facebook
prohibit content that is harmful, offensive or illegal or that violates
the rights or threatens the safety of any person. On all three sites
users have the right to report material violating the Terms of Use.
However, such reports often are ignored.
In August 2007, complaints about the Nazi propaganda were
lodged with YouTube by a German government-sponsored Internet
watchdog group, jugendschutz.net. The complaints were not responded to, although some of the videos that inspired the complaints disappeared. The Central Council of Jews in Germany has
threatened legal action against Google, the parent of YouTube,
given the German laws against the display of Nazi propaganda.
One may ask, given the vast wave of information contained on
the Internet, why even bother trying to control hate speech online?
Well, here’s why: The effect of such content on people – especially
children – and on society is profoundly troubling. As a matter of
principle, society must take a stand about what is right and wrong.
And, in addition, although little empirical data exists, there is no
question that there is a link between hate speech online and real
world violence.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate how social networking sites
facilitate hate speech on the Internet and the connection between
online and real-world manifestations of hate is to tell you about a
recent episode originating in Manhasset, New York – a bedroom
community of New York City on the North Shore of Long Island.
A 2005 Wall Street Journal article ranked it as the best town for
raising a family in the New York metropolitan area.
An individual name John Rocissano is a graduate of the Manhasset High School, someone described by a neighbor as a “good
kid.” After graduation, Rocissano attended community college and
found a job at the local Staples office supply store. By day, Rocissano helped customers find printer cartridges and copier paper. By
night, like many young adults, he used the social networking site
MySpace to connect online with people sharing his interests. On
MySpace, he became a group leader of the National Alliance discussion site.
The name, by itself, does not say much. National Alliance could
be a well-intentioned group. But it is not. National Alliance is a neoNazi, white supremacist hate group recognized for decades as one
of the most formidable white supremacist groups in the country.
The founder of the National Alliance is William Pierce, the author
of The Turner Diaries, a novel calling for the violent overthrow of
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the federal government and the systematic killing of Jews and nonwhites in order to establish an “Aryan” society. The Turner Diaries
is thought to be the inspiration behind Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, which resulted in the
deaths of 168 people. Rocissano also was inspired by the teachings
of the National Alliance. On MySpace, he listed The Turner Diaries
as his “favorite book.”
At first, he merely handed out fliers for the National Alliance,
to recruit new members. But in the late summer of 2007, he and a
friend went on a hate crime spree in Manhasset, home to a large
Jewish community, including Holocaust survivors. Over Labor Day
weekend, the pair painted red swastikas and other graffiti espousing
hate on an elementary school, on a school bus in a high school parking lot, at a synagogue (where they also smashed windows), on a
home in nearby Roslyn Estates, New York and on a street sign in a
residential neighborhood. Before their violence escalated any further, they were arrested and charged with misdemeanors – first offenses for each. Ironically, in the “About Me” section of his
MySpace home page, Rocissano wrote: “Don’t judge me until you
get to know me.”
On MySpace, as well as on the social networking site Facebook.com, there are hundreds of groups featuring the words “Hitler” or “Nazi,” many established to promote neo-Nazism and other
anti-Semitic feelings. The “virtual community” of haters no doubt
gave Rocissano the feeling that his views were mainstream and acceptable, and that it was OK to act on them. Had the police
searched the computer of the newly apprehended hate criminal, they
likely would have seen evidence of visits to YouTube and viewings
of hate videos posted there.
The MySpace, Facebook and YouTube materials join the thousands of websites that deny the Holocaust and that espouse virulent
anti-Semitism; others portray gays and lesbians as subhuman in the
guise of promoting so-called “family values”; and still other websites
contain racial epithets and caricatures. As new technologies for information become available over the Internet, members of hate
groups have proven themselves to be “early adopters”.
Another example: online gaming is popular and hate-filled
online games are now available at lightning fast speeds thanks to
broadband technology. There are numerous games that celebrate in
gory detail the random killing of minorities. Some call Internet hate
speech the “direct marketing” of racism and violence. And as bad as
the directly-racist and violent websites and Internet content may be,
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perhaps more troubling are the hate sites masquerading as scholarly
and reliable sites.
Stormfront, which describes itself as the “White Nationalist
Community”, hosts a site about Martin Luther King that appears to
be legitimate but in fact contains racist propaganda. To a schoolchild doing homework research, the site is terribly misleading and
has the potential for instilling biased and hateful preconceptions in
young minds.
Before the Internet, hate speech largely was available only in
plain brown envelopes and down dark alleys, and its reach was limited. Rallies rarely attracted large crowds. Now, on the Internet, hate
is on display for all to see, and the potential audience is vast.
The dawn of hate on the Internet has wreaked havoc on
American society with a marked increase in hate crimes. Online
recruiting has aided many hate groups linked to violence against
Jews, African-Americans, gays and lesbians in their efforts to increase their membership. In fact, Don Black, former Grand Dragon
of the Ku Klux Klan, noted that, “as far as recruiting, [the Internet
has] been the biggest breakthrough I’ve seen in the 30 years I’ve
been involved in [white nationalism].”
An understandable immediate reaction to the hate found on the
Internet is “there ought to be a law.” But, in the United States, the
First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies with full
force to the Internet, the Supreme Court has ruled. And that freedom of expression protection means most speech is permissible
unless it threatens imminent violence directed at identifiable victims.
To be sure there are also laws against pornographic content or if
intellectual property rights are violated online. And in the U.S., hate
speech, online or off, can be used in some jurisdictions as evidence
to show a prohibited motivation for a crime.
In Europe and elsewhere around the world, by contrast, there
are laws prohibiting online hate speech and images. Why the difference in approach? Although freedom of expression is a valued principle in most modern democracies, it is counterbalanced by the
belief that government has a role in protecting its citizens from the
effects of hate and intolerance. Nowhere is this belief stronger than
in Germany and it neighbors, countries that less than a century ago
witnessed how words of hate against Jews and other minorities exploded into the Holocaust, with the attendant murder of more than
six million people.
As a result, there are laws in Germany and elsewhere in Europe
that prohibit words and images attacking religious, racial and sexual
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minorities, and that revive the words and images of the Nazi era. In
Germany, Volksverhetzung (incitement of hatred against a minority)
is a punishable offense under Section 130 of the Germany’s criminal
code and can lead to up to five years imprisonment. Volksverhetzung is punishable in Germany even if committed abroad and
even if committed by non-German citizens, if the sentiment was
made accessible in Germany.
A famous instance of German prosecution of someone whose
hate speech was launched from abroad but was available in Germany is Ernst Zundel. Zundel is a Holocaust denier who published
“The Hitler We Loved and Why” and “Did Six Million Really Die”
while he lived in the North America. Zundel was deported from the
U.S. to Canada and onward to Germany, and tried criminally in the
state court of Mannheim on outstanding charges of incitement for
Holocaust denial dating from the early 1990s, and including for
materials disseminated over the Internet. On February 15th, 2007,
he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum term of five years
in prison.
Similarly, an Australian Holocaust denier, Frederick Toben,
used his Australia-based website to publish his benighted views.
Upon visiting Germany, he was arrested, tried, and convicted of
violating German law as a result of his Australian-based website that
was viewable in Germany. The conviction and subsequent jailing
made Toben a hero of sorts among Holocaust deniers, so much so
that he was a featured speaker at the infamous conference sponsored by the Iranian government on whether the Holocaust really
happened. And the convictions did not do much to silence their
hate speech. All one need do is insert the names of Toben and
Zundel in a Google search bar, and you will find websites of supporters paying homage to them as martyrs and republishing their
messages.
There is of course a danger, beyond the scope of our focus here
today, of nations squelching political speech in the name of eradicating hate speech. So the power to control in the hands of reasonable
state actors may be appropriate, but it is a power that can be abused
by less responsible regimes.
In addition to national laws like those in Germany used to convict Toben and Zundel, the Council of Europe has included in the
Cybercrime Treaty a prohibition against online hate speech. Specifically, the provision bans “any written material, any image or any
other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes
or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual
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or group of individuals, based on race, color, descent or national or
ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these
factors.” It also outlaws sites that deny, minimize, approve or justify
crimes against humanity, particularly the Holocaust.
The treaty is beginning to be implemented through legislation
among European member countries. The United States is a signatory to the Cybercrime Treaty but did not sign the protocol on
online hate speech, in light of its invalidity domestically under the
First Amendment. And the European Union recently passed legislation extending to the Internet its “broadcast rules” that restrict hateful and other content deemed inappropriate.
There is a fundamental difference in approach in the United
States to hate speech. The framework of the First Amendment presupposes that just as hate speech is permissible, so too is speech
intended to counter and negate such hate speech. Simply put, for
every hurtful lie told about a group of people, someone can tell the
truth about the falsity of stereotypes and about how important it is
to judge people as individuals. But in the Internet era, it appears
there are more people interested in spewing hate than in countering
it. On the social networking sites and on YouTube, inflammatory,
hate-filled content overwhelms the limited efforts to promote tolerance and to teach diversity. And, as we have seen, hate speech inspires violence.
What does that mean for the Internet worldwide? We have seen
that countries – like Germany – criminalize Internet hate speech and
issue orders requiring people to take down web pages and video that
would be illegal in the United States. Indeed, people have been arrested and jailed because of their online content. Does that mean
that the laws in Europe result in a “cleaning up” of the Internet?
The answer is no.
The borderless nature of the Internet means that if placing certain content on the Internet is illegal in one place, all one needs to
do is place the prohibited content on the Internet in a jurisdiction
where it is legal. That means the United States, which is the most
permissive nation in the world when it comes to allowable speech,
can serve as host to hate-filled content that is illegal elsewhere. Once
launched from the United States, it is viewable worldwide, except in
certain situations where there is massive censorship blocking incoming Internet content, such as China. And one need not be physically
present in the United States to launch content from an Internet
server there. Telecommunication lines make remote Internet hosting simple for someone from overseas.
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So laws addressed at Internet hate, even though understandable
in the light of a nation’s history, are perhaps the least effective way
to deal with the problem. There may be symbolic value in prosecuting hate speech online to show that a country will not sit idly by and
allow speech that is contrary to its values of tolerance and personal
respect in the light of its history, such as in Germany. But the reflexive use of the law as the tool of first resort to deal with online hate
speech threatens to weaken respect for the law if such attempted
law enforcement fails to stop the content from appearing online, as
most often will be the case since it can be re-posted in the United
States once taken down abroad, or if it is used to deal with minor
violations.
The law is but one tool in the fight against online hate. Indeed
perhaps the best antidote to hate speech is counter-speech – exposing hate speech for its deceitful and false content, setting the record
straight and promoting the values of tolerance and diversity. To
paraphrase U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, sunlight is still the
best disinfectant – it is always better to expose hate to the light of
day than to let it fester in the darkness. The best answer to bad
speech is more speech. Regrettably, it is not fashionable to promote
tolerance and diversity, and to counter hate speech, on the Internet.
Hate sites far outnumber sites with messages to counter hate
speech.
So what are other possible antidotes to hate speech online? The
voluntary cooperation of the Internet community – Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) and others – to join in the campaign against hate
speech is urgently needed. If more ISPs, especially in the U.S., block
content and follow their Terms of Service, it will at least be more
difficult for haters to gain access through respectable hosts.
The latest social networking and video sites go to great pains to
eliminate obscene (but not legally pornographic) content because of
the anticipated public outcry over the appearance of such material.
That is why YouTube’s videos all are “G rated.” A similar effort
could help eliminate hate content, but it appears that public demand
for such editing is needed to prompt adequate attention.
But in the era of search engines as the primary portals for
Internet users, cooperation from the Googles of the world is an
even more important goal. The experience with Google concerning
the hate site “Jew Watch” shows how search engine companies can
help. When entering the search term “Jew,” the top result in Google
was the hate site “Jew Watch.” The high ranking of Jew Watch in
response to a search inquiry was not due to a conscious choice by
16
Google, but was solely a result of an automated system of ranking.
In response to contacts from the Anti-Defamation League, Google
placed text on its site that apologized for the ranking, and gave users
a clear explanation of how search results are obtained in order to
refute the impression that Jew Watch was a reliable source of information.
INACH has reported that, over a recent four year period, it received complaints on fifteen thousand cases of online hate. By forwarding the complaints to ISPs and search engines, more than five
thousand hate sites, discussion threads, videos and music files were
removed. Still, requests for removal frequently are not acted upon,
as evidenced by the recent case of Germany’s jugendschutz.net
complaining to YouTube but receiving no response.1
For the time being, YouTube is the single major video -sharing
portal. So its decisions on what content appears do make a difference. But where there are multiple outlets for content, as is the
norm on the Web, the effectiveness of the take-down remedy is
limited. For example, a subscriber to an ISP who loses his or her
account for violating that ISP’s regulations against hate speech may
resume propagating hate by subsequently signing up with any of the
dozens of more permissive ISPs in the marketplace.
I do not need to tell this group that the problem of hate speech
on the Internet is not one that is easily solved. The law has a limited
role to play, especially in light of the permissive rules in the United
States, which allow hate speech to be launched for viewing worldwide. The ISP and search engine operators could, if they wished,
play a greater role in controlling hate speech, but even their efforts,
unless coordinated, may have limited impact. Thus, Justice Brandeis’
remedy of more and truthful speech to counter the harmful effects
of hate speech may, in the end, be the most enduring solution. Just
as words do motivate people to act and – in the context of hate
speech – to act criminally, perhaps words of tolerance and understanding will motivate people to control their basest instincts. In the
end, right-minded people saying and doing the right things may be
better than any technological or legal approach.
Thank you.
1 Editor's note: Since September 2007, jugendschutz.net has succeeded in establishing an agreement with YouTube (now owned by Google) on the removal of
illegal right-wing extremist videos: The team regularly reports Nazi videos which
are then either deleted or blocked for German users by YouTube/Google.
17
I
How does the Internet influence
lives of children and youngsters?
Bernd Schorb
The use of the Internet by young people
What we do at the JFF Institute for Media Pedagogy in Research in
Munich and the University of Leipzig is research on media and
youth, and based on this research we develop models of feasible and
reasonable use of media. Therefore our presentation is divided into
two parts. First, I will show you some data and interesting coherences about the Internet use of young people from a survey we
made at the University of Leipzig. The data will visualize what is
important for young men and women using the Net, seen from the
point of view of young people and not from the point of view of
the media. Secondly, Jan Keilhauer, who was also collaborating in
the survey, will tell us about his evaluation of an Internet project
against racism called D-A-S-H, realized by the JFF in Munich in
cooperation with the University of Leipzig. It is one of the projects
that were financed for a number of years, among others by the
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic
Education, Germany). After funding ended, the project finished in
Germany but it is still alive in Europe. This project provided us with
some good experiences. The report about D-A-S-H may give you
some hints on the subject being discussed at this conference.
The Internet survey was carried out during the summer of 2007
and included more than 5,000 young people. In addition, we directed 50 in-depth interviews face-to-face with adolescents chosen
from the 5,000 persons who participated in the survey. This research is part of the long-term project Medienkonvergenz Monitoring (MeMo)2 which investigates the development of the use, especially the social use, of the Internet and other media by young people between the ages of 12 and 19 years.
2 Schorb, Bernd/Keilhauer, Jan/Würfel, Maren/Kießling, Matthias (2008):
Medienkonvergenz Monitoring Report 2008 (MeMo Report). Available on:
www.medienkonvergenz-monitoring.de
18
I want to give you an inside view now on how and for what
purposes adolescents use the Internet. Our first question was: How
important is the Internet for youngsters amongst different media?
Media use at home, in percent of users; 12-19 years old; N=5053;
Source: MeMo Report 2008
Because we get more technical media every year, the importance of
the media will be changing over the coming years. According to the
results, TV is still the most important medium, as it has been for
young people in Germany since 1967. The computer with Internet
connection closely follows TV in second place. In only five years,
the number of young Internet users increased from about
40 % to 88 %. The mobile phone comes in third place with some
young people having not only one but several mobile phones. Mobile phones are followed by the mp3 player for music, digital cameras, DVD player, radio and so on. TV, Internet and mobiles are
used at home by nearly everybody. For the participants of our survey, this means that the Internet is an everyday medium. Most of
them have broadband access. The Internet dominates their everyday
life: they start using it in the morning and don't stop before late in
the night.
The next question was: Which medium do you use to follow
your personal interests?
19
Hobbymedia; use in percent; 12-19 years old; N=5053; Source:
MeMo Report 2008
What we knew from the surveys we had made before is that convergence of the media for young people is not just a convergence of
technology. There is convergence of content. Since young people
have their individual interests, they especially use the media to pursue their interests. We asked them: If you follow your personal interests, which medium do you use? In the results we can see that
nearly two-thirds of young people use the Internet, the computer is
in second place followed by TV, newspapers and magazines. Personal interests were collected by an open question. One main interest is music ranging from music generally to dancing or playing the
guitar. Other interests are sports like soccer, handball, and basketball. They also mentioned media activities like chats, photography or
an interest in computers. Finally, friends are a main interest, too.
The Internet is the main medium used by young people to supply all
their needs.
Young Internet users do not use the Net aimlessly. They are
guided by their personal and real life interests. We asked them, what
motives and interests they follow by surfing on the Net, how often
they use the Net and for what interests.
20
Frequency of Internet Use; scale: 1=never, 2=rarely, 3=sometimes,
4=often; 12-19 years old; N=5037; Source: MeMo Report 2008
Firstly, the Internet is used as a medium for getting information; not
only political information, but also information about what they are
interested in. The second most frequent type of activity on the Net
is watching videos. That is important for two reasons. The first one
is: Young people use the Internet as a mass medium. The Internet
was established as a personal medium or a medium for small groups
but it is increasingly becoming a mass medium. If you have a look at
MySpace or YouTube, these are mass media and they offer content
from other mass media, e.g. TV. However, only a few young Internet users are watching Online TV. The everyday use of online videos shows us that the Internet is gaining much more importance
than it had before. As a mass medium it will contain more and more
offerings from other media. The second interesting point is based
on young people's interest in entertainment provided by watching
videos: If you entertain, you can also offer hate. You only have to
pack it into entertainment and it will be adapted for arousing interest. What we also see is that radio is merging into the Internet, both
media are converging slowly. Consequently, for young people, the
Internet is, to an ever greater extent, becoming a medium where
they can do everything that they do with other special media. This
does not mean that they don’t watch TV or they don’t listen to the
radio anymore, but there is an increasing shift of these activities into
the Net. Of course, we should not forget that using the Net also has
technical reasons.
21
The Internet is not only essential for consuming but also for active communicating, which is even more important than information seeking.
Frequency of Use – Communication on the Internet; scale: 1=never,
2=rarely, 3=sometimes, 4=often; 12-19 years old; N=5037; Source:
MeMo Report 2008
The kinds of communication activities preferred by adolescents
show instant messaging in the first place. Nearly all of the youngsters we asked do instant messaging. Many of them are in constant
contact with their friends, mostly with those they meet at school
already. Other communication activities are e-mailing, writing in
forums, chatting, calling via the Internet and writing in blogs. What
you can see here is: Communication activities are bound to the effort. The easier they are to handle, the more they are used. Instant
messaging is the easiest way to communicate, whereas you need
some more knowledge for writing in blogs. The Internet is the main
medium for communication and social exchange. The leading interest for young people is meeting friends.
A third function of the Net is as a platform for me and my
messages. A further question was related to the frequency of uploads on the Internet. Generally, uploading is not used as often as
information and communication. Young people mostly upload pictures, often in the context of social interaction, for example uploading pictures for friends and self-presentation. Self-presentation is
getting much more important for young people. They use the Internet to display their personality, their questions or their thinking.
22
Frequency of Use – Upload on the Internet; scale: 1=never, 2=rarely,
3=sometimes, 4=often; 12-19 years old; N=5037; Source: MeMo Report 2008
Uploaded pictures are shared in photo communities or they present
themselves through their photos within social networks, like for
example SchülerVZ, one of the biggest communities for students in
Germany, similar to Facebook. Young people do not upload music
or podcasts very often, due among other things to the technical
skills which are required.
The fourth way is to use the Internet as a resource for media
content and offerings. Young people take, they barter and they give;
and then they arrange what they have into files tabulated by their
personal interests. They mainly download pictures and text. That is
one of the normal activities connected with the other activities of
communication and information.
Frequency of Use – Download from the Internet; scale: 1=never,
2=rarely, 3=sometimes, 4=often; 12-19 years old; N=5037; Source:
MeMo Report 2008
Music is one main interests on the Internet and music downloads
are considered normal for young people, especially as they are now
23
encouraged by the music industry. Sometimes they download other
data like videos, games and mobile phone content. One problem
can be the kind of content they get. They download what they like
and many of them are not selective. And adolescents can use nearly
every possibility the Net offers. What you can also see is the convergence of media, which is not primarily guided by technical opportunities; it is crucially directed by the personal and social interests
of the youth.
I want to illustrate a possible course, which young people can
take through the media, using the example of a young girl. Tina is 16
years old and a huge fan of a music band called Beatsteaks. This
interest guides her through the media. She listens to this band on
the radio, she buys DVDs from the Beatsteaks, she listens to them
on her mp3 player, watches them on TV, has their music on her
mobile phone, surely to exchange it with friends, and on her computer connected with the mp3 player; but the Internet is of central
importance for this young girl. She was introduced to the Beatsteaks
by her friends. They also like the Beatsteaks, they liked them before
her and they encouraged her to listen to the Beatsteaks.
The Net offers Tina much other content relating to the Beatsteaks and opportunities to deal with the band. Following information from other media or persons she looks for more information,
using search engines and seeking fan sites and official websites. She
listens to Internet radio, special radio, where she can hear the Beatsteaks, and she downloads videos, which show her band. But even
in her social network SchülerVZ, where she presents herself, she
searches for information about the band and makes contact with
other fans of the Beatsteaks.
In conclusion, when surfing on the Net, adolescents mainly
pursue their interests and these interests come mainly from outside
the Net, from friends of the same age, but sometimes also from
other media. Mostly they have one strong interest, which is similar
to the interests of their friends, and they follow these interests
through the Net. Only a few young people have many interests and
use the media, especially the Internet, in a sophisticated way. If the
interests of adolescents are the media themselves, they find in the
media a huge variety of content. Young people can be interested in
many types of media. They are interested in music, computer games
or TV shows. You can find content on YouTube and MySpace if
you are interested in movies. And there are a lot of other media
interests. For all these interests you can find content, but the kind of
content you can find is very differentiated as it is in all the Net and
24
that may be one of the problems.
In general, young people are not passive users but they use the
Net actively. They generally know what they are looking for and
they normally reject content such as hate sites. Most of them do not
hold with anti-social content. On the other hand, young people are
also curious. They are interested in new experiences and they are
interested in preferences held by their friends, parents and the social
environment. If they are afflicted by the poison of intolerance for
example, they may get infected by more poison, which you can find
on the Net often in a pretty and entertaining package. For most
young people, the Internet is the virtual part of our merchandise
world. In fact, the Net truly is merchandise. They follow the trails
built by the entertainment industries. And the Internet is part of the
industry although it is not its only function. On the Net you can
find everything. And if you are unprepared or not educated, if you
are not able to differentiate, if you don’t have a position and knowledge of what is good for you and society, then the Net can be dangerous. There are only a few authorities that fight against anti-social
content on the Net and there is no authority that can definitively
ban this content from the Net. All we can do is to use the Net to
fight against anti-social content and Jan Keilhauer will now show
you the example of the project D-A-S-H, where that is exactly what
we did.
Thank you.
25
Jan Keilhauer
Young people opposing hate and exclusion
on the Internet
As we just heard, the use of the Internet depends on the users' own
interests and that of course includes active forms of participation.
One key aspect of media pedagogics is to support young people in
creating media products, to use media in a self-determined way and
to reflect their own concerns, for example against hate and exclusion. Experience has already been gathered in this special field of
Internet activities against exclusion. Firstly I want to make clear of
what kind of young people we are talking about, if we want to encourage the Internet activities of young people, who oppose exclusion. The second point focuses on different types of Internet activities that you can find among active groups of young people. Those
who are not on the Web yet can also be encouraged to get active
this way. Finally, as the third point I would like to outline the online
offerings and central experiences of the media pedagogical project
D-A-S-H. This can be useful as a reference for future projects.
The media pedagogical project D-A-S-H enables young activists
against right-wing extremism to deal with media independently
26
The complete name of the project is “D-A-S-H. Networking
against Exclusion”. The aim of this project was to support and co nnect young people, who are actively involved in fighting racism or
want to get started. D-A-S-H wanted to enable active groups of
young people to deal with media independently and using methods
suited to their own needs. D-A-S-H was run by the JFF Institute for
Media Pedagogy in Research and Practice, in cooperation with the
Department for Media Pedagogy and Further Education at the University of Leipzig. D-A-S-H was financed by the German Federal
Ministry for Family Affairs, Seniors, Women and Youth in the context of the program Youth for Tolerance and Democracy. Furthermore, it was supported by the Federal Agency for Civic Education.
Financing stopped in 2006 at the end of the promotional program.
The German language platform is the main instrument of
“D-A-S-H” in Germany and went online in 2002.
The following information is primarily based on the positions
and statements of users of D-A-S-H who were interviewed in the
context of evaluating the German platform of D-A-S-H, which was
directed towards active groups of young people in Germany.
Let’s have a look at the target group. Why is it a pedagogical
objective at all to support young people, who are already engaged in
activities against exclusion or want to get started with it? It is a
promising approach to support a democratic youth culture and with
it a democratic media culture. Together with young people we can
develop options for action against exclusion and set positive content
against hate sites. Politically active young people can also support
other young people in reflecting on exclusion, whether in the Internet or in society as a whole. They can achieve that best because they
use the same language of youth culture. If you want to provide suitable offerings for active young people it is important to understand
how they are thinking and what their motivations are.
What are the characteristics for this target group? Most of them
are older than 16 years, rather young adults. Their motivation lies in
the possibility of having an authentic impact on politics or giving
direct aid to disadvantaged persons. Working in conventional political institutions, communities, etc is not really an alternative for
them. Self-determination, both in terms of the issues and in terms of
the manner of working, is of highest importance for them. Their
activities are rooted in local youth culture; first of all in music subcultures, for example punk or hardcore, and several other subcultures. It is about self-organized groups of like-minded people who
are working on local problems but they are interested in supra27
regional and social-political is sues, too. They are struggling against
neo-Nazis or conditions of exclusion in their surroundings and they
want to communicate that to the public.
We are talking about a group of young people, which has a
clear position against every aspect of hate and exclusion and they
maintain a very critical view of society in general. Based on their
critical understanding they follow their own aims as well as they
rather refuse direct pedagogical impact. Pedagogical offerings
should therefore open up opportunities which meet the needs of
this specific target group. You only will make them join in if there is
basically an overlap with their own concerns and if there are resources which enable them to put their ideas into practice.
Another question is how politically active young people use the
Internet. They mostly use the Web as part of their everyday lives
and as a matter of course. They are interested in political and social
information and assess it critically. Beyond that they are very disposed to using the Internet in an active way, as participating communicators or producers of their own media.
There are three different types of Internet activities, in which
groups of active young people are operating. These Web activities
can be taken as models for other young people, who want to start
using the Internet this way. (1) The first possible area of application
of the Net is to provide public websites that offer information for
users to form an opinion or to give activists helpful information for
their work against discrimination and exclusion. These online initiatives often arise from local commitments but, because they are
based on the Web, many other like-minded people can contribute to
the Web content. In this way, they improve the offerings by co ntributing their special knowledge or perspectives. (2) Another way of
using the Internet is to present local activities to the public in order
to find people to support these activities. (3) Moreover, young activists can use Internet services for independent and trans-local communication, organization and for networking of active groups. Websites and other communication tools like mailing lists are useful for
member communication.
These forms of Internet use are generally mixed according to
the specific aims of each group. For these purposes, it is rarely necessary to build extensive web portals. The websites are controllable,
simple, and can be maintained by the young activists themselves.
As examples, I want to show you three websites created by active groups of young people. The first is the website of “Recht
gegen Rechts” ("The Law Against Right-Wing Extremism").
28
Judicial advice by law students on activities and strategies against
exclusion
This website is a guidebook, which provides guidelines on judicial
aspects of exclusion for anything from racism or anti-Semitic slogans to violent assaults. It provides advice on what to do. Here,
users can also find discussions about strategies against right-wing
content on the Internet. The information is provided by young people, who are studying law and activists from different towns in
Brandenburg (Federal State of Brandenburg); most of them are
young people as well.
“Turn it down” is a website and a project run by the “Antifaschistisches Pressearchiv” and “Bildungszentrum e.V.” in Berlin.
It offers other young people and pedagogues an up-to-date reference work on right-wing extremist music. Young people help in
analyzing the grey areas, the shades of racism inside of ongoing
music culture. The users are asked to participate, to send their locations or post information about new tendencies.
29
Up-to-date information on right-wing extremist music
The third example is a website for an alternative youth center
called “DOSTO”. It is located in Bernau, near Berlin. Young people
growing up in the town or its surroundings work on this website.
Local network of young people against right-wing extremism
30
They use it for networking with other initiatives and for announcing
information about activities taking place in the youth centre. On the
website there is information about anti-Semitism, local problems
with racists or about Nazi-lifestyle.
What kinds of offerings were provided by D-A-S-H for young
people who wanted to become active in fighting racism on the Net?
How did young activists receive these offerings? And what kind of
advice can we get for further pedagogical work? D-A-S-H wants to
support and connect young active people, in particular by providing
different offerings on an online platform. Using an Internet platform has advantages: The information is presented cross-linked, you
can access it almost from all over the world and you can get in contact rapidly. However, before you can start working on it, you have
to make target groups aware that this website exists. This is hard
work. It is necessary to do public relations work on the Internet and
beyond, and it is very important to get in contact with young people
in local areas. Another point we have to consider is that young people, who are active against exclusion, have quite a variety of needs.
So the platform offerings should serve different target groups.
Offerings from the project were provided in three areas: Web
services, training and information resources.
The first area of D-A-S-H offerings included technical support
and Web services. It was provided for those who wanted to use the
Internet actively but did not have the necessary technical equipment
and resources. This offering included services like complete hosting
of websites or mailing lists and software – basically a free content
management system. The intention was to find a matching solution
for each participant and this approach was successful. There was
quite a high demand for the Web services, which were up-to-date in
respect of technical developments; and yet with the emergence of
the Web 2.0 technologies D-A-S-H enabled many groups of young
people to participate in decentralized online collaborations. Of
course a very important factor in favor of the support provided by
D-A-S-H was that these services were free-of-charge and free of
advertizing.
Furthermore, there was the possibility for young people or
groups of young people to take part in training through workshops
and courses. The trainings were offered for those, who needed help
in using online media and realizing their ideas on the web. The platform offered basic knowledge, for example about how to set up and
design a content management system or about the usage of free
software. In addition, best practice projects were presented, which
31
could suggest new online activities. Users could find inspiration or
maybe get in contact with people from the best practice project.
More important are workshops with groups because practical
knowledge can best be worked out in learning by doing. The content of the workshops was defined by the participants in order to
meet their needs. If necessary, experts in building online media were
consulted. These workshops have lead several groups directly to
establish their own media.
The third facet of the D-A-S-H platform was the information
resource, which published the developments and various activities
against exclusion. The various materials in the information area were
published for those interested in reports on work against exclusion
in different fields. The D-A-S-H dossiers regularly provided collections of articles that raised different current issues concerning exclusion. Issues for example included: strategies against right-wing extremism on the Net; extreme right-wing influences on music culture;
the spreading of racist attitudes in the middle of the society; and the
situation of immigrants in Germany. If such offerings are to be wellreceived, they have to be reader-friendly. A very theoretical or academic style of discussion is not what young activists actually want to
read. You have to follow and discuss the latest debates and local
problems or youth cultural innovations. The special quality of these
dossiers was the fact that they combined interviews with experts,
reports from persons concerned with discrimination and wellgrounded scientific articles. They brought together different points
of view and fed discussions among groups of young people working
against exclusion. Young activists used these dossiers for serious
discussion and for getting to know other perspectives and activities.
Some of these groups have actually distributed these dossiers in
their local networks. They provided links to the dossiers from their
websites and even used articles as teaching aids. The user groups of
D-A-S-H also had the opportunity to join the discussion and present themselves to others in the framework of a dossier, i.e. to publish their own articles.
Clearly it is necessary to maintain, update and improve the offerings, which means a lot of work for the people who are behind
the platform.
Furthermore it was the aim of D-A-S-H to provide an exchange of experiences and build a network to associate activities
against exclusion. Therefore it is necessary to have a communication
structure as well as publishing and presentation of projects. The
German platform was created before the age of Web 2.0 as a static
32
website that didn’t have this kind of communication structure. This
would be indispensable, because it enables users to actively participate in the content building process, to address a topic or to discuss
with other users.
Besides the online activities of D-A-S-H, considering all the experiences gained from the project, it is clear that there is no alternative to personal communication outside the Internet. It is essential
to combine online activities and offerings with offline meetings. The
conferences initiated by D-A-S-H have demonstrated that. These
conferences allow participants to contact other activists easily, have
complex discussions and build group solidarity, too. Some cooperation projects started spontaneously in this way. With this special
group of active young people, it is better to start with offline meetings and then they can choose with whom they cooperate and with
whom they do not. They should also decide whether they want to
use open web communication offered on a platform like the D-A-SH platform or their own communication tools.
The intention of my speech was to give some suggestions for
how to bring forward young people to use the Internet as an instrument for their engagement against hate and exclusion. The starting point is that there are different groups of young people with
different aims and different needs. A direct pedagogical impact is
rather unlikely to succeed. Open opportunities are needed for active
young people to put their ideas into practice. Concerning the m
i plementation, online offerings should basically be combined with
offline meetings; then users can excha nge qualified information and
experiences online.
For all of that – continuous updates, tracking and analyzing debates and technical developments, providing rapid contact, stimulating network building inside and outside the Internet – a long-term
financing is required. Otherwise sustained work and a persistent
involvement, which is the basis for all pedagogical work, is hardly
possible.
Thank you for your attention.
33
II Which discriminatory content are
web users confronted with?
Thomas Pfeiffer
The Internet – a tool for anti-democratic organizations
I would like to thank you very much for the opportunity to give my
views on the question “Why is discriminatory content on the Internet problematic?” I will introduce myself briefly since my professional background has impacts on my perspective that hate pages
are indeed problematic. I am a researcher in the Department for the
Protection of the Constitution within the Ministry of Internal Affairs in North Rhine-Westphalia. As you may know North RhineWestphalia is one of Germany’s federal states, located in the very
west of Germany. The Ministry of Internal Affairs is based in
Düsseldorf.
The Departments for the Protection of the Constitution are
closely linked to the general design of the German constitution. The
constitutional design is often referred to as a “militant democracy”
(“wehrhafte Demokratie”). The term was coined in 1937 by Karl
Loewenstein, a German sociologist who emigrated to the USA during National Socialism. What is a militant democracy? To cut a very
long story quite short, a militant democracy is characterized by the
fact that the state is aware of the enemies of democracy and that it is
willing and able to protect its democratic character. The experience
behind it is the decline of the Weimar Republic. In fact, the destruction of democracy followed lawful procedures; National Socialists
used all the means democracy provided to overcome democracy.
Karl Loewenstein argued a democracy should have effective means
to defend itself at an early stage when it could come under pressure
from anti-democratic powers. Just to avoid any misunderstanding: I
am not saying that other types of democracy – particularly a typically
liberal democracy in the Anglo-American tradition – are defenseless.
I am pointing out the legal framework in Germany and the reasons
for its existence.
34
Some means of a militant democracy in the Federal Republic of
Germany are:
• legal measures to ban an organization or even a political
party,
• the fact that certain symbols and certain types of hate
speech are prohibited by German law ,
• offices that observe anti-democratic groups and organizations and report to the governments, the parliaments
and to the public. These offices are so-called Offices or
Departments for the Protection of the Constitution
(Verfassungsschutz). Not only are they responsible for
observing illegal action of anti-democratic – we say “extremist” – groups but also lawful action and propaganda
if it is hostile to democracy. The Departments for the
Protection of the Constitution are intelligence services –
in order to gain information on hidden plans and developments they are in contact with informants within extremist groups and organizations.
So to answer the question in the headline I may say in one line:
A website is problematic if it’s anti-democratic. I should make my
point a bit more precisely: It is problematic if it is hostile to the core
values of the German constitution, which are part of the so-called
“liberal democratic basic order” (“Freiheitlich Demokratische
Grundordnung”). These are the core values of any democracy in the
western sense: for example individual human rights, independence
of the courts, the right to form an opposition. In this regard, any
propaganda that promotes a “Fourth Reich” in the tradition of the
National-Socialist “Third Reich” is considered extremist. The most
basic of the core values in the constitution is “human dignity” in
Article One of the constitution: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.
To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority” – of
any human being regardless of ethnic background, religion, color of
skin and so on. Content on the Internet that promotes xenophobia
or racism in a way that the equal dignity of any human being is questioned is to be considered extremist.
The Departments for the Protection of the Constitution are
obliged to observe an organization if there is indication for suspicion that it follows objectives that are hostile to the liberal democratic basic order. As I mentioned, this does not necessarily mean
that their actions and propaganda are against the law. Thus, we are
so to speak the early warning system of militant democracy. Our
35
main focus is not on the Internet. Our focus is on the antidemocratic organizations or parties behind the websites that use the
Internet as a tool – as a platform for propaganda, to gain support or
to build an extremist right-wing communication network. In this
regard, however, extremist websites are a very relevant factor in our
work: They fulfill a number of functions that enable the extremist
right-wing scene to become active, stay active and mobilize support.
The Internet has become one of the – if not the – most important
means for right-wing extremists to network inside their own movement and to address potential sympathizers. Right-wing extremist
groups and organizations are highly aware of this and have started
to use the web more and more professionally ever since the beginning of the Internet era. I would like to name some of the functions
that the Internet fulfils for such groups:
Mobilization: Websites are an important tool for organizing extremist right-wing demonstrations. They spread the message and
continuously give up-to-date information. Very often there are special websites to promote the objective and give detailed information
on the demonstration. However, websites are just one type of media
for mobilization. It would not work without other media such as
extremist right-wing newspapers and magazines, flyers, posters and
so on.
Networking: Networking was the main function of the very
first neo-Nazi-page on the Web. When the “stormfront-page” went
online in 1995, its welcome-screen said that this was a “resource for
those courageous men and women fighting to preserve their White
Western culture, ideals and freedom of speech and association. A
forum for planning strategies and forming political and social
groups to ensure victory“.
Today, the stormfront page is a collection of forums for discussion. Among these are German language forums. Contact and
communication between right-wing groups on a national and international level has been one of the key functions of their websites.
This is particularly true for German neo-Nazi-groups that call themselves comradeships. Just as important or even more important than
contact on the Internet is the face-to-face contact in a group and
between the leaders of groups.
Recruiting and influencing potential sympathizers: Young people have become the most important target group of extremist rightwing groups and organizations in Germany. This fact is mirrored by
the way some websites are tailored to address young people. What
we find on these pages is close to what happens in real world ex36
tremist groups: Hidden political content is the bait used to fish for
young people, but disguised using fun, entertainment and action.
Some websites provide a full range of options for entertainment in
an extremist right-wing environment: Online-radio stations, OnlineTV, music as background sound, music for download, interactive
forums such as guest books or chat rooms. Such pages are an example of what we call “Erlebniswelt Rechtsextremismus” – my
suggestion to translate the expression: “The Adventurous World of
Right-Wing Extremism”. This is also the title of a book that was
published recently by jugendschutz.net and the Ministry of Internal
Affairs in North Rhine-Westphalia.3 We chose the title to raise a
significant point: Right-wing groups and their websites provide
highly attractive offers to young people – at least at first sight: They
provide entertainment, group feelings that they call comradeship, a
set of myths and symbols that turn their action into a legendary
fight, a clear set of enemies, who are also scapegoats for developments that negatively affect one’s personal life. Since you can find
all this on extremist right-wing websites they can be an effective
means to address potential sympathizers.
Factor number four is closely connected to the last one: broad
effect. In 1997, David Hirschman wrote on the website of Media
Awareness Network: “If anything makes the Internet different from
other types of speech it is the relative ease with which the few can
reach the many.” In order to increase the broad effect, many extremist right-wing pages do not express their ideology frankly –
more and more pages offer “hate in disguise” – or to use the term
that one of the protagonists of the intellectual New Right invented:
“political mimicry”. Implicitly he gave the message: We must learn
to use language that sounds harmless – just as some animals adopt
the color of their environment in order to go detected. Some groups
would even take left-wing symbols and terms on board and link
them to their own ideology. A picture taken from a neo-Nazi platform based in the north of Germany called “störtebeker.net” could
serve as an example. It says “Revolution – no more, no less” and
“autonomous nationalists”. There has been a significant tendency in
German right-wing extremism over recent years to avoid any symbols or language liable to prosecution. They would prefer allusions
to unlawful statements and codes to replace illegal national socialist
symbols. This is equally true for websites or any other media such as
3 Glaser, Stefan/Pfeiffer, Thomas (Eds.): Erlebniswelt Rechtsextremismus.
Menschenverachtung mit Unterhaltungswert. Schwalbach/Ts. 2007
37
CDs or magazines. Thus the outward appearance of many extremist
right-wing materials has become less aggressive; on the other hand,
propaganda has become more accessible to a broader audience.
There is no doubt that the potential broad effect of extremist rightwing propaganda has increased – the actual broad effect is hard to
measure. We don’t really know how many people use hate pages.
Who are they? Sympathizers?
Factor number five: Trading with extremist right-wing products. In 2006, there were 91 extremist right-wing mail order companies based in Germany – they would not offer illegal products such
as the Swastika flag whereas you will find a collection of such products in right-wing mail order companies based abroad, for example
in the United States. You will also find extremist right-wing products in special extremist shops – again the German ones would not
sell illegal products, at least they would not do so openly. I remember talking to a former extremist right-wing skinhead who said: If
you know people that know people there is access to everything
including fire arms. This was before the Internet played a major role
in the scene. There is no doubt about the fact that access to any
kind of extremist right-wing products – illegal or not – has become
significantly easier.
The Internet is international and the legal conditions outside of
Germany can be quite different. German right-wing extremists distributing illegal materials often anonymously use Internet Service
Providers abroad for example in the USA – some of which are actively involved in the movement so they provide a safe haven for
materials liable to prosecution in Germany. There is low risk of
being made responsible. However, as I said earlier, most German
groups and organizations would rather avoid illegal materials on the
web since the people behind their sites are well known to the security agencies.
I would like to give you a number of examples – some contain
lawful materials, others illegal materials. I will just highlight some
elements of the websites and won’t go into too many details.
The NPD, the German National Democratic Party, is the most
active, the most aggressive and the most successful extremist rightwing party in Germany at the moment. The outward appearance of
the website mirrors its strategies: The message is: We are young, we
are modern, we are professional. We are not extremist but we put
social justice first – social justice for ethnic Germans. That is what
they mean when they say “’social’ only works on a national basis”.
In fact this is a party that closely cooperates with neo-Nazi com38
radeships. Just to quote one line from Udo Voigt, the chairman of
the NPD, who said in an interview: “There is no doubt about the
fact that Hitler was a great German statesman” [“Zweifellos handelt
es sich bei Hitler um einen großen deutschen Staatsmann”]. Part of
the website is the media server where you can download the socalled “school yard CDs”, similar to the “Project Schoolyard” in
Germany and the USA.
Offering downloads of give-away CDs with right-wing extremist
music for young people: Media server of NPD
These are give-away-CDs used in electoral campaigns. Music is used
as a tool to attract young people, particularly young voters or future
voters. I would like to present one of the songs to you.
Annett: It is time for rebellion, time to stand up
I am not going to watch the grievance in my country any longer
It is time to speak up, that’s why I am here today
I won’t be calm any longer and drown my sorrows in beer
Stand up, my German people [Volk]
You went through a lot of suffering
It is your homeland, your country, your death
Germany needs you in its misery
39
It is time to make a noise, time to stand up
If Germany were ours once again
A gleam of hope – it would be wonderful
German original: Annett – Es ist Zeit zu rebellieren
Es ist Zeit, zu rebellieren, es ist Zeit um aufzustehn
Denn den Missstand in meinem Lande
Will ich nicht länger mit ansehn
Es ist Zeit, sich zu melden, deshalb stehe ich heut hier
Will mich nicht mehr ruhig verhalten
Die Alltagssorgen wegtrinken beim Bier
Deshalb stehe auf, Du deutsches Volk
Hast viel schlimmes Leid hinter Dich gebracht
Es ist Deine Heimat, Dein Land, Dein Tod
Deutschland braucht Dich jetzt in seiner Not
Es ist Zeit, endlich zu lärmen
Es ist Zeit um aufzustehn
Dass Deutschland wieder uns gehöre
Ein Lichtblick, es wär wunderschön
The variety of styles on the CDs is remarkable. This one reminds me of left-wing songwriter festivals or the peace movement.
The lyrics are rather subtle compared to other extremist right-wing
songs. However, there is a xenophobic allusion in this part of the
song and it gets more explicit in the rest of it. In general, the website
is an example of what I call “hate in disguise”.
Music is an important part of the “adventurous world of rightwing extremism”, the mix of propaganda and free time activity. On
the web, a modern, appealing look is important particularly to
attract young people. Interactive elements create an entertaining
environment. One group that combines both is based in the centre
of the German federal state of Hesse and calls itself “Nazis in Mittelhessen”, as they call it a “youth project” of the action office Mittelhessen, which is a regional neo-Nazi-network. The fact that they
explicitly call themselves “Nazis” is rare and in this context it is used
to gain attention. German neo-Nazis prefer the word “National
Socialists” and more and more often they stress the word “socialists”.
40
Modern look and interactive elements are used to enhance the attractiveness of right-wing extremist websites
On the “Nazis in Mittelhessen” site you can listen to music, watch
videos, view flyers and posters and contact the authors if you “feel
like going to a concert, a party or a demonstration at the weekend”.
NS-Media.info explicitly facilitated the “Video Share for National
Socialists”
41
NS-Media.info is a platform for video-download – the “nationalist YouTube”, as someone called it in a neo-Nazi forum. One of
the films you can download is called “Our beloved Fuehrer Adolf
Hitler”. The ideas and the pictures are obviously old – the technology of the website is state of the art.
The next website was created by an anonymous person. It is
quite obviously illegal according to German law, because it includes
a Hitler portrait as well as the “Horst Wessel Song”, which is illegal
in Germany even without the lyrics. In one of the texts, the message
becomes more explicit, as the translation of the following screenshot shows:
Germans out to total war against the wog4 republic. Do you want total war?
As Mr. Goebbels asked in former times: Do you want total war?? So we have
to ask you today, if it is still possible to be German in such a Germany!!!
"Do you want total war?" (“Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?“), quote of
NS Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels
The content of this page is beyond discriminatory, it promotes violence, it is primitive in many ways. However, the page is not quite
relevant to our work. The person responsible is probably German,
but the author seems to be a single person. There is no indication
that an organization is involved. Moreover, the provider is not based
in Germany, so even for the law enforcement agencies prosecution
is practically impossible.
The last example is the website of an organization called “Citizens’ Movement Pro Cologne”. The organization appealed to the
administrative court recently to stop their observation by the Department for the Protection of the Constitution. The court rejected
their appeal because of the ongoing xenophobic agitation of the
organization and contacts to groups that pursue extremist objectives
4
people.
The German original term "Kanake" is a slang insult mainly for Turkish
42
more openly. “Pro Cologne” has got five seats in the local parliament. The flyer that you can download on the website represents
one of their main issues: the planned building of a mosque in Cologne. There has been much debate in the city about the mosque
and resentment against the building – sometimes mixed with prejudice against Islam in general – has been expressed by quite a few
people, some of them are notable people. Pro Cologne stirs resentment against the mosque and Muslim people. Apparently they are
aware that the issue is a suitable platform for gaining mainstream
acceptance. The flyer says:
After the events of 09/11 we have to be alert, particularly in Cologne. Terrorist Mohammed Atta prepared the assault in a Hamburg mosque. So far, the
Islamic associations in Cologne have not credibly distanced themselves from the
Islamic extremists. Therefore it is quite possible that the new large mosques will
become a dangerous haven for Islamic extremists. We don‘t need that in our city!
German original: Nach den Ereignissen vom 11. September 2001
müssen wir gerade auch in Köln wachsam sein. In Hamburg bereitete der Terrorist Mohamed Atta in einer Moschee den verbrecherischen Anschlag in New
York vor. Die islamischen Verbände in Köln haben sich bislang nicht glaubwürdig distanziert. Es ist daher sehr gut möglich, dass die neuen GroßMoscheen auch eine gefährliche Zufluchtsstätte für islamische Extremisten werden. So etwas müssen wir uns in unserer Stadt nicht antun!
These are just some examples where web users are confronted
with discriminatory content in various forms. I perfectly agree with
sanctions if the materials are illegal – however, the key factors in
dealing with the problem are public awareness and media competence. In a militant democracy, in particular, extremist websites need
attention from both sides: state and civil society. If there is a need to
protect and promote democratic values, the state alone will not be
able to do so. Among many others, it is the task of the Departments
for the Protection of the Constitution to provide information on
extremist right-wing ideas, strategies and action – on the Internet
and elsewhere. Young people are the top target group of the rightwing extremist movement. So information and awareness among
young people and their social circles is particularly necessary. This
will be a long-term challenge and many organizations and offices
will have to play their parts – if possible not on their own but together with others. In other words: in a network. So last, but not
least, I would like to take this opportunity to say that I thoroughly
43
appreciate the activities of the International Network Against Cyber
Hate and I would like to thank my colleagues at jugendschutz.net
for their great cooperation over the last couple of years.
Thanks for your attention.
44
Rafal Pankowski
Internet hate propaganda in Poland
In Poland or in Eastern Europe as a whole as much as anywhere
else in the world, we are currently experiencing yet another Internet
boom. The number of Internet users in Polish society is growing
very rapidly, especially of course among young people. But the still
dominant, rather naive, view of the Internet is that of a rich warehouse of easily accessible knowledge and of a wonderful transnational means of communication that brings people together, irrespective of race, national origin and so on. Of course there is a lot
of truth in that, but as we all know the reality is actually much more
complex.
I don’t know how many of you have seen this very recent report on “the other side of social networking” published in the Financial Times on 3rd November 2007. I just wanted to quote a few
sentences from this very interesting article about certain new social
networking sites that have appeared quite recently. One is called
“Enemybook”. Enemybook runs on the back of Facebook. It allows you to add people as Facebook enemies below your friends,
specify why they are enemies and notify them that they are enemies.
You can also see who lists you as an enemy and even become
friends with the enemies of your enemies.
The second one is called “Snapster”. Similar to Enemybook,
Snapster derides the notion of social networking sites. Users can
build lists of personal enemies from their Facebook contacts, who
will then be sent a snap and alerted that they are either on notice or
“dead”.
The third one is called – surprise, surprise – “Hatebook”. Again
it is modeled on the Facebook concept with an almost identical
layout. You can be friend of – I quote – “other haters” and your
homepage alerts you when – I quote – “other freaking idiots contact
you”. The site also provides you with an “evil map” marking the
locations of other users. This is the antithesis of Facebook with its
emphasis on making friends. It is an open forum for abuse and
aggression.
In Poland, too, the number of Internet websites promoting
hate has mushroomed in recent years. The Internet in Poland –
again, in Eastern Europe as much as anywhere else - is used to create new identities, identities based on exclusion and xenophobia that
strongly interact with and influence the manifestations of exclusion
45
and xenophobia on the national and on the trans-national level in
real life.
I wanted to tell you about two examples of such sites in the
Polish context. One of them that doesn’t exist anymore was called
“Nara”, which stands for “markdown radicalism” (national radicalism). This site contained a list of enemies with their personal details,
among them members of our organization Never Again, with direct
encouragement for physical attack. This case is a good example of
international cooperation within the framework of the International
Network Against Cyber Hate. After our intervention in Poland, the
site was shut down on the Polish server but soon it was relocated to
a Slovak server. Fortunately, we have our friends in Slovakia, who
are INACH partners and they intervened with a Slovak company
and it was shut down again. Then the authors of the website made
the mistake of relocating their site to Germany. Fortunately, we
have a good INACH partner in Germany and I think it was a matter
of seconds rather than minutes before this site was shut down, too.
Then they went to a Canadian server. It took a few weeks for it to
be shut down in Canada thanks to an intervention, which resulted
from our cooperation in the framework of INACH. Then it stopped
and it doesn’t exist anymore.
The second example is called “Redwatch”. The Redwatch website was created by the Polish section of Blood and Honour, the
international Nazi skinhead movement. It too contains a list of
“enemies of the Polish Nation and the white race”, again including
personal details, again including members of the Never Again Association, human rights and minority activists as well as journalists.
That was the reason why the famous organization Reporters without Borders also became involved in this case, because it specifically
targeted journalists. The site was hosted in the United States; it became subject of many reports in the media in Poland and beyond.
What happened next? The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reports in its Hate Crime Report that the
Polish Redwatch site was shut down as a result of cooperation between Polish police and the FBI. Well, this is not quite correct: unfortunately, it’s still online. In fact, as far as I know, the only action
against this website taken in the United States was again taken in the
framework of INACH by the Anti Defamation League. That led to
a temporary closure of their website, but unfortunately it reappeared
several times again and it is online now. That is despite several arrests that were made in several cities in Poland in connection to that
website. This also shows that the physical network that appeared
46
gradually as a backup to this Internet site is now quite strong. As an
example, the daughter of President Kwasniewski, the previous
president of Poland, was added, pictured and listed here a few days
ago. She was described as a “Jewish prostitute”. So this website is
very much alive.
In May last year an anti-racist activist, whose details had been
listed on the Redwatch site, was stabbed near his home in the center
of Warsaw and he very narrowly escaped death. He was in a critical
condition in hospital. The trial of those responsible is now in progress. At that time, the Minister of the Interior dismissed the stabbing simply as a case of “hooliganism”. That draws me to another
point, which is the fact that the police and the judicial system often
turn a blind eye to hateful activities, including those on the Internet,
and so do ISPs.
An interesting case is the filter that was introduced to Polish
schools by the Minister of Education. This was last year, too, at the
time when the Minister of Education was none other but Roman
Giertych, the leader of the extreme right-wing party League of Polish Families. The filter blocked all references to homosexuality, so it
blocked access to the websites of organizations such as the Campaign against Homophobia or International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), etc. But it didn’t block the racist and Nazi websites.
It didn’t block access to Redwatch, for example.
There is a very good campaign in Poland which has a lot of
support on the political level. It is called “Internet in every classroom”. The idea is very simple - it is to install computers with
Internet access in Polish schools, especially in the countryside, in
villages, in small schools for underprivileged kids. However, one
right-wing newspaper in Poland criticized this initiative, because
they said: “Internet in every classroom means pornography in every
classroom”. When you think about it, you could also say: Internet in
every classroom means racism in every classroom, neo-Nazism in
every classroom. This is a challenge for all of us and not only in
Poland, of course.
In this context, I want to finish by saying a few words about the
work that we do as the Never Again Association in cooperation
with Collegium Civitas, which is an academic institution in Warsaw
working in the field of the Internet. The first priority for us is direct
intervention. If you want to read more about it our report is, of
course, included in the INACH annual report5 that includes statis5
See: www.inach.net/content/INACH-annual-report-2005.pdf
47
tics. I could just mention that in 2006 alone we received about 2,000
complaints about racism on the Internet in the Polish language, so
you can do the calculation and work out how many complaints per
day we receive. It is a lot, believe me. It also shows the seriousness
and the urgency of the problem on the Polish language Internet.
The second priority, which is no less important, is the longerterm sensitization especially of Internet Service Providers. We have
produced a special info kit for ISPs, but also for public officials and
the public at large.
Finally we’ve also used Internet proactively, through our own
quite elaborate website, which is now by far the largest resource on
racism in Poland and in Polish. Recently we have also started using
YouTube very intensively and we have also looked at the issue of
Wikipedia, which as you know, is the main post-modern platform
for the production of knowledge. We have also been working on
and using other similar sites. It is not easy, of course, given the fact
that we are running on a very minimal budget and we actually do
this work mostly on a voluntary basis. But we know that it is important, it is necessary and we are happy to work with INACH in this
field. We are committed and we hope to continue this work in the
years to come.
Thank you.
48
Ronald Eissens
A flavor for anybody that loves to hate
I have been asked to give examples of what is euphemistically called
‘problematic’ content on the Internet. We have done this many
times during the last 10 years, often in the form of a PowerPoint
presentation, garnished with some nice muzak by DJ Adolf or Racial Holy War, a presentation dubbed by some OSCE diplomats as
‘the horror show’.
Since most of us here are very much aware of what there is to
find on the Net, I won't give you the horror show. Instead I will go
totally non-techno and try not to bore you with the oldest form of
transferring knowledge; I will tell you a story.
Before I do that, I will give the subject its due: the Internet is a
tool used for good and bad. On the bad side you can find lots of
racism, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, hate against Muslims, gays,
lesbians, African-descendants, anybody non-white, etc. There is a
flavor for anybody that loves to hate. You can find it in the shape of
text, video, photos, cartoons, and sound - really through all the different media incorporated by the Net. Yes, it is a whole lot, thousands of sites, hundreds of thousands of images, millions of typed
expressions. Yes, it is bad. It claws at the fabric of society, trying to
take over. It causes violence, murder, abuse, wars and terror. It distorts thinking. It pits us against each other. It wants to balkanize us.
It is not a banal or harmless evil. Ultimately it wants to do away with
democracy and murder those it does not like.
Here, we must keep in mind that we cannot force democratic
values upon people. That would be counter to the principles of
democracy. At the same time, democracy is not an automaton; it
does not procreate by itself, we need to teach it to people, nurture it
and do maintenance all the time. And yet, it stays extremely fragile.
Standing in this historic place on this date, I don’t have to explain in
detail that allowing undemocratic political parties to take part in a
democratic process can be the very end of democracy. So we need
to act now, to stop the murderers of tomorrow.
The answer to the question in the title of this session, ‘What
discriminatory content are web users confronted with? What makes
this content problematic?’ is another question: ‘What kind of bullets
can you expect in a shoot-out? What makes these bullets problematic?’
49
I vividly remember the first website I ever visited. It was the
site of The Louvre, one of the first museums that built a website or,
as we all called it during those days, a ‘homepage’. It had tiny images, the so-called ‘gifs’ on a grey background. Magical. We did not
imagine then that this beautiful new tool would also be used for evil.
It was 1995 and we had been on the Internet for a short time. I
think from early 1994 on, this was in a text-only environment provided by the Dutch Digital city DDS, which looked very much like
the Bulletin Board Systems of old providing amongst other things a
number of thematic newsgroups or discussion groups, on which the
users of this first Dutch ‘Internet Community’ could post news,
opinions or just engage in gossip and discussions. Even on this textonly virtual peninsula of the Internet, where progressive cybernauts
promoted ‘changing the world through communication’ all was not
well. Within a few months after the ‘birth’ of the Digital City old
human failings surfaced. Hate was spread by some of its users, with
as its low point the posting of the text of the infamous Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel Song. With that, and with the subsequent
actions my organization Magenta Foundation took against this,
much of the stage was set for things to come on the Internet. I
don’t think it was the first time that racist or Nazi material was
posted on the Net, but it certainly was the first time action was
taken to get the material removed or to prosecute an author of
online hate speech. By no means was Magenta Foundation the first
organization working on that issue. The good people of Nizkor.org
beat everyone to it. But Nizkor, based in the then dominant part of
the Net, North America, believed foremost in taking action by
countering disinformation about the holocaust and by unmasking
neo-Nazi groups. ‘Good speech’ as an antidote to ‘bad speech’. As I
said, at that time the Net was predominantly American-based, with
which came freedom of speech American style.
For years after, the public debate on the issue of cyber hate
would be dominated by those who wanted the Net to be a totally
free haven where anything should go and those who rightly claimed
that Auschwitz wasn't built with bricks but with words.
The popularity of the Internet with extremists shouldn’t really
be a surprise. The Internet is the biggest information and communication device in the world. Neo-Nazis saw the potential of the Net
in its very early stages, using Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in the
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pre-world wide web age6 and moving onto the web full force from
the start. By now, the number of extremist websites runs into the
tens of thousands. Hate on the Net has become a virtual nursery for
In Real Life crime, where ‘In Real Life’ becomes a moot point, since
the Internet is an integral part of society, not a separate entity, as
some protagonists of ‘cyberspace’ like to claim. The Internet is just
the latest – and possibly the greatest – in communication and dissemination tools, which can, as any other tool, be used or abused.
Incitement through electronic means is no different from incitement
by traditional means, be it a paper pamphlet with the text ‘kill all
Gays and Lesbians’ being handed out in the streets or a website
saying it. The end result is the same, violence and murder.
Small sparks can cause huge fires, which has been proven time
and time again, e.g. by the hate speech and incitement that was
dished-out by media (including the Internet) during the Balkan-wars,
conditioning the public to support any new conflict7 and by radio
stations during the Burundi genocide. I’m afraid that we will find
out soon that the same hate mongering plays a part in the ongoing
genocide in Darfur. To quote Simon Wiesenthal, “Technology
without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a
disaster.” I would like to add to that: “Technology without proper
law and moral guidelines can be equally disastrous”. Too often, I
still encounter Internet Service Providers that do not care what is
hosted on their machines, or even worse, know full well what’s going on but just don’t care. To those I would like to say, have a look
at how a famous Information Technology predecessor, IBM, facilitated and streamlined the execution of the Holocaust with their
Hollerith punch card and punch card sorting machines, without
which the Holocaust would have been almost m
i possible on the
same scale.
But you do not have to look at war zones to see the effects of
incitement by use of Internet. Hit lists targeting groups in society,
individuals or organizations, conspiracy theories, defamation, holocaust denial: it is a long list and the effects can be terrible. Attacks
on Jews in Russia and France, firebombing of synagogues, attacks
on homosexuals and anti-fascists in Sweden, attacks against Muslims, mosques and anti-fascists in the United Kingdom, jihad re6 The Germany-based Thule-Netz BBS started operations in 1993. IDGR Lexikon Rechtsextremismus, www.lexikon.idgr.de/t/t_h/thule-netz/thule-netz.php.
7 Cp. Dimitras, Panayote Elias: Hate Speech in the Balkan, p.8, published by
the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Vienna, 1998.
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cruitment in the Netherlands, death-threats by e-mail against Asians,
racially motivated murders and shooting sprees in the United State,
all incited through websites and web forums.
Neo-Nazis are using the Internet to spread hate, to recruit, to
incite to racial violence and to deny the Holocaust, partly in order to
make National Socialism a ‘respectable’ option again. They use it
also as a means for research into their ‘opponents’ and for command and control of marches and actions, for online denial of service attacks against websites, for racist spam-actions, concerted
efforts to publish defamation or misinformation on public discussion forums and, last but not least, for manipulation of online polls.
A growing number of young people from very different backgrounds are attracted to extremist views and the Internet caters for
most of their needs. Anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and hate
against Muslims currently make up a large part of all online hate.
There are thousands of hate-sites and new ones are brought online
every day, promoting violence, denying historical facts, poisoning
and recruiting. On top of that, a vast amount of hate is being disseminated through discussion forums, peer-to-peer networks (like
Kazaa), mailing lists and chat boxes. Today’s hatred has a larger
breeding ground, perpetrator group and audience than ever before.
It is no longer only to be linked to neo-Nazis or right-wing extremists. Ultra left-wing groups and extremist Muslim groups also engage
in spreading anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and hate.
That conclusion often meets with irritation, resistance and politically correct pussyfooting. Some do not like to hear that groups
other than the extreme-right are capable of racism; it distorts their
cosy world view. For example, Jihad recruitment is almost always
accompanied by anti-Semitic and anti-western rhetoric. Until relatively recently, you could only find a limited amount of left-wing
anti-Semitism, but after the disastrous 2001 World Conference
Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, which turned
into an anti-Semitic hate-fest, the masks came off. Blatant antiSemitism on left-wing sites is now quite acceptable, of course prudently called ‘anti-Zionism’. Some left-wing sites even link to antiSemitic content on neo-Nazi sites. Not to mention all the extremeleft and extreme-right conspiracy theories about the role of Jews in
the 9/11 massacre.
But there is more. There now exists a vast group of unaffiliated
citizens who post discriminatory or racist material on web forums
and web logs, often airing populist views on migration, minorities,
Islam, Jews and others: an excellent breeding ground for extreme
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parties or groups and for new, so-called respectable populist parties
that have lately been popping-up all over Europe.
We see a strong tendency to publish or show anything on the
Internet, no matter if it is defaming, inciting or racist. The dominant
mores seems to be hedonistic rather then freedom-loving – anything
goes, as was proved two years ago when the gruesome video
‘Housewitz’, in which the Holocaust is trivialized and ridiculed as a
dance-party, was published on a Dutch web forum. The Internet
being what it is, the popular Dutch web log ‘Geenstijl’ immediately
copied the video clip, after which it spread all over the world. Although the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the
Internet (MDI) and other members of INACH got rid of a number
of the copies and the creator of the video, a 22-year old economy
student, was convicted for racism and defamation, the damage was
done. The Housewitz video still does the rounds on the Net.
The Internet is the biggest soapbox in the world. Anyone can
use it to publish anything. This results in the phenomenon that people who would not dare to give their views in real life find their
outlet in publishing them on the Internet, thinking they are totally
anonymous. The Internet also is the big recycler. Once something is
online, it is almost impossible to get rid of it for good. The boost
the Internet gave to the really quite shady publication ‘the protocols
of the Elders of Zion‘, is enormous. This was created in 1911 by the
Czarist secret police to stir up anti-Jewish hatred. These days, thanks
to the Internet, ‘The Protocols’, a so-called ‘Zionist plan for world
conquest through Jewish world government’ is readily accessible
and has become a bible for anti-Semites. Twenty years ago, virtually
nobody had ever heard of ‘The Protocols’, and at that time it had
almost disappeared into obscurity. Now it is back with a vengeance.
An Egyptian TV-series has even been made based on the Protocols,
which is a big hit in Arab countries. Hate on the Internet is like a
crime that is being committed over and over again. Not that everybody agrees that cyber hate is harmful – some are of the opinion
that everything should be freely published, all the more glory to the
‘marketplace of ideas’. For me, living on a continent that survived
the Holocaust, this is really out of the question. As the European
anti-racist maxim goes, ‘Racism is not an opinion, it is a crime’.
After the 2004 murder of Dutch publicist and filmmaker Theo
van Gogh, it was noted belatedly that online incitement and threats
against him read as a chronicle of an announced murder. On top of
that, the murder led to incitement on the Internet to firebomb
mosques and kill Muslims, which resulted in a violent wave of arson
53
attacks and attacks on Muslims in the Netherlands. So much for
harmless free speech! I do recognize and support free speech as an
important value in any democratic society. However, I strongly oppose free speech extremism, the idea that even incitement to violence and murder can be considered free speech. Luckily, I am not
alone in that.
Freedom of speech advocates like to quote the constitution of
the United States all the time but forget to mention that the same
constitution, and for that matter U.S. case law, does recognize situations in which hate speech can be harmful and should be illegal.
This relates to the survival of democracy, as our Canadian colleague David Matas wrote in his book ‘Bloody words, hate and free
speech:
The simple fact is that whereas freedom of speech is a condition for a successful democracy, tolerance is essential for the survival of a democracy. As freedom
of speech goes hand in hand with the responsibility to have respect for the rights
and/or reputations of others, we need to be extremely careful when setting
boundaries to freedom of speech. But we also need to be very careful in giving hate
mongers, extremists and terrorists a free reign. History has proven that censorship lurks around the corner but has also proven that free speech without ethics
and responsibility can have deadly and devastating consequences. 8
If we allow hate speech to run rampant, democracy will in the
end be destroyed and tyranny will be the result, bringing with it the
abolition of free speech.
Hate is not something we will ever get rid of so a long hard battle, maybe resulting in a somewhat better world is what we are in
for. Sixty years after the Holocaust, we have a thriving Holocaust
deniers industry (sic!) and the same mistakes are being made again
and again. Education is the magic word but for that to be successful
we need to convince lawmakers that education is failing. Most students these days use unfiltered information from the Internet, not
knowing if this information is correct or not, clueless about which
sources are legit and which are propaganda, and, as a recent documentary on Dutch TV showed, confused by an overload of information that is hard to assess. They no longer see the difference between news, infotainment and newly created versions of reality on
web logs and even no longer care about this, ‘since it does not make
8 Matas, David: Bloody words, hate and free speech, p.38, Bain & Cox publishers, Winnipeg, 2000.
54
a difference anyway’. Students develop a cut & paste way of working, endlessly copying information that is often biased, slanted or
simply incorrect.
A search in ‘Google’ on ‘gas chambers’ will lead you to,
amongst others, the Holocaust denying ‘Institute for Historical Review’ and the Leuchter report. Sites that, at first glance look quite
legitimate and serious. Do a search on the keywords ‘Migration and
Islam’ and you will find sites about ‘Eurabia, the ‘Europe-Arab
Axis’, which set out to prove that European Muslims are just a fifth
column in a great Arab-Muslim conspiracy to take over Europe and
the world. How sadly reminiscent of the Protocols and other antiSemitic conspiracy myths. To give another example, two weeks ago
in New York I was asked to evaluate a thesis written by an undergraduate student. The paper was about the Madagascar plan and the
final solution. The student had mainly used the Internet as his
source. Not surprising that on the first page there was already a
whopper of a mistake. I quote:
There is sufficient evidence that points to Hitler himself being born a Jew because his mother was Jewish, which according to Jewish principle, makes him
Jewish.
Never mind that the student really meant Hitler’s paternal
grandmother Maria Schicklgruber, never mind that there is not a
shred of evidence for any such theory and that there is not a serious
historian in the world who believes it. Never mind that such theories only enhance already existing revisionism like ‘the Jews did it to
themselves’. If you use the Internet as your main academic tool, if
you are too lazy to read books and check sources and then go cutting & pasting from the Net, the results will be disastrous.
Guidance is called for, either by parents or by teachers. But
most teachers are overworked, underpaid, not very Internet-savvy
and just interested in getting through the day. As for the parents,
most of them also lack the know ledge, time and tools to make a
difference. 60 years after the Holocaust and a recent poll in the
Netherlands shows that 83 % of the Dutch think that the Holocaust
was the cause of World War II! Teachers and parents need help and
advice on the ways they can best filter and assess information in
order to protect and guide children and students. At the same time
those educators need a reference guide themselves. In short, we
have our work cut out for us.
You will understand that I am very pleased that this conference
has education as its main topic and I will end by reading something
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quite suitable that is literally engraved on one of the walls of our
office. It is a quote by Elie Wiesel and it goes like this:
There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance.
To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others
have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read
were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so
are you.
Thank you for your attention.
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III What can media education achieve?
Floriane Hohenberg
OSCE/ODIHR – Tolerance and NonDiscrimination Programme
Good morning ladies and gentlemen, I will not just talk about media
education since my organization deals with this field as a small part
of its activities. But I will mention this subject briefly so that we can
really focus on the issue. The ODIHR and the OSCE have been
supporting INACH I think for as long as we have existed. I’m very
grateful to the organizers for giving me the opportunity to give you
a bit of an overview of what we do and why we support your work.
The OSCE, maybe not everyone is familiar with this, is the
largest regional security organization and we have participating
states in the North American continent and also in Central Asia, the
Caucasus, Russian Federation, Central, Eastern Europe and Western
Europe. It means that the situations on the Internet and the way
users deal with it and the situation of hate on the Internet vary a
great deal. The OSCE has, since its creation in the 70s, been a very
important forum for discussions, raising issues and discussing standards on human rights situations. In this regard, the OSCE organized a very important meeting on hate on the Internet in 2004 and I
remember that INACH was very instrumental in its success. What is
important for us is that during this meeting a number of very important commitments were made by the participating states and that
these commitments, which are not legally binding – unfortunately –,
only politically binding, started, I would say, to raise awareness on
this issue in some regions of the OSCE that had never dealt with
this before. These commitments are numerous and you can find
them on our website. But some of them deal very specifically with
education. They stress the need for states to encourage the establishment of programs and to educate children and youth about offensive content. They also stress the role of the OSCE in fostering
exchanges, best practices and helping civil society to address those
issues. Of course, they also stress the need for states to prosecute
and fully follow up on discriminatory content and inflammatory
speech on the Internet. These commitments were very important
for the institutions of the OSCE, because they defined the mandate
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that institutions will have in this field. There are two institutions
basically dealing with hate speech on the Internet. One is the
ODIHR, which I represent here – Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights – and the other is the RFOM – the Representative on the Freedom of the Media. These two institutions have
very different approaches and very different activities, but I would
say they complement each other very well.
I will start with the mandate of my institution, of the ODIHR.
We are supposed to monitor and report violent incidents and hate
crimes. I would say, in this regard, that it is very important for us to
receive reports from you on incidents happening on the Internet
and websites you may have been shutting down or you having difficulties shutting down. The reports we issue are rich. If there is lots
of information we are able to convince states that there is something
to be done. And we rely very much on information from civil society.
We are also obliged to collect and disseminate information. In
this regard, we receive some statistics and legal texts from the states
as well as general information. Again we disseminate this through
our website, which I will present later. In general, we are mandated
to provide assistance to states and civil society in the form of educational programs, for example trainings, and tools. We sometimes
serve as honest brokers between civil society and states when there
are issues at stake. It is a very general mandate. Finally, we are here
to provide a forum for discussion so that issues are put on the
agenda and states are reminded of their obligations. This is the
ODIHR.
For the RFOM, the mandate is quite different because basically
the Representative on the Freedom of the Media is mandated to
ensure that the freedom of the media is guaranteed. In this regard,
when it comes to hate speech or to discriminatory content on the
Internet it has an early warning function on infringements of freedom of the media, for example when legislation made to prosecute
or prohibit discriminatory content is applied in a way that may be
used to prevent journalists, to prevent the media from doing their
work. That is different kind of approach. In this regard, the Representative also sees his role in raising awareness on the positive role
of the Internet because in some parts of the region of the OSCE the
Internet is seen as a danger by the states; and so the Representative
on the Freedom of the Media tries to stress the positive role that
can be played by this medium. Hence it sees its role as stressing the
importance of self-regulating principles. Much less than proposing
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and creating legislation and regulations to put constraints on the
exercise of the media.
Let me return to the ODIHR. We have been developing tools
that are not specifically designed for the media but, I think, that can
help and can be useful for the media in this area. We now publish
on an annual basis what we call a hate crime report. It is a report on
incidents and occurrences of violent manifestations of intolerance.
It includes what we call hate speech or discriminatory content.
These two can be used, and it covers the whole OSCE area. It is not
an accurate account of every incident that happens in the region but
it tries to work out trends and the main responses that can be given
to these incidents and those trends. This report can be used, of
course, by the media to obtain a very accurate snapshot of the situation in the OSCE region.
We have developed in collaboration, I think with lots of people
who are here in this room, a resource guide for civil society on how
to tackle hate crimes and hate motivated incidents. There is a section specifically on hate speech and freedom of speech, and there is
a specific section on the Internet. The Office is also developing a
resource book on Muslim communities. This document is actually
designed especially for the media, for educators, for the public at
large and for public officials. It will contain lots of information and
facts about Muslim communities in specific countries. The document has now been developed for Spain. We have a pilot for Spain
and it will be introduced to the media community at the beginning
of next year.
The last tool I would like to present is the website, which is
called “TANDIS”. It is an acronym for “Tolerance and NonDiscrimination Information System”. This website is a specific page
about hate on the Internet and it provides a lot of information
about international standards, about tools, guides, about documents,
publications and practical initiatives. Unfortunately, I would say that
this page is currently the least lively of all the pages we have on
TANDIS. We really rely and depend a great deal on you submitting
examples of initiatives that have been successful, submitting real
reports on what you observe, etc. It can only be lively and it can
only be used by educators, by the media, by the wider public or
officials if it is very up-to-date. We know now that this website is
extremely well used. There are lots of downloads every day. So I
think this page could be quite a useful tool for all of you to present
your work on a very important platform.
To finish my short presentation, I would just recall that there
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are very important areas of cooperation, between INACH and the
ODIHR. First of all, I think the most important are the lobbying
efforts. I think it is very important that INACH has a strong presence at OSCE events so that the issue stays on the table. We can
help and support you in putting very specific issues on the table. We
normally have annual forums, annual meetings ahead of big OSCE
conferences and we usually consult INACH on the agenda and the
list of speakers for these events. For two years now, we have been
supporting civil society in drafting and preparing recommendations
during the civil society forums and again I think it is important that
INACH is present, that you are present, so that the issue of the
Internet stays in the recommendations that are presented to the
states all the time.
And finally, at every OSCE meeting and conference there is the
opportunity to organize what we call side events, which are actually
a sort of a workshop where a few participants, NGOs or also state
officials can present specific projects. Again I would encourage you
to be present and to present your projects. We can support you
financially.
Another area of cooperation is something I have already mentioned: We try to strengthen networks. We don’t have the capacity
to do this very extensive and exhaustive grass root work. So we try
to work through strengthening networks, to outreach visibility and
that’s what I have been trying to do with INACH since 2005. In this
area, on a very concrete basis we support small scale projects. For
example, we supported, I think two years ago, the establishment of
the Complaints Bureau on the Internet in Slovakia by People
Against Racism. It was a very small scale project, but the point was
that the People Against Racism office would become a part of
INACH. For us, it would multiply the effect of this very small scale
grand and I would say it is definitely a success.
The last area of cooperation is our function as a monitoring
and reporting institution. As I have already mentioned, we need you
to send us information and incidents, whatever you have, throughout the year so that we can include them in our report, so that the
issues can be tackled and raised. I would say that the reports are
read very carefully by the participating states, who respond on very
specific issues most of the time. If you submit something, you can
be assured that you get an answer quite quickly.
Feeding TANDIS – that is what I mentioned already – this
website has to be lively. And, of course, there is always the opportunity to raise issues ad hoc. If something absolutely outrageous is
60
happening, maybe the office can help in raising awareness with the
participating states.
Thanks.
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Anne Taylor
A media education approach to online hate
Thank you for inviting Media Awareness Network to participate in
this important discussion. It is a great pleasure to be here.
Before I share Media Awareness Network’s approach to antihate education, I will just tell you a little bit about our organization.
Media Awareness Network is a national, not-for-profit organization
and its mandate is to promote critical thinking by young people vis à
vis the media in their lives. We do this in a number of ways – and
always in English and French:
• We host a large media education website.
• We produce and license multi-media resources for
teachers, students and parents (covering a whole range
of topics – advertising and consumerism; media and lifestyle choices involving tobacco, alcohol, eating habits;
gender and body image; stereotyping; cyberbullying,
anti-hate and internet education - to name a few - as well
as issues such as bias in journalism and the relationship
between media ownership and media content.).
• We conduct nation-wide research on young people’s use
of and attitudes towards digital technology.
• We work with organizations, school boards, teachers' associations, public library systems, national and community organizations and provincial and federal governments so that our approaches and our resources reach as
many decision-makers and as many people working with
young people as possible.
Media Awareness Network began in 1995, as a response to a
public hearing by Canada’s broadcasting regulator on the issue of
children and television violence. In 1995, media educators were
discussing TV, films, popular music, advertizing, and perhaps video
games. People were aware of the Internet, but few had any idea
where we’d be today. As we discussed yesterday, this generation of
young people are creators and distributors of information as well as
consumers and they are accessing what they want, when they want it
and from just about anywhere, which is making it very difficult to
protect them from harmful online content, n
i cluding online hate.
The old saying “Education is power” is never more true than it is in
the case of online hate. Hate mongers try to have power over the
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minds of others. Good information and critical thinking cut through
that power.
I think the first thing to say about Media Awareness Network’s
approach to anti-hate education is that we don’t isolate the crime of
hate from the media culture that kids are engaged in every day. It is
a culture that does not fairly reflect the diversity of our societies. It
is a culture that creates and feeds stereotypes and it is a culture that
has become increasingly hard-edged and, at times, nasty. In tackling
racism and hate, we therefore look at what we call the whole “spectrum of hate” that kids are exposed to – in films, on TV, on websites, in chat rooms and blogs, and in the games and music they love
so much. The spectrum ranges from subtle stereotypes, demeaning
humour or insults on one side, to in-your-face racism, homophobia
and hate on the other and it has the effect of normalizing the act of
mocking, demeaning or vilifying others. Nowhere is this more evident than on the Internet, where putdown insults, tasteless humour
and violence towards others are considered cool. Message boards
for kids on sites like the popular Skateboarding.com are filled with
insulting and often hateful postings. On some sites, like YouTube or
eBaum's World, people submit their own photos. Sometimes the
images are unaltered, sometimes they have been manipulated. Whatever the case is, content such as this fosters an online culture in
which making fun of others in a mean way is acceptable behavior.
Farther along on the “spectrum” are sites where humour comes at
the expense of specific groups of people.
This e-mail joke cites reasons why Muslim terrorists are so
quick to commit suicide. (I have omitted the second part of this joke
because I find it too offensive to put on the screen.)
Subject: A mystery
Everyone seems to be wondering why Muslim terrorists are so quick to commit suicide. Let's see now: No Jesus, No Walmart, No television, No cheerleaders, No baseball, No football, No basketball, No hockey, No golf, No
tailgate parties, No Home Depot, No pork BBQ, No hot dogs, No burgers,
No lobster, (…)
And then, of course, there are the games, which most adults
never see and which routinely cross the lines of acceptable expression. On the Newgrounds site, the game Border Patrol allows players to blast illegal Mexican immigrants as they enter the United
States.
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Online games are frequently glorifying violence
In KZ Manager, players manage a concentration camp. In
Kaboom, players try to position a suicide bomber near as many
Israelis as possible. In the Tsunami game, the player gets points for
robbing victims as they lie on the beach. The site where these games
are found was rated the fifth most popular site in our survey in
2005.
It is inevitable, of course, that some of the in-your-face meanness to be found online is reflected in the kids' own online communications. It is just part of the culture. Two years ago almost 50 per
cent of young Canadians were online for one to three hours each
day, and you can bet it is even more today. Half of these were alone
most of the time. And a significant number said they had come
across a website that was “really hateful” towards someone. Close to
a quarter of these sites targeted a specific group of people. Not surprisingly, 82 per cent of students said they had never discussed racist
or hate sites with an adult.
This is why we are here today. The kids are largely out there
alone. For the most part, they have only themselves to rely on as
they navigate their way through an endless stream of websites containing the best, the worst and everything in between. Our approach
to educating about online hate is a very broad one. It involves giving
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kids the “Web Smarts” to judge the quality of what they see online;
developing their critical thinking skills so that they can recognize
bias, negative stereotyping and discrimination in all media. And
providing them with factual information and background about
propaganda and how hate groups operate on the Internet.
So now I will share with you some of the resources that Media
Awareness Network has produced to support this approach.
"Fact or Folly": A uthenticating online information
“Web Smarts” or Web Awareness is central to anti-hate education. A study last year from Ireland revealed that just over 40 percent of children aged 10 to 16 believe “most or all” of what they
find on the Internet. 57 percent said that they “do nothing” to confirm that the information they find on the Internet is true. Canadian
findings in 2001 were almost identical. To address these findings we
produced “Fact or Folly”, a one-hour professional development
workshop for teachers on authenticating online information. The
workshop goes hand-in-hand with an interactive module for students called Reality Check!
Teachers can present Reality Check! as a class activity on a large
screen or students can work their way through it independently on a
computer in their own time. Reality Check! primes young people to
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keep a keen eye out for online information that is inaccurate, inappropriate, misleading or just plain false. The module, which has nine
units, asks students sets of questions regarding various websites and
it links to the websites so students can examine the sites and apply
the questions. There are amazing sites out there.
Online hoax "do-it-yourself surgery"
The LASIK @ Home Web site, for instance, is selling a do-ityourself eye surgery kit. Hundreds of people signed up for Plastic
Assets, which was a hoax set up by a Canadian media critic. It
promises “free breast implants with every card". Reality Check!
provides guidelines for getting to the bottom of hoaxes, quick
money schemes and unreliable information.
We learned about martinlutherking.org years ago, when the
child of a staff member used it for a school project during Black
History month.
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Subtle hate site against Martin Luther King
At first glance, it looks like a credible resource, but it’s really a subtle
hate site, designed by the organization Stormfront and it discredits
Martin Luther King with allegations of plagiarism, ties with communists and sexual misconduct.
Kids know that anyone and everyone can post their views
online but, as the studies show, it is very tempting to believe what is
in front of one’s eyes. Reality Check! reminds them to ask some
hard questions: Who’s responsible for the site? Who is (are) the
author(s)? What can you find out about them? What can you find
out about the organization? Do they provide an organization profile
or a real-world postal address and phone number? Can you get information about them from other sources such as books, or your
teacher or librarian? What kinds of websites do they link to? And
who links to them? One can tell so much about a site by knowing
who links to it. It is such a simple thing to do: go to a search engine
and enter the word “link,” followed by a colon and the page’s URL.
If we do a link search with the URL for Media Awareness Network,
for instance, we see that more than 7,000 sites link to it. The fact
that most of these sites are education or government sites supports
MNet’s claim that it is a non-profit, educational organization.
To turn now to another key resource, Exploring Media and
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Race is a professional development workshop as well as a selfdirected tutorial – again, for teachers – that is grounded on some
key concepts of media education. One of these concepts is how
audiences negotiate meaning from what they see and hear. We all
bring a personal package to the media we encounter – our socioeconomic backgrounds, gender, race, ethnicity, knowledge and attitudes. (In fact, we bring this package to everything.)
There was a furore in my province last week over an incident in
which a 16 year old went to a Halloween dance dressed as a member
of the Ku Klux Klan. A black girl rushed, in shock, to the principal
who unwisely dismissed it as “just a costume.” To the black girl, it
symbolized the worst face of racism and as such was an unacceptable affront. Negotiated meaning is an excellent topic for getting
kids to step back and ask critical questions about the values and
attitudes they bring to what they see, hear and do.
Another key concept is that media construct reality. All media
products – be they TV shows, comics, or websites – are constructions. They are the result of many decisions made by individuals, for
a purpose and with a particular viewpoint. Kids of this generation
should have less trouble understanding this than a previous generation because so many of them are media creators themselves. We
encourage students to think critically about the ways in which certain members of society are represented, misrepresented, overrepresented or absent from the media. Through representation or omission, media have the power to grant or deny legitimacy and importance to whole groups of people.
Video games are a rich source of misrepresentation. In a 2001
study, 86 % of video game heroes were white males, 8/10 African
Americans were sports competitors and 7/10 Asians were fighters
or wrestlers. Misrepresentation can be very subtle. We encourage
students to explore journalistic techniques that may create bias in
media.
Last spring, when a group of alleged Islamic terrorists was
charged in Toronto, a major national newspaper carried a front-page
photo of one of the suspects that was so large on the page and so
closely cropped that his face was frightening. On page five, the paper juxtaposed a photo of burkha-clad women gathering outside the
courthouse with a photo of an angelic blond, blue eyed woman with
her equally blond and angelic child, celebrating, in candlelight, an
obscure Christian saint day. These things are no accident, and they
underline the fact that all media productions are the result of individual or institutional decisions. In Exploring Media and Race, we
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look at the difference that headlines can make to the impression
created: "Fewer than 1,000 show up at protest." "More than 900
attend protest."
We also stress the importance of being able to distinguish between fact and opinion. For instance, in the following statements
about teenagers: Teenagers are lazy. Some teenagers are lazy. Which
is true and which is false? What makes one statement fact, and the
other opinion? Encouraging students to spot bias in mainstream
media will help them see through language on hate sites that manipulates the viewer or reader.
I would like to make some remarks about our CD ROM Deconstructing Online Hate. Like Exploring Media and Race, this CD
can be used as a self-directed tutorial for teachers who don’t have
the time or opportunity to attend a workshop – or a workshop facilitator can use it for group presentations. Some teachers are also
using it directly with senior students. Deconstructing Online Hate
addresses some of the basic information that young people and
teachers need to know about hate and those who spread hate. First,
they need to know that recruitment is a priority for hate mongers
and that young people, especially young people who are lonely,
alienated and angry, are prime targets. They need to know that when
they stumble across hate sites, it is not entirely by accident. Metatags, which are part of the coding behind a site, are one of the most
important strategies for drawing traffic to the site. The creators of
hate sites put some of kids’ most common search words in the
metatags for their sites. Another key understanding – and this was
also mentioned yesterday – is that hate mongers try to draw young
people into their web by playing on their interests, games for instance. The home page for this one says: “Your skin is your uniform
in this battle for the survival of your kind. The white race depends
on you to secure its existence.”
And then, of course, there is music. Young people should know
that there’s a multi-million dollar a year music industry that uses the
Internet to bypass adult notice and promote hate music directly to
youth. The tagline for Panzerfaust records is: “We don’t just entertain racist kids, we create them!” Hate mongers are good at making
young people feel included.
The Website of the Canadian Heritage Alliance encourages students to enter personal information so that they can, over time,
actively draw them in. For instance, they are promising to send regular updates about European Heritage Clubs. And of course, the
absolutely fundamental concept to be understood is that of “the
69
other”. Students should understand that the common theme in all
hate ideology is the belief that one group of people is somehow
intrinsically inferior to another. The concept of "the other” is common to all cultures. It is a way of handling insecurities and discomfort with differences and it helps people shift the blame for social,
political and economic woes. We have seen this played out in history many times. It is helpful to use students’ own experiences with
being stereotyped – as with the “Teenagers are lazy” example we
saw a few moments ago - to stimulate discussion about stereotyping
that characterizes people as “other” on the basis of ethnic, racial or
gender differences.
This resource also examines the propaganda techniques used by
hate mongers on actual websites: WorldPlay for example. White
supremacist groups prefer to call themselves “racialists”. Why? It is
a word with less history and stigma than “racist”. The use of symbols: Hate symbols like the swastika are well known but hate groups
are increasingly co-opting mainstream symbols, such as the Celtic
cross and pagan runes, as emblems of white supremacy.
The group World Church of the Creator has recently changed
its name to the Creativity Movement. Still its crest, with its crowned
“W” brands the group’s version of hate, and creates a sense of
power and belonging. It says
The W stands for our White race which we regard as the most precious treasure on the face of the earth. The Crown signifies our Aristocratic position in
Nature’s scheme of things, indicating that we are the elite.
Students can easily see that symbols are a quick way to identify
with others who share an ideology – in the way that youth gangs, for
instance, identify themselves – another good topic for class discussion. The creators of this site also rely on the authority of religion to
persuade visitors. Note they offer people the opportunity to be
accepted as “members” of “our Church” and they express their
expectations as “commandments”. For some people, these words
carry a lot of power.
Students should know that credible research is often used on
hate sites to legitimize hate ideologies. For example, on the site from
Statistics Canada, a federal agency, a research article has been posted
on immigration and ethnic populations in Toronto, Montreal and
Vancouver.
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The article, which is factual and balanced, lends legitimacy to
other information on the site – much of which seeks to exploit fears
and insecurities among Canadians who may be uncertain about their
own place in the economy and in society – a fear many young people can identify with. Fear-mongering is a key hate propaganda
technique and it often feeds on peoples’ discomfort with changes in
society. The Canada First website does this, for example, by linking
Toronto’s traffic problems to increasing immigration.
With young children we focus on representation. For the primary level, we have lessons on stereotyping and bias that look at
archetypal villains and heroes in kids’ popular culture. When kids get
to be nine or ten, we introduce the consequences of putting unfair,
unkind and untrue information about people online and add the
challenge of distinguishing fact from opinion. In CyberSense and
Nonsense, the three little Cyberpigs learn how to distinguish the
outpouring of emotion and opinion on a We Hate Wolves site from
valid information about wolves on a nature site.
Educational games supporting media awareness
An extensive teachers’ guide, lessons and activities accompany the
game. In one exercise, children are faced with about 20 statements
about wolves and have to decide whether they are facts, myths or
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opinions. As children get older, we address the continuum of bias,
prejudice, discrimination and hate. In Allies and Aliens, a game for
Grades 7 and 8, a team of agents represent Earth on an intergalactic
mission and have to judge whether the internet sites of other planets
contain bias, prejudice or hate propaganda. Again, a 50-page teachers’ guide accompanies the game. On each professional development CD, we offer four or five lessons that teachers can print out
and use in the classroom. In one lesson, for instance, students keep
a log of putdown humour and stereotyping from TV shows, music,
and games. The lesson explores how derogatory humour reinforces
the idea that some individuals or groups are not worthy of respect
and how representations like these might encourage “othering” –
online or in the real world.
In Thinking About What We've Found, high school students
are taken step-by-step through the deconstruction of a Holocaust
revisionist webpage. The lesson is based on a real incident in which
a 14-year-old student researching the Second World War thought
the information he had found was authoritative because it was on a
University server and had been posted by a professor. What should
he have done? The lesson helps students apply all the Web Smart
steps we looked at today. If Zak had done an author search or a link
search he would have been much farther ahead. By senior high
school, we have students examining propaganda and the spectrum
of Web content that might be considered hateful. We look at Canadian mechanisms for handling hate and the inherent tensions between freedom of expression and freedom from hatred. One of the
lessons has students creating their own anti-hate sites.
We always, in our lessons, teacher's guides and workshops,
stress the good things that are happening and the positive things
that teachers and young people can do to promote tolerance and
respect for others. Our Website has extensive materials – essays,
articles and studies - to support teachers working in this area or to
serve as a research source for senior high school and university students. There is a large section on Stereotyping and another on
Online Hate. MNet’s Lesson Library contains lessons and student
handouts, accessible by grade, topic and matched to provincial
learning outcomes that tackle all the topics I have referred to today
– and more.
That is the short tour of MNet’s approach to educating young
people about online hate. But the big question is: How do we get
teachers to bring this approach into the classroom? It is not easy –
the curriculum is overloaded (there is huge pressure on teachers to
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address social and health issues, on the one hand, and huge pressures from the ministries of education to improve literacy, numeracy
and science competencies, on the other); budgets for resources are
very low; and fewer and fewer resources are allotted to professional
development. Furthermore, teachers tend to stick with what they
know. Online hate is not a traditional topic and it is a very difficult
topic, which some teachers do not want to touch. So we look for
people with vision within the system, with whom we can work, and
we look for windows of opportunity within provincial curricula.
Media education is mandated in the K-12 curricula of all provinces and territories in Canada and media literacy crosses a broad
range of subject areas including language arts, social studies, world
issues and information technology. These are just a few of the dozens of learning objectives that we pulled from provincial language
arts curricula. They provide entry points for race-relations and antihate education. By giving education leaders workshop tools to use,
and by providing PD tutorials that teachers can go through in their
own time, and then giving them lesson plans and learning resources
to use with their students, and backing it all up with website information, we try to make it as easy and as unintimidating as possible
for teachers to incorporate this kind of critical thinking into their
regular programs.
The response to the resources we have seen today has been
heartening. Three provincial ministries of education and 33 school
boards, many of them large urban boards, have purchased licenses
for Exploring Media and Race and Deconstructing Online Hate.
The province of Ontario, which has over one-third of the school
children in Canada, has just purchased a three-year license for Reality Check!, and Cyber sense and Nonsense gets over 3000
downloads a month – more than any other single item on our site.
There is also been huge interest from the university faculties of
education and I think this is particularly significant. The baby
boomer generation is starting to retire, opening up more and more
spaces for young, newly trained teachers. These teachers bring new
blood and new ideas into the schools. Nothing moves fast in education, but there are always some who are ready to lead the way on
important issues, and we think the best thing we can do is to give
these people the tools to do their job.
On closing I would like to show what the kids themselves have
to say. We spoke to them in focus groups in three cities in 2003 and
in 2005. I think we had a total of about 14 focus groups. And interestingly the kids had it right. Young people told us that efforts to
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keep them from being exposed to inappropriate materials are ineffective. There are too many access points, they said, and too many
places where unsupervised exploration is possible. The Internet
does not work on principles of censorship or control, they told us,
but rather on principles of responsible decision making and calculated risk taking. And these are the kinds of skills that the kids want
to develop. This was also reiterated in our paper survey of 6,000
kids. It is, I think, the parents and the teachers we have got to get to.
Thank you very much.
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Stefan Glaser
Guidelines for the media educational work of
jugendschutz.net
Before giving a short introduction to the guidelines of the media
educational work jugendschutz.net developed to promote tolerance
and non-discrimination, please allow me to make some preliminary
remarks about my organization's work against right-wing extremism
on the Internet. jugendschutz.net was founded in 1997 by the German Youth Ministries, at a time when the Internet in Germany was
still in its infancy. The mission was to control the "new medium"
Internet for illegal and harmful content and to establish measures to
get it removed. Since 2000, jugendschutz.net has been running a
special project on right-wing extremism, because we realized that
racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial on the Net have become
increasingly relevant with regard to kids using the Internet.
From the very beginning, our work has been driven by the
conviction that all the relevant protagonists of the Internet – people
using websites, social networks, chats and communities and all other
services, legislation, jurisdiction and state authorities combating hate
by legal means and last but not least providers, gaining a financial
profit from people using their services – that all of them must take
their responsibility for getting rid of hate mongers on the Internet.
And also from the outset, our work in confronting online hate
has been characterized by a multidimensional approach, which operates on several levels: jugendschutz.net constantly monitors the
Internet, and especially focuses on how right-wing extremists target
youngsters, how they try to interest and recruit them for their ideas
and organizations. This "observation" and analysis is imperative for
counteracting online hate and for our educational work as well. We
take effective measures to get illegal content removed, and here the
co-operation with our partner organizations within the INACH
network and especially the joint activities against transnational cases
are very important. Finally, we invest a lot of our resources in educational work with teachers, students and out-of-school educationists because we believe that education is a very important 'missile', to
use a militaristic term, for promoting tolerance and nondiscrimination. We are convinced that these three action lines belong together and that they are the essential columns, on which
sustainable work against hate on the Net has to be built upon.
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At this point I would like to introduce this last column. I don't
want to describe concrete methods – the choice of methods always
depends on concrete situations and the individuals or groups you
are working with – but I want to give a short insight into our understanding of learning and into the didactical assumptions, on which
the educational work of jugendschutz.net is based.
The educational part of our work is – in my opinion – the most
challenging because it aims at educating children and youngsters.
Those, who have children or who have ever worked with children
and teenagers in an educational context will know that education is
not really predictable. You can only assume or hope to know where
your activities may lead, but you will never know at the beginning
what or who will finally emerge. Education is not like baking or
cooking where you look at a traditional recipe telling you how it
works. Take a child, two or three yummy ingredients shake twice
and there you have it: the tolerant and democratically oriented
young man or woman. This is not the way education works. The
development of a child is a much more complex and complicated
process; it depends on many factors and variables and, this I am
really convinced of, teachers and educationists can only influence
certain parts of children's lives. They can, for example, offer their
knowledge, their own experiences, thoughts and skills and if they are
good and professional they do it with regard and respect to the special talents, needs and interests of those youngsters they are working
with.
The first question my colleagues and I always have to answer
when we introduce our educational work, for example, to teachers
in schools, is: Why should we deal with online hate? Don't we just
make youngsters curious or make these ideas attractive for them if
we make them subjects of discussions and analysis in schools? Wha t
we answer then is: we should make it the subject of discussions and
analysis for several reasons and here I want to name some of them:
Nowadays, children and teenagers increasingly use the Net for
entertainment and information purposes. It is somehow their medium. However, they often do not assess and analyze information
they read or obtain from the web in a critical manner. Again and
again, teachers reported to us that their students wrote seminar papers or made presentations on the Holocaust/National Socialism
using material from revisionists' websites. And – this is what we
experienced in many workshops – revisionists' arguments seem to
appear plausible and are often accepted as credible statements. In
addition, everyday racism presented on the web feeds prejudices and
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those 'harmless' subliminal racist and anti-Semitic arguments are
very often accepted without criticism (not only by young people).
Another experience is that children know right-wing extremist
bands and have their music on CD or as downloaded files from the
Internet on their computers. Music is an important element of
young people's lifestyle and identity and also an important tool for
right-wing extremists to lure teenagers. In Germany, for example,
the dissemination of so-called Schoolyard-CDs with music from
neo-Nazi bands has become an integral part of their agitation. In
particular, right-wing extremist parties like the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, a German right-wing extremist
party) have distributed thousands of CDs in school surroundings in
recent years. And we should also recognize that discrimination unfortunately is an everyday reality in schools and that anti-Semitic,
xenophobic, anti-Ziganistic, homophobic, Islamophobic expressions are part of childrens' and teenagers' lives. Dealing with racism
on the Net is nothing other than dealing with racism - we are just
starting at its expression in modern, multimedia!
Last but not least, right-wing extremists target youngsters on
websites and in popular Internet services. In the past, jugendschutz.net and other partners from the INACH network have investigated a number of cases in which neo-Nazis placed their propaganda on open communication platforms or in social networks to
spread hate speech, to advertise and recruit for regional groups and
to infect kids with their inhuman ideas. And right-wing extremists
offer certain values that might be regarded as attractive especially
amongst youngsters who are not really socially integrated. They
offer "comradeship", "home" or events/action like concerts etc. All
these are very good reasons why educationists in and out of school
should deal with hate speech online – kids get in touch with it
sooner or later or they already know it anyway and to close our eyes
and ignore this fact, in my opinion, is not really helpful.
What are we aiming at with our educational work? First of all,
our aim is to foster the media literacy of children and teenagers. For
us, this means carefully introducing to methods of assessing information critically and supporting them in becoming competent users
of the Internet. "Go into it deeply!" Never just believe what people
publish on the Net without a critical view asking why and how
something is said or written. And "Refer to reliable sources!" to
prove the veracity of what is published. In our workshops, kids have
the opportunity to train themselves in analyzing and decrypting
texts/messages and to learn something about the rhetorical strate77
gies that racists and right-wing propagandists use.
Furthermore we want to encourage youngsters to stand up for
human rights and against neo-Nazi statements and activities. The
Internet is what users make of it and an Internet with less hate and
discrimination can only be achieved if we strengthen young people
in counteracting online hate with the means at their disposal and by
means of the Net.
And finally, we regard it as our mission to raise awareness
about hate speech amongst teachers and out-of-school educationists. Though racism is an everyday reality in schools, teachers are
often not aware of this fact or they do not see the need to make it
subject of discussions. Our job here is to sensitize them to the problem and to show that hate mongers use modern media to recruit
(their) kids.
Let me just in short stress some guidelines for our work: We
are convinced that teaching the dangers of hate speech on the
Internet in the old-fashioned sense of lecturing is not really what
didactical concepts nowadays should rely on. What comes to my
mind here is the warning index finger ('mahnende Zeigefinger')
trying to save children from making mistakes. Modern educational
approaches take into consideration expectations and experiences of
young people. They are no longer regarded as 'deficient' but as
young people with their own competences and interests. And education has to pay tribute to this recognition and has to make use of
appropriate ways of working.
When analyzing hate content on websites we think that it is
necessary to rotate between self-contained web research in the sense
of learning by discovering and plenary discussions. Kids will eventually have to ask their own questions and try to find their answers
independently – without a teacher wiping away unwanted opinions
by saying what is right or wrong. This does not mean that educationists have to stay neutral – quite the contrary. They should offer
themselves as a counterpart for discussions by providing background information, asking critical questions themselves and stating
their own, authentic point of view. But they should always do that
by taking boys and girls seriously. And youngsters should get the
opportunity to reflect their experiences, ideas and, last but not least,
their own prejudices critically with others.
One of the last steps in our workshops leads us to a very practical approach: acting against cyber hate by means of the Internet.
Young people enjoy this and it provides the positive experience of
being able to tackle hate mongers themselves. We encourage them
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to counteract hate speech and they have the chance to try out and
train as well as reflect on several possibilities, for example arguing
against hate propaganda in discussion panels and community platforms, sending letters to providers and complaining about hate content or creating and uploading anti-racist websites or profiles and
videos in social networks. This is the moment when the talents and
creative potentials of teenagers can be incorporated and it is fun for
most of the kids. Our experiences show that an educational project
realized this way may end in a kind of self-reflection that finally
leads to new recognitions and expands the horizons of knowledge
and understanding. This is the way, in which learning can become
an action-related process and not something that remains theoretical.
What do we offer? During the last few years, jugendschutz.net
has developed concepts for working with teenagers, teachers and
educationists and we have organized more than 250 workshops in
and out of schools. We have conducted seminars at universities and
academies in order to teach people who will be working with children and youngsters. Due to the fact that we have limited resources
– we are not able to go to every school and teach every teacher – we
have developed and published tools and handouts which multipliers
may use for their work on the subject of cyber hate. Here we target
different groups: the CD-ROM on right-wing extremism and the
book 'Erlebniswelt Rechtsextremismus' 9 both include background
information on the phenomenon and concrete materials for educational work with children and youngsters. And the booklet 'Vernetzter Hass im Web' has been compiled for older teenagers in order to
sensitize them to right-wing extremist propaganda.
In summary: our work has made it clear that education has to
face the problems of hate on the Internet and we state that there is
an enormous need for information and education on this subject by
youngsters and adults. The work with kids requires a high degree of
expertise, didactical and methodical skills. This is why we are currently concentrating on working with the upcoming generation of
educationists in universities – to provide didactical skills for practical
work with children and teenagers. Education can face cyber hate
and what we see is that young people can learn to use the Internet
critically and develop a critical view on racists, anti-Semitic and all
kinds of discriminatory thoughts. An action-oriented approach is
9 Glaser, Stefan/Pfeiffer, Thomas (Eds.): Erlebniswelt Rechtsextremismus.
Menschenverachtung mit Unterhaltungswert. Schwalbach/Ts. 2007
79
especially effective in motivating kids to stand up for democracy and
human rights and to act against hate mongers by means of the
Internet. We hope, and I think I share this vision with many of my
colleagues, that through this the Internet will increasingly become
an instrument for promoting tolerance and non-discrimination
rather than a tool for spreading hate. And – with this I will end – I
would like to encourage other organizations dealing with online hate
to implement educational activities as well.
Thank you very much.
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IV Which educational tools and projects do exist?
Barbara Liegl
The educational program of ZARA
Thank you for the warm welcome. ZARA is one of the new members of INACH and I have been listening quite attentively during
the last one and a half days to the interesting things going on in the
network. I think I have picked up lots of ideas about what ZARA
could do to better integrate the Internet in its educational programs.
I want to say a couple of words about our organization to put
our educational program into a context. ZARA was founded in
1999 as a real grass-roots NGO. We are located in Vienna and our
main mandate is to combat racism in Austrian society. Our ultimate
aim would be to close our organization down as it is no longer required to fight racism, because the racism is no longer there. I do
not think that the people currently working for the organization are
going to live long enough to really see us achieving that aim.
There are three elements in our organization, which we use to
try to combat racism. The first one is to provide support to victims
and witnesses of racism who come to our organization and tell us
about their experiences or specific incidents with racism. We try to
develop a strategy together with them to help them cope with this
racist incident. Sometimes this merely ni volves documenting the
incident. Sometimes our clients want to contact the discriminator
and want him or her to apologize or they want to go to court.
Whatever our clients want to do, and of course we try to support
them in what they want to do, is done together with them. This
work is essential for our annual publication, which is called the “Racism Report”10. It is also available in English on our website. In this
report, you can read a selection of the cases that are reported to us.
We do not usually select the most cruel and most bloody cases, but
those that really show everyday racism. Our clients are discriminated
against in all areas of everyday life. During 2006 we had 1,500 cases
reported to us and about 50 of these cases concerned the Internet.
You can see that we have not been able to really establish ourselves
10
See: www.zara.or.at/materialien/rassismus-report/racism-report-2005.pdf
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as the one organization taking in all the reports on hate speech on
the Internet, but we are working on that. The Racism Report is a
very important document, which is a resource for raising awareness
and is therefore crucial in preventing racism in Austria.
This brings me to the second element of our work, which is
raising awareness and work on prevention. An essential part of this
awareness raising are the trainings and workshops we offer, which
either promote civil courage or try to sensitize people to discriminatory speech or discriminatory incidents. We also have a focus on
legal measures that can be taken against discrimination in Austria.
Another essential element of raising awareness is the public relations
work we do. Racism in Austria still is a taboo issue and we are therefore the ones who always have to put it on the agenda and make
people aware that racism is there, that we have to deal with it and
that we have to do something about it.
The third element of our work is lobbying, where we try to get
decision makers to improve anti-discrimination legislation in Austria
and, with regard to our educational program, we strive for getting
the values of anti-discrimination and civil courage into the educational system. Right now, I have the feeling that these values are not
considered very important in the educational system and that they
are not really part of the educational programs in Austria. I think it
is our duty to get these things established within the system. Establishing these values within the teaching programs may no longer
only depend on very good or very active teachers who try to integrate these values into their teaching programs.
What are the aims of the trainings and workshops we offer? I
have to start with a non-aim of these workshops. We do not offer
ready-made solutions in our workshops. We work with the participants and try to show them that they themselves have multiple identities and belong to very different groups. They get the opportunity
to perceive that people they are confronted with have multiple identities. Because of these multiple identities they belong to many different groups and discrimination can affect them if they display
specific elements of their identity in the “wrong” context. I think at
the end of the day of such a workshop people are sometimes more
confused than at the beginning because for the first time they have
thought about their own multiple identities and most of them know
that they have to learn more about themselves as well as about what
discrimination means and how it can be combated.
What are the main target groups of our workshops and trainings? Most of the trainings we do in schools together with pupils,
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but also with teachers and with other people who work with young
people in different organizations. Of course, we also try to reach
civil servants, the police and other NGOs, but I would say the main
focus of our training is really in schools. A group that it is absolutely
necessary to target, but is very difficult to reach, is journa lists. We
have been working on getting journalists to participate in our workshops for a couple of years now and we have not been all too successful yet.
How do we try to achieve our aims? We have a team of 12
trainers, who are of course not permanently employed in our organization, but work for many different organizations and have very
different educational backgrounds. Our workshops are always conducted by two trainers, because it is difficult to work with issues of
identity and rather complex themes alone. We suggest that the training is done by two trainers, which most of our customers accept.
We work with interactive methods in our trainings. We try to empower our participants, for instance to develop strategies against
discriminatory incidents or to develop arguments against discriminatory statements among friends and colleagues, so that people are
prepared to stand up and say something against racist statements
when they are made in their presence. I think another important
element of our education is that we do peer education in schools.
We try to have trainings with pupils who are willing to be ambassadors against discrimination, who want to get involved in antidiscrimination work in their own school and want to support other
kids who are victims of discrimination in the school. This is kind of
difficult, because sometimes schools are not very keen on giving
enough space and resources to these kids who want to become
peers.
Another element is that we try to empower people to know
about their rights, so that when people get discriminated they know
what they can do about it or they at least know where they can turn
to when they are discriminated against. Another important issue that
has already been mentioned today in the morning is what we call
action planning. We dedicate something like two hours of a training
to action planning, so that every person or every participant in the
training can develop a strategy for how he or she can either promote
more civil courage or more anti-discrimination or anti-racism work
in his or her own environment. I think that a rather good project
resulted from one of these action plans. A young woman developed
the idea that she wanted her home community to have as many
trainings as possible on anti-racism and civil courage. So we man83
aged to run a project, which we called “attention for everybody” in a
district in a federal province in Austria this year, where we did 41
trainings within one week for a whole lot of different target groups.
And, of course, the schools in the district were one of the focuses
within this project – about 25 of the 41 trainings we did were done
in schools. I think one of the good things about the project was that
we did an accompanying evaluation and that we also went back to
the schools three months after the project and asked the pupils: Has
anything changed in your school? Are you more aware of discrimination? Are your colleagues more willing to fight discrimination at
school? And I think a very interesting result of this evaluation was
that boys saw much more improvement regarding the issue of antidiscrimination than girls; and on the other side girls rated themselves much more competent in fighting discrimination in their
environment than boys.
What are the challenges our organization really has to tackle? I
think the most difficult problem is that we are not really reaching
those people who are hardly aware of the issue of racism and discrimination. We reach the ones who are already active, who are
already aware and want to learn more about anti-racism work, but
not those who hardly know anything about this issue. I also think
that it is very important – as I said at the beginning of my speech –
to really get these interactive methods and the values of antidiscrimination and civil courage integrated into the educational system. As I said, I have learned a lot about how to integrate the Internet and hate speech into these kinds of trainings. So I think the aim
for us for the coming year will also be to have a focus on hate
speech on the Internet in our school trainings and try to find out
more about how schools deal with this issue in Austria because,
honestly, I have to say that I do not really know, whether this is an
issue at Austrian schools or not.
Thanks.
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Brian Marcus
Anti Defamation League (ADL)
Many of you have known me for a number of years and can identify
me in some ways as a face of ADL, but I just want you to know: of
all the organizations here, the ADL is in a unique position because I
am one of 400+ people at ADL. We have 30 offices spread across
the country and we are a multi-million dollar organization. So because of that I understand that some of the things that we can do some of the organizations here are not able to. What I would like to
ask you is that you think of us as a resource. I realize that the stack
of materials that I could bring would literally reach from the floor to
the top of this podium, including the materials that we have developed as educational materials, and I will note some of these later.
In case you did not realize, ADL was founded in 1913. One
thing I want you to know is that in the original Charter, ADL was
not only founded as an organization to deal with anti-Semitism. The
League’s ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment for
all and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination or
the ridicule of any sect or body of citizens. That was the original
Charter of 1913, and it brought about ADL’s mission and a broad
mandate.
What has been done since the foundation of ADL is to create
tools that help people deal with various types of hate. Some of these
have been mentioned earlier today. I would like to show you a few
examples of things that we are looking at and using. Taking Google
as an example for search engines - in the Martin Luther King example, we have mentioned Martinlutherking.org coming up on the
screen. When we are talking about media literacy, we often hear in
these cases about an emphasis on “children”. I just want to note
that on Martin Luther King Day of this year, Rock the Vote, the
MTV site that is dedicated to empowering 18 year olds to get involved in the civic project of becoming good citizens by voting, if
you went on Rock the Vote on this Martin Luther King Day and
you went to the “more about Dr. King” link - that link actually
brought you to Martinlutherking.org. To their credit, they do have a
blog on Rock the Vote and they did realize their mistake and wrote
there:
“Last night we made a mistake. In honor of Dr. King’s birthday, we created
a tribute on the front page, as we’ve done every year for some time. To identify
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the external link, our webmaster searched Google and showed us one of the top
results but appearances and apparently popular results on Google are deceptive:
it’s a racist website.”
So when we are talking about media literacy we are not just
talking about kids, we are not just talking about educators. Even
reporters and society as a whole can generally be, to some extent,
Internet illiterate. This is a website that is filled with very Internet
literate people, who made a very simple mistake and again I give
them credit for admitting that they did so. I just thought it was a
good example of this idea of education being a broader one than
just for kids.
Chris mentioned Google during his presentation and one example would be to put the word Jew into Google. If you look on
either the right hand side or at the top of the results there is a
marked section that notes this is a search on an offensive term.
Google offers search results for Jew Hate Sites including an explanation and apologizing for it in the section "Offensive Search Results"
This section shows the sponsored links on Google, and they have
reserved this area for a special note to indicate that these results can
lead a person to an offensive website. It very specifically mentions
that, when you link out to Jew Watch (see third hit), it is a hate site.
And as Chris has mentioned, Google also inserted a postscript at the
bottom of their note about the offensive results that "if you are
interested in more information you can go to the ADL site". The
gentleman who runs JewWatch, Frank Weltner, has a radio show
that he has done for over 20 years and his site is filled with antiSemitism. He puts up a new video on YouTube five days a week.
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And this is one of the other means of education - ADL has a
section on Internet rumors. This is again the idea of educating the
public. This rumor was in 2004, this first idea, that basically there
was somebody at Google who is manipulating the results to make
this anti-Semitic site come up. Well, in fact what happened was the
algorithm used by Google is automatic, and no person was behind
the ranking. There is an addition to this rumor, which was that there
was a petition, and if enough people signed this petition then
Google would remove the result. But what people did not realize
was that the petition site you went to was a racist website – well,
they did not read the fine print so they didn't realize that their
names became public domain. And what was happening was that
their names were being taken from the petition and cached by a
racist website. There were something like 400,000 names on the
petition – and that information is open and public. It is a website
called “Unclesemite.com”. Unclesemite.com claims it is “not your
good old fashioned anti-Semitism,” it is a new form of antiSemitism. Under a section called “Shelter's List” they took the
names of all the people who signed this petition, because in their
mind the only people who would sign this petition are Jews. They
said this is great, we now have a database of 400,000 Jewish names.
What we are going to do is, we are going to create a system, so that
you can type in somebody’s name and using that database we will be
able to tell you just how “Jewish” your name is. So people who had
signed the original petition did not realize this. What happened was
this petition ran around, this rumor ran around over and over again.
And ADL used our website as a way to educate the public, to let
them know that if you signed this petition your name could be misused in this way. So this Internet Rumor section is updated whenever we get something new.
There is the rumor about the United Kingdom supposedly
stopping Holocaust education. Again talking about literacy, when
somebody saw UK apparently, recently, they thought it was the
University of Kentucky, not the United Kingdom. So there was a
rumor that it was not the United Kingdom that was stopping Holocaust education but in fact the University of Kentucky was going to
not teach Holocaust education. Literally just on the 6th of this
month we have updated that rumor, to let people know that as far
as what UK stands for there is also something to think about.
In terms of resources and the resources ADL has, one of the
things I would recommend is that if you have not gone to our website adl.org, there is a tremendous section there on education. There
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is a lot of depth to the website as well. One of the things I wanted
to note is that we do have this new initiative on cyber bullying. This
is about dealing with all forms of hatred being expressed through
the Internet. We are also including in there some ideas of trickery.
So we are also doing some things not just on cyber bullying but hate
on the Internet integrated into that program. And we have in-school
workshops; we have tips on how to respond to cyber bullying.
These are downloadable PDFs. There are some great examples in
there for information. This is something against the transmission of
hatred, this is against bullying of all types, but also against all types
of discrimination as well. We have integrated this into the curriculum that we’ve done on it.
We also have a curriculum connection. This provides anti-bias
lesson plans and resources for educators from kindergarten to 12th
grade, and we have a library in there with materials. Again, like I
said, I could keep showing you piece after piece after piece. But I
want to give you an idea of not only the depth but also the breadth
of the different materials that we have as well. There is a newsletter
at the curriculum connection, which you can sign up for online. We
have an entire education section of ADL focusing on not only education and working on educational materials but also “train the
trainer programs” to go into schools. They also do peer training in
education. This idea of not only bringing it into the class room but
also teaching others how to bring it into the classroom.
One further educational tool is our World of Difference Program. The World of Difference Program, to go into it, is the Miller
Early Childhood Initiative at the World of Difference Institute. The
World of Difference Institute is an education program that deals
with, for example, Sesame Street, to deal with pre-k and kindergarten aged children and then works its way all the way up to adults in
the workplace.
Another program, which we have also done, is called “No Place
for Hate”. Schools can designate themselves as a “no place for
hate”. As an integrated program and an anti-bias training for educators, "No Place for Hate" is a program where we actually go into
schools. The students have to sign onto a document, saying that
they will agree to be a “no place for hate” school; that they will live
by the ideas of diversity and tolerance. And the school, as part of
this, has to do a number of events within one school year promoting diversity and tolerance. And if they complete that within one
year they are named a “no place for hate” school. They get a nice
banner. We have had schools who have repeated this now for a
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number of years. For example, in the state of Pennsylvania, the
Governor of Pennsylvania declared a “no place for hate” day. He
contacted all the educational districts in the State of Pennsylvania
and actively encouraged all of the educators in the state to become
part of this program. The Philadelphia office joked about this. After
the “no place for hate” day they suddenly got this incredible volume, where they had to hire a new person just to deal with this influx of new schools in Pennsylvania. So it is a mixed blessing on
some levels - getting the encouragement is great, but then trying to
find the resources to be able to deal with it.
The “Classroom of Difference” program is part of the World
of Difference and this is again going out to address diversity. More
than 375,000 elementary and secondary school teachers, who are
responsible for almost 12 million students across the United States,
have participated in this program. We also work on responses so
that parents and educators will know how to deal with incidents of
hate and bias that happen in their communities. And we will give
them real world practical examples so that they can deal with it before it happens - but also skills for how to deal with something after
it has happened and show how a community and a school can come
back together. Again, this is all material that is on our website, and
shows what an excellent resource it can be.
We also do Holocaust education, for example on “Echoesandreflections.org”, Echoes and Reflections is an absolutely tremendous program. This is something that we do to teach about the
Holocaust. It comes on DVD, and there is also a booklet. It is actually an entire program, and one of the things about this program
that is outstanding is that there is an integrated component, where
the teachers go and give information about the Holocaust. There is
a multi-media component within it. This is something that was done
in conjunction with the Shoah Foundation and also Yad Vashem.
We took testimonies of Holocaust survivors and if you go into the
multi-media section of Echoes and Reflections you can listen to
those. To give an example of some of the pieces that are in this, and
some of these are on the website as examples, we have maps showing communities in Europe; there are several handouts – e.g. one
that is given to students and another one that is about children in
the Holocaust and how they were affected. One thing we also have
online and gives good information is dealing with Holocaust denial,
some of the frequently asked questions. Again, this is a multi-media
aspect of dealing with Holocaust denial on the Internet, going to
this website. We are talking about fighting bad speech with good
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speech, having this as a credible resource with information on topics.
ADL also has an education component about confronting antiSemitism. Again, ADL has a foundation as a Jewish organization,
but we also look at this as far as anti-Semitism is concerned as being
something within larger communities that needs to be dealt with
and addressed. So we have community programs confronting antiSemitism. We have campus programs confronting anti-Semitism as
well. We also have something that was called “Hate Comes Home”.
Hate Comes Home is a virtual experience interactive CD. There was
a hate crime - an incident that occurred around a homecoming
dance at a school, and with this CD you actually went in and you’d
become the lead character in the movie. So it’s a movie where you
play and you make a choice and then you make that choice on the
screen and your choices actually affect what happens, whether this
hate crime actually occurs or not. It is a wonderful resource, this
interactive CD that we have. Again, another resource, an idea of
using the media, using multi-media as a way to reach out to students, to teach about hate and intolerance.
We do have a website, another one, I recommend: “Partnersagainsthate.org”. Partnersagainsthate.org has materials for educators,
law enforcement, for parents, for youth on it. One of the most important pieces on that is one that is directly related to the Internet. It
is called “Hate on the Internet” and this is a response guide for
parents and educators. Again, helping children navigate safely – as
was mentioned earlier. The idea is of promoting media literacy, the
idea of teaching parents and educators how to teach children to
credibly assess a website and look at it. You can download it from
the website Partnersagainsthate.org. I also wanted to note that we
have this tremendous material on education: There is one about
teaching diversity and tolerance with all sorts of characters. You will
see Dora the Explorer, you will see Winnie the Pooh, all these various partners coming together. In “No Place for Hate”, we have a
program that we are doing with corporate partners. This is a “101
ways to build diversity”. There are all sorts of educational materials
for kids, etc.
One thing I also wanted you to notice is that we do educate farther than that, and the idea of educating it into the Jewish community. And we have also adapted this for the Latino community in the
United States, suggestions on how to protect your institutions and
how to do security awareness. And again, think about this idea of
education, not just educating youth and educators and parents and
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families, but also educating the community about possible dangers.
One of the most important things that we do is training law enforcement. As we are talking about education, one of the things I
wanted to note is that when we educate law enforcement officers,
we give them things that are specifically relevant to them. So we
have an entire section here for front line officers. There is one more of a US context - on officer safety, teaching officers the symbols of extremists and how to recognize them. So we actually have a
display of racist symbols. And as you open it up it gives the different
symbols of different groups. We give this out for free to law enforcement. We also have posters of this material. When I do training
sessions for law enforcement I am actually going into departments
and see these posters hanging on their walls. There is a section that
we have on our website that is called “L.E.A.R.N.” – Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network. There is one section we did
for lawyers in California and for law enforcement. This is a compendium of all the hate crime laws in California. We put this together as a resource for them.
We also create materials – I have examples – on some of the
reports that we have done on specific groups; some of the initiatives
that we’ve done. We did a briefing, for example, for the National
Association of Attorneys General. Again teaching them about, in
that particular case, hate on the Internet. Thinking about education
is being aware of parents, educators, kids, but also realizing that it
has a broader communal aspect and even law enforcement; not just
using law enforcement as a tool or mechanism for us to try and
fight hate, when we see something illegal we report it to them, but
thinking of ourselves as an educational resource to be able to train
law enforcers. There are 800,000 law enforcement officers in the
United States, sworn law enforcement officers; and we’ve trained
120,000 of them.
I have only showed you a very small selection of our materials
and resources. And I’d love to be able to share more of the tools
with you. Some of them are online, but please, think about this as a
resource to help you.
Thanks.
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Daniel Milo
Trainings for police officers as a tool to
counter the extreme right
First, I have to say that I am no longer involved in People Against
Racism, but People Against Racism was my home organization for
the last six years, so that is why I am standing here now. But there
are two of my new colleagues and I hope they will continue in the
efforts we are putting together. And I think People Against Racism
will continue to be a valuable INACH partner. The topic of my
presentation is “Trainings for police officers as a tool to counter the
extreme right”. But first of all I would like to give you a little bit of
background data about Slovakia, because if you compare the numbers I am going to mention with Brian’s, it looks very small. Slovakia is a country of just five million people and we estimated that
there are approximately 5,000 right-wing extremists. Last year, there
were 188 officially recorded hate crimes, but this is of course only
the tip of the iceberg. The real numbers are of course much higher,
because of the under-reporting and also incorrect legal qualification
in some of the cases.
First of all: What is our cooperation with the police based on?
Educational activities for various target groups have been at the
core of the People Against Racism mission ever since it began. But
to approach the police and to actually make them willing to cooperate with NGOs is not an easy task in many Eastern European countries as some of my colleagues can confirm. It took us a lot of time
and effort to really build some sort of a framework that we can rely
on and we can work with. We succeeded in building such a framework in 2001 by creating a “Commission for Coordination of Activities Against Racially Motivated Violence and Extremism”. The
name is horrible, it is very long, nobody really remembers it and it
has actually changed three times. But the very fact that there is a
joint body – a commission, or working group, composed of top
level police officers, NGOs, representatives of the general prosecutor's office and some other organizations, is quite unique according
to my knowledge in this Central/Eastern European sphere. Actually
it proved to be a very efficient tool. There were many practical activities, which were the result of this cooperation. For example, in
2001 there was a card issued for each police officer with symbols
used by neo-Nazis.
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Slovakia has around 20,000 police officers and each of them received such a card. It really circulated all around and I have seen it
in schools, prosecutors offices etc. I have seen photocopies of this
card in many places. At the time when it was printed and distributed
it played an important role, because it was the time when you could
see people wearing all these symbols openly on the streets. All these
symbols are illegal, if you wear them openly in a public.
There was also a methodology printed and distributed to all police headquarters for investigating racially motivated violence and
crimes. What was most important for me personally was that it created a new level of trust and cooperation because until then we were
seen as enemies of the police - because of the fact that we often
criticize them if they misbehave or if investigations are not going as
they should. But this commission helped us really to be viewed and
treated as equal partners with the police.
But why the Internet? Why do we also need to concentrate on
education for police officers and for law enforcement focusing on
the Internet? Well, the main reason was that at the beginning of
2000/2001, there was a big increase in Internet use as a whole. I
think these were the years when the Internet really hit the general
public in Slovakia. Also right-wing extremists exploited this situation
and we were faced with the first instances of hate speech on the
Net; and also because it was quite a new phenomenon for the police, they were not really able to effectively deal with such cases.
They did not know how to investigate them, what are the log files,
who to ask for what information and so on.
The rapid spread of use of the Internet by the extreme right
was accompanied by the creation of several very prominent websites, against which we initiated criminal proceedings because in
many cases we are monitoring the Internet for these kinds of sites.
And this is one concrete example of why we also have to go after these sites, because this guy, even though he looks like a skinhead, is my predecessor, the founder of People Against Racism. His
name is Ladislav Durkovic and this is one of the most prominent
neo-Nazi sites called Whitefront. As you can see there was his picture with a sign “Wanted Dead or Alive” and a public call to physically attack or kill him. This is a practical example of why we really
have to deal with these guys, because they are serious about their
aims. I will elaborate a little bit about this site, because it is quite
typical for how the investigation evolved and what we learned from
it.
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The founder of People Against Racism on the most prominent neoNazi site "Whitefront": "Wanted Dead or Alive"
This site was really the most extensive and most complex collection
of right-wing extremist literature, materials and all kinds of information. If anyone is interested in becoming a neo-Nazi, he can just
login to this site and read “Mein Kampf”, “Protocol of Learned
Elders of Zion”, Mussolini’s “Ideology of Fascism”, Holocaust
denial texts, David Irving articles, different handbooks, manuals,
how to conduct combat actions, even guides on how to react to
police investigation if the person is called by the police. This was a
very complex and big website and we dedicated a lot of effort to
going after its authors. It changed its address several times. They
made a mistake by registering in early 2000 as “Whitefront.sk”.
There was a person, who had registered it and the police got his
name, but then it moved of course through several foreign servers.
In the end the police did not identify the authors. The authors are
still unknown. Only one of the persons who provided some articles
was prosecuted, but he was acquitted in the end as well. So in the
end this whole case was a failure for the police and also for us. That
is why we really decided we have to do something about this.
And here is another example - Blood and Honour Cassovia,
which is a name for a city called Kosice in eastern Slovakia. The
website included also this Redwatch section.
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Redwatch-part of Blood and Honour Cassovia
The guy behind this website was quite known for being a distributor
of neo-Nazi t-shirts, buttons, all kinds of materials. He even organized concerts in Slovakia. Besides all this, he was also the creator of
this website. The police actually succeeded in prosecuting him, not
because he was the author of this website but because he was distributing all these kinds of neo-Nazi materials.
The third case I would like to tell you something about is NSinfo. It was really a new type of neo-Nazi website. It was called “National Socialist News Agency” and they were ded icated to publishing
articles about “successful” attacks by young nationalists against
“junkies” and all kinds of targets. They actively monitored our activities. They published lists of IDs and addresses of young people,
who are active in our organization. This site also included sections
on the law, how to behave and so on. But most disturbing were the
reports from so called “combat actions”, because they served as a
forum to upload texts and sometimes even pictures from so-called
“combat actions”; this meant attacks by neo-Nazis against their
targets.
But this site was also special in a way that there was a new level
of technical expertise on how to hide their identity. We at People
Against Racism really dedicated a lot of effort to hunting the authors, because we saw it as a big danger both physically for the people, who were mentioned there, and also as a way to counter their
effect on young people. We were this close to really catching them
in cooperation with underground computer experts and the police.
We managed to create sort of a system, which enabled us to know
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from where people were uploading the stuff onto that website and
then we were alerted by SMS messages and, you know, it was kind
of a complicated structure but in the end it worked. However, there
were always a few minutes between the time that we received the
SMS messages with the location and the time the police came. In
the end, again, the authors were not found, but the site was disabled
for one and a half years.
Because of all this, we have decided we really have to work with
law enforcement and more specifically with police officers to provide them with the necessary information, not just specifically about
the Internet and hate speech on the Internet, but more generally
about right-wing extremist groups, about their modes of operation,
symbols and so on. Of course, Internet use was one part of these
educational activities. But we saw a need for a complex training
structure.
We organized a series of trainings in 2005 and 2006, which
took place in all regions of Slovakia. We tried to really go into the
regions, to talk to the local police directorates. The attendance was
also quite good. We trained around 300 police officers during that
period and more than 500 copies of this publication were distributed in the regions.
Shortly afterwards, we started to see the results. The first and
the most extensive wave of trainings took place in 2005 and the next
year we saw an increase of nearly 40% in officially registered crimes.
It does not mean that in the next year the crime rate was actually up,
but I think the reason behind this increase was that the police were
more willing to prosecute and to actually address these issues properly. Increased awareness of the use of the Internet and its meaning
for extreme right-wing groups was one of the results of these trainings, and also better competence in dealing with instances of on-line
hate speech. Last but not least, one result was the creation of personal contacts and building of trust between the people working at
People Against Racism and the police.
Then, the next year, we continued in a slightly different manner, because we tried to concentrate on prevention specialists, police
officers who go into schools to give lectures to kids. They also
wanted us to provide them with expertise on right-wing extremism
and Internet right-wing related issues. This time we used a different
methodology and we put more focus on interactive education techniques, role playing and so on, so that they could directly conduct
these activities in schools. This time five trainings took place and
more than 150 police officers were trained in this way. These train96
ings were highly rated by participants.
What is next? All these trainings have taken place, but there are
several obstacles in the way, which People Against Racism must deal
with in order to counter the effects of right-wing extremism and
their activities really effectively. First of all, there is still a need to
increase the level of competence and to bring more expertise to
police officers, specifically on Internet related cases, because still we
are dealing with incompetence, with not giving enough resources
and basically not knowing how to handle individual cases by police
officers.
One of the major obstacles is a lack of police specialists dealing
specifically with hate crimes. It is not possible to train the whole
police force but there is a need for a strong special police agency or
body which deals only with hate crimes. Also better monitoring of
online instances of hate crimes and their connection to real life;
because you can see that this user-created content nowadays is actually a reflection of real life activities and we see many videos on
YouTube or some similar sites which mirror the real attacks. Furthermore, some legislative changes or amendments are necessary,
because the current legislation sometimes also prohibits police from
playing their role effectively and investigating crimes of this type.
Thank you.
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Valentín González
Education and hate speech on the Internet
First of all, I want to express my gratitude to the organizers, who
offered me the chance to share some points of view about hate
speech called “educational countermeasures”.
I think there is something absolutely clear for all of us and for
those working on the topic of hate on the Internet: The link between hate speech and violence. But it is not so clear outside of here
and to some security forces, judicial systems and governments, who
are not doing enough to stop it. This is the reason why we have to
increase our capacity to raise awareness, not only at an institutional
level, but also among society, and it is here where it is really important to develop good educational projects. This is an important part
of our daily work, so in order to reach the maximum level of efficiency we have to do a thorough and realistic diagnostic about hatred, not only on the Internet, but also in the “real world”. It would
also be an indispensable way to design the best educational project.
Let me present you some information about hate crimes in
Spain in order to lay down a general idea about the context in which
Movement Against Intolerance works and also the way of combating intolerance through educational activities. It has to be clear that
our educational concept is a direct consequence of the diagnostic on
intolerance and hatred.
I will start with the case of Miwa Buene Monake, a Congolian
citizen who came with his wife to live in Spain some years ago. After three attempts, he succeeded in finding work as an economist.
His life was fine until he was cruelly beaten by a man while he was
insulting him with racist slogans. The attack left him a severe quadriplegic. He can only move his lips for the rest of his life. The aggressor was not detained until 7 months later, after Movement
Against Intolerance initiated “popular prosecution” (or Civil Action)
in court. I would like to highlight that this was, of course, an intolerable act of hatred, but it also shows the indolence of the justice
system in Spain in tackling these kinds of cases efficiently and fairly.
There has been a strong public debate and a certain commotion
after the attack against a young woman from Latin America on Barcelona's metro. The cameras recorded this incident, which was massively published in the media. The images were quite impressive: a
guy beating a young woman while describing the aggression to
someone on the telephone.
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Nevertheless, these incidents are not isolated. According to the
Movement Against Intolerance RAXEN report there are 4,000 acts
of aggression in more than 170 cities per year motivated by racism,
xenophobia, anti-Semitism and homophobia as well as other forms
of intolerance. A minimum of 75 people have been killed during the
last 15 years. Movement Against Intolerance, according to its own
investigations, has detected more than 70 hate groups, neo-Nazis,
fascists, etc, most of them with great influence among football ultras. These so-called “hate groups“ are composed of 11,000 members (according to statistics produced by the Ministry of Internal
Affairs) or 15,000 ( according to the information published on the
neo-Nazi web site called “La Censura de la Democracia” — The
Censure of Democracy). There are 94 Nazi hate music bands, music
which is easy to download on shared files on the Internet. The
Internet for these groups is much more than a propaganda platform.
It is the very essence of their existence. We detected more than 500
sites in Spanish still in operation whose contents are also aimed at
Latin American countries. We can also confirm the tendency to use
new Internet platforms, for example YouTube, in order to spread
harmful illegal messages by hate groups and individuals.
Ninety percent of what we do to tackle this situation in our
daily work is run educational activities, but we also provide legal
assistance and representation to victims of hatred and systematically
collect data on hate crimes. And, of course, we lobby for the adoption of effective legislation as a tool to combat hate groups and
intolerance and also make demands for a political response.
Our educational concept has been designed to confront the
situation I have just described but also to deal with what we consider worrying tendencies amongst teenagers. Our poll shows racist
and xenophobic attitudes toward ethnic, religious and sexual minorities – what we could define as “vulnerable people.” The aim of this
research is to measure hatred and intolerance in the clearest possible
way. So the studies have to ask questions like “If it were up to you,
which group would you expel from your district or town?” 30 % say
that they would expel Roma people, 27 % Moroccans, and 14 %
Jews. We also tried to find out what the basis is for such stereotypes
in order to develop the best practices to deconstruct them.
Educational projects represent approximately 90 % of MCI
work, not only running school activities but also editing pedagogical
materials for teachers and students. In this respect, we have issued
four publications about Roma people, intercultural training, tolerance and coexistence, and a guide aimed at training people who
99
have been, or could be, victims of hatred in how to deal with their
situation at a legal and social level. These materials are available on
our website.11
I will mention our K
‘ nowing Roma People’ book, in which
there is a description of the history of gypsies in Spain and some
information on deconstructing stereotypes - such as the fact that
there are as many Roma lawyers as flamenco musicians as well as
lots of information about culture, tradition and perspectives of
Roma in Spain. We run 1500 school activities each year. The methodologies used depend very much on the profile of the pupils and
the demands of the teachers according to the situation they face in
class. But I am going to focus on what we call “Workshops to prevent intolerance”. These are aimed at racist and even violent teenagers selected by their own teachers. There are no more than 25 per
workshop during 15 hours distributed according to the organizational system of the school. It lasts 2 hours per week.
The contents are the following topics: racism, xenophobia, antiSemitism and related intolerance; deconstructing stereotypes and
prejudices; Holocaust education; and hate groups – which include
Internet issues. We use radio, music and creativity in order to create
challenges for the students and make them focus their energies on
developing positive thinking. The radio is a good way to do it. At
the end of the training, they record their own programs with antihatred messages. Some of them can be listened to on our website.
In closing, let me just say that our experience and cooperation
within INACH has been invaluable for improving our knowledge
about hate on the Internet and providing us with the inspiration and
motivation needed to tackle hatred and intolerance in this “new
world without borders”.
Thanks.
11 www.movimientocontralaintolerancia.com/html/entrevistas/entrevistas.asp
100
V Appendix
Resolution
ADOPTED BY MEMBERS OF
THE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK AGAINST CYBERHATE (INACH)
IN FURTHERANCE OF THEIR SUBSTANTIAL WORK
IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATION TO COUNTER THE
HARMFUL EFFECTS OF ONLINE HATE SPEECH.
Berlin, Germany
November 9, 2007
Noting that the Internet is an important communication, information and entertainment tool for all people; and
Noting that for young people, especially, the Internet is an essential part of daily life; and
Observing that the Internet is used by hate mongers to deny
the Holocaust, to espouse anti-Semitism, to preach Islamophobia,
homophobia and xenophobia, and to incite hate and violence, as
well to recruit new hate mongers;
Observing that online hate speech disseminated by hate mongers often leads to violence offline; and
Observing that the role of the law in controlling Internet hate
speech has limits, and, likewise, the intervention by actors in the
Internet industry to monitor and filter hate-filled content is not a
complete solution; and
Concluding that educational efforts to promote tolerance and
non-discrimination are an indispensable complement to all other
strategies helping to protect young people; and
Noting that INACH members provide education to the users
of the Internet (especially young people) as well as to parents, educators and members of the Internet industry on the evil of online
101
hate speech, and on ways to counter such hate speech.
NOW THEREFORE IT HEREBY IS RESOLVED THIS
9TH DAY OF NOVEMBER, 2007 IN BERLIN GERMANY,
That the European Union, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, and all governmental and nongovernmental organizations with the authority and power to do so,
hereby are requested to
Condemn all forms of hate speech on the Internet, and as appropriate under national law, to use legal means to eliminate such
hate speech
Support and promote educational efforts to sensitize young
people against all kinds of hate and discrimination. Measures in the
education field should include:
Developing, testing and analyzing educational concepts against
online hate speech
• Broad implementation of such concepts at the international level
• Developing cross-border exchanges of information and
best practices of different countries and organizations
• Provide support for organizations devoted to countering
hate speech on the Internet
• Provide support for networks such as INACH that
combat cyber-hate with a multidimensional approach
consisting of educational work and effective counter
measures, as well as information sharing and training
102
The authors
Alexandra Beyersdörfer
Since 2006, Alexandra Beyersdörfer has been working in the project
fighting right-wing extremism on the Internet at jugendschutz.net.
She has a degree in German and English Studies and in Philosophy
and worked as a lecturer and a teacher for several years.
Ulrich Dovermann
For many years, Ulrich Dovermann was a clerk at the "Gesamtdeutsche Institut" where he was an adviser for the inner-German
youth-exchange and attended the consultant agency for political
science. Since 1992, he has been working for the "Bundeszentrale
für politische Bildung" (Federal Agency for Civic Education in
Germany) as a consultant for teacher training. Since November
2000, he has been the director of the project against right-wing extremism. He studied German language and literature, history and
education. The "Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung" finances the
project work of jugendschutz.net against cyberhate.
Ronald Eissens
Ronald Eissens is the General Director and co-founder of the
Dutch Magenta Foundation, an international human rights and antiracism NGO. He has been responsible for national and international anti-racism and human rights projects since 1992. In 1997,
along with co-founder Suzette Bronkhorst, Ronald Eissens instituted Meldpunt, the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination
on the Internet. He co-founded the International Network Against
Cyber Hate (INACH). As General Director, he manages two divisions of the Magenta Foundation: The Dutch Complaints Bureau
for Discrimination on the Internet and the Magenta Projects.
Ronald Eissens also oversees and administrates Magenta’s web and
technological services.
103
Stefan Glaser
Stefan Glaser, deputy director of jugendschutz.net, has been managing the project of jugendschutz.net on right-wing extremism since
2000. He was co-founder of the International Network Against
Cyber Hate (INACH) and is a board member of INACH. He has a
degree in pedagogy and political science. For many years he worked
in education programs with kids, youngsters and adults. For jugendschutz.net, he and his team do research and develop educational
concepts and tools on cyberhate. In 2007 he and Thomas Pfeiffer
published the book "Erlebniswelt Rechtsextremismus" (The Adventurous World of Right-Wing Extremism). jugendschutz.net was
organizer of the fifth Annual Conference of INACH.
Valentín Gonzáles
Valentín Gonzáles is deputy-president and coordinator of
Movimiento contra la Intolerancia in Andalucia. Movimiento has
been the Spanish member of INACH since 2006. He graduated in
journalism at Madrid Complutense University, started to work in
various media during the early nineties until he worked at Onda
Verde, the communitarian radio of the Movimiento, an intercultural
and plural radio. In 1994, he started to work at a permanent campaign against racism and violence, which also initiates pedagogical
projects e.g. on holocaust education. Today he leads the local, regional and national projects of Movimiento and is responsible for
international relations.
Floriane Hohenberg
Since March 2005, Floriane Hohenberg has been an adviser on civil
society relations in the Tolerance and Non-Discrimination Programme at the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human
Rights (ODIHR) of the OSCE. She has worked together with
INACH in several matters, for example she hosted an INACH
workshop for Eastern European organizations building up a complaints bureau against cyber hate in 2005 in Warsaw. She was head
of the Berlin Office of the French Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation between 2000 and 2005.
104
Jan Keilhauer
Since 2006, Jan Keilhauer has been a scientific assistant at the professorship for media pedagogy and further education at the Institute
for Communication- and Media Science at the University of Leipzig.
He has studied communications-, media- and cultural science at the
University of Leipzig since 2000.
Barbara Liegl
Barbara Liegl is director of ZARA – Zivilcourage und AntiRassismus-Arbeit, the Austrian member of INACH. Currently, Barbara Liegl is a representative of ZARA on the board of the network
for social responsibility and in the workgroup European Diversity
Management of the Austrian Normungsinstitut. From 1999 until
January 2007, she was a clerk at the Institut für Konfliktforschung.
Since November 2006, she has been working at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights. She focuses on issues such as
migration and the documentation and monitoring of racism in Austria.
Brian Marcus
Brian Marcus is the Director of Internet Monitoring for the Civil
Rights Division of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). ADL is the
US-American Member of INACH. He has been an advocate for
many years on the use of the Internet as a means to promote civil
rights and educate the public about extremism online. Prior to joining the Anti-Defamation League, Brian Marcus delivered papers at
various academic, international and specialized conferences, and
spoke to audiences at schools, universities and community organizations across the country. He has appeared in national, local and
international media and trained law enforcement officers at all levels
(local to federal) as an expert on the topics of online anti-Semitism,
extremism, terrorism and bigotry of all types.
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Daniel Milo
Daniel Milo is chairman of People Against Racism (PAR, the Slovak
member of INACH). Since 2001, Daniel Milo has worked on various projects dealing mostly with the legal aspects of racism and
right-wing extremism. His duties included providing legal aid to
victims of racially motivated crimes, monitoring and research of
extreme right-wing groups and interaction with national and international NGO networks. In September 2007, he left PAR but he is
still working as an expert in the field of right-wing extremism, racism and related issues.
Rafal Pankowski
Dr. Rafal Pankowski has been the secretary of the Stowarzyszenie
Nigdy Wiecej (Never Again Association) and deputy editor of Never
Again magazine since 1996. Never Again is the Polish member of
INACH. He is the author of more than 200 articles on racism and
xenophobia published in Polish and international journals as well as
chapters in books and encyclopedias like "Racism and Popular Culture" published in 2006. A native of Warsaw, Pankowski studied at
Eton College and Oxford University. He earned his master's degree
from the Institute of Political Science at Warsaw University in 1998
and his Ph.D. at the institute for Applied Social Sciences at Warsaw
University in 2005. He currently works as coordinator of a national
hate crime monitoring and research program at Collegium Civitas in
Warsaw.
Thomas Pfeiffer
Dr. Thomas Pfeiffer attended professional training as a journalist at
"Leipziger Volkszeitung" (1992-1993), he received a degree in journalism at Dortmund University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in social science
at Ruhr-University Bochum in 2001 (thesis: "Media of a right-wing
new social movement"). He has been a lecturer at Ruhr-University
Bochum since 2000 and a researcher in the department for the protection of the constitution within the Ministry of Internal Affairs in
106
North Rhine-Westphalia since 2002. He has published several articles and books about right-wing extremism. In 2007, he published
the book "Erlebniswelt Rechtsextremismus" regarding media educational work against hate speech together with Stefan Glaser.
Bernd Schorb
Since gaining his habilitation at the faculty of pedagogy at the University of Bielefeld in 1994, Prof. Bernd Schorb has been professor
for media education and further education at the Institute for
Communication- and Media Science at the University of Leipzig.
From 1976 to 1994, he was director of the "JFF-Institut" for media
education in research and practice. In 1994, he became the first
chairman of the JFF. He is co-editor of the German educational
journal "merz - medien + erziehung" and director of the center for
media and communication (ZMK) in Leipzig.
Anne Taylor
Anne Taylor began her career as a teacher. Throughout the 80s she
was National Education Coordinator for the National Film Board
of Canada in Montreal. In 1995, after a three-year stint abroad as
Director of the Pakistan In-Country Orientation Program for the
Canadian International Development Agency, she co-founded, and
for ten years co-directed the Media Awareness Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion and support of media education in Canada.
Chris Wolf
Since 2005, Chris Wolf has been Chair of the International Network
Against Cyber Hate (INACH). He is a partner in the Washington
DC office of the New York-based international law firm Proskauer
Rose LLP, where he chairs the firm's Internet law practice. He has
been called a "pioneer in Internet law" reflecting his involvement in
precedent-setting Internet-related cases involving copyright, domain
names, free speech, privacy and jurisdictional legal issues. He is the
chair of Anti Defamation League's (ADL) Internet Task Force, and
is a senior ADL lay leader, serving on the National Commission,
107
National Executive Committee and National Advisory Committee
of the ADL. He has also published several articles regarding hatespeech on the Net.
108
INACH and its members
International Network Against Cyber Hate
(INACH)
Website: www.inach.net
Contact: [email protected]
Based: Amsterdam
The object of INACH, the International Network Against Cyber
Hate is to combat discrimination on the Internet. INACH was
founded on October 4, 2002 by jugenschutz.net and Magenta
Foundation, Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet.
Since its founding, it has developed into a cross-national NGO co nsisting of antiracist organizations from both sides of the Atlantic. All
of them monitor and counter hate on the Net in order to get co ntent removed and perpetrators prosecuted.
Austria – Zivilcourage und Anti-Rassismus-Arbeit
(ZARA)
Website: www.zara.or.at
Based: Vienna
ZARA is an anti-racist NGO whose work is based on three pillars:
training enhancing awareness and civil courage, public relations and
counseling of victims and witnesses of racist discrimination. ZARA
deals with all forms of racism. ZARA receives no funding for dealing with cyber hate and has no resources to monitor the Internet on
a regular basis at the moment, but it responds to complaints it receives and takes action against hate sites.
Belgium – Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism
Website: www.diversiteit.be
Based: Brussels
As an autonomous federal public service the Centre is competent
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for the entire country. Its mission is to promote the equality of opportunities and to oppose any and all forms of distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on so-called race, skin color,
heritage, background or nationality; sexual orientation, marital
status, birth, fortune, age, creed or philosophy of life, current and
future state of health, disability or physical trait. The Centre was
raised in 1993 and in 2006 the Cyber Hate project was launched in
order to respond to the rise of racism and xenophobia on the Internet. The project wants to raise awareness of the problem and to
respond to reports of racism on the Internet.
Czech Republic – Czech Helsinki Committee (CHV)
Website: www.helcom.cz
Based: Prague
The Czech Helsinki Committee is a non-governmental non-profit
organization for human rights. The main mission of the Czech Helsinki Committee consists of monitoring legislative activities concerning human and citizen rights, monitoring the state of human
rights in the Czech Republic with special emphasis on selected areas,
monitoring the situation of those groups of the population, in
whose case protection of rights requires special attention and providing free legal counseling for citizens, whose human rights have
been violated.
Denmark – Documentation and Advisory Centre on
Racial Discrimination (DACoRD)
Website: www.drcenter.dk
Based: Copenhagen
DACoRD assists in cases of racist discrimination and gives advice,
guidance and legal assistance to persons who are victims of or have
witnessed hate. This includes bringing cases to the police, courts and
even to international bodies like the UN Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Racist Discrimination (CERD). It also properly
monitors hate speech on the Internet.
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France – Ligue Internationale Contre Le Racisme Et
L'Antisémitisme (LICRA)
Website: www.licra.org
Based: Paris
LICRA was founded in 1927. This historical association was first
created in order to fight the growing wave of anti-Semitism in
Europe on the verge of the terrible events of the Holocaust. From
1932 on, it evolved to include the fight against the plague of racism.
LICRA strives to evolve with the new means used to spread racist
opinion. First founded to mobilize activists against racism, in 1972
LICRA was authorized to represent victims of racist acts during
court hearings. Today, thanks to the new information technology, a
part of its activities includes counteracting the propagation of racism
and anti-Semitic ideas.
Germany – jugendschutz.net
Website: www.jugendschutz.net
Based: Mainz
jugendschutz.net is the German cross-national organization for the
protection of minors on the Internet, founded in 1997 by the German Youth Ministries. Its tasks are defined in the Youth Media
Protection Treaty (JMStV), the German law about media use and
youth protection. jugendschutz.net deals with all kinds of illegal and
harmful content and since 2000 has been running a specific project
combating right-wing extremism. The team continuously monitors
cyberhate, counteract illegal content and does educational trainings
and handouts for youngsters and adults.
Latvia – Latvian Center for Human Rights (LCHR)
Website: www.humanrights.org.lv/
Based: Riga
LCHR was established with a view to promoting human rights and
tolerance in Latvia through monitoring, research, advocacy, legal
111
assistance and training activities. Since its establishment, LCHR's
main focus has been on two broad areas: human rights in closed
institutions and social integration, which includes all minorityrelated and tolerance issues. Since 2003, LCHR has broadened its
focus to anti-discrimination (all prohibited grounds), anti-racism and
hate crime issues. Since 1998, LCHR has been a member of the
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights.
Moldova – Youth Helsinki Citizens Assembly of
Moldova
Website: www.hca-moldova.org
Based: Chisinau
YHCA of Moldova aims to build civil society in Moldova and promote human rights. It also strives to promote European democratic
ideas and values in Moldova. YHCA works towards ethnic tolerance, rights of national and linguistic minorities, fights against racism, fascism and anti-Semitism, Transnistrian and Gagauzian regional conflicts in Moldova and develops conflict prevention policies.
Netherlands – Meldpunt Discriminatie Internet
(MDI)
Website: www.meldpunt.nl
Based: Amsterdam
MDI is part of the Magenta Foundation, founded as a reaction to
the increasing number of discriminatory and racist expressions on
the Internet. It handles complaints about discrimination based on
religion, descent, sexual preference, gender, skin color and/or age
and tries to get content removed. MDI's attention focuses mainly on
the Dutch part of the Internet. Educating kids, multipliers and police is another important part of MDI's work.
112
Poland – Never Again Association
Website: www.nigdywiecej.prh.pl
Based: Warsaw
As a leading anti-racist organization in Poland, the Never Again
Association aims at promoting human rights, multicultural understanding and the development of a democratic civil society in Poland. It is particularly concerned with the problem of education
against racist and ethnic prejudices amongst youngsters.
Romania – Media Monitoring Agency (MMA)
Website: www.mma.ro
Based: Bucharest
The Media Monitoring Agency (MMA) is a human rights advocacy
NGO, which aims to promote minority rights and the values of
democracy. MMA does research, educational trainings and regularly
monitoring of hate expressions on the Internet.
Russia – SOVA Center
Website: www.sova-center.ru
Based: Moscow
The SOVA Centre researches and monitors nationalism and xenophobia as well as hate crimes in Russia. SOVA does not receive
regular funding and its work is volunteer based. The most important
goal is to counter hate. SOVA also deals with hate speech on the
Net on the basis of complaints and monitoring and takes action
against the most dangerous websites.
Slovakia – People Against Racism (PAR)
Website: www.rasizmus.sk
Based: Bratislava
PAR started on a volunteer basis and has been working since 2003
as an independent civic community. Its main goal is combating ra113
cism, neo-Nazis and all kinds of discrimination in society. Through
constant monitoring of racism and its expressions in real life as well
as on the Internet the organization tries to achieve its goals e.g. by
means of co -operation with the police and other civic bodies, education, information campaigns or organizing public events. One important part of its work is providing legal counseling to victims of
racist violence.
Spain – Movimiento contra la Intolerancia
Website: www.movimientocontralaintolerancia.com
Based: In several Spanish cities
Movement Against Intolerance (MCI) is a plural, autonomous, open
and participatory movement that works against intolerance, racism
and violence. MCI aims at the defense of human rights and fundamental liberties, the elimination of violence as a form of conflict
resolution, social eradication of all forms of intolerance, the rejection of totalitarian ideologies and civic development of tolerance,
solidarity and participatory democracy.
Sweden – Diskrimineringsbyrån Uppsala (DU)
Website: www.diskrimineringsbyran.se
Based: Uppsala
DU is a Swedish anti-discrimination organization, established in
2005. Uppsala Föreningsråd, representing about 350 local NGOs, is
the owner of DU. DU deals with all kinds of discrimination protected by Swedish law e.g. on grounds of ethnicity, disability, gender,
religion and sexual orientation. From January 2009 age and gendercrossing identity or expression are also included. DU offers free
legal advice and assistance to individuals and information about
discrimination. Its preventive actions against discrimination are
directed to schools, unions, public bodies, NGOs and companies as
well as the public.
114
United Kingdom – Community Security Trust (CST)
Website: www.thecst.org.uk
Based: London
CST is the defense agency of the Jewish community in the UK. It
works closely with the Board of Deputies of British Jews as well as
with police and relevant departments of state. CST is entirely funded
by and provides training and assistance to the entire Jewish community. CST researches online anti-Semitism and Internet-use by extremists and refers offensive websites to the police and the Internet
Watch Foundation (IWF).
USA – Anti Defamation League (ADL)
Website: www.adl.org
Based: New York
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is the premier civil rights/
human relations agency fighting anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry in the USA. ADL defends democratic ideals and protects civil
rights for all. ADL carries out its mission through a network of
Regional and Satellite Offices in the United States, as well as abroad.
ADL is the leading non-governmental organization providing training on hate and extremism for law enforcement. ADL has trained
more than 40,000 law enforcement officers in the past three years.
On the Internet, ADL's Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network (LEARN) web pages have become a key resource for law
enforcement officers, recording over 6,500,000 visits since the
pages' inception.
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