Hate Speech, The Evil Side of the Surface Web 😈

 

This world became more open after internet came into the existence. Peoples all around the world can post any of their opinions about anything. This made everything transparent. Almost nothing is hidden or forbidden in many of the countries. To balance that sheet, it brought some unwanted things too. Blackmailing, copyright issues, illegal dealings, child porn, hate speech are some of these.

 

Hate speech is one of the biggest problems among them. Hate speech is an act of posing or expressing abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation. And the point of view of different medias on this  may differ.

According to the policies of YouTube, hate speech is refer as content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes:

✗    Age

✗    Caste

✗    Disability

✗    Ethnicity

✗    Gender Identity and Expression

✗    Nationality

✗    Race

✗    Immigration Status

✗    Religion

✗    Sex/Gender

✗    Sexual Orientation

✗    Victims of a  violent event and their kin

✗    Veteran Status

 

Not only YouTube. But also Twitter, Facebook and almost all one to many(Public) platforms are implementing AI programs, manual reporting, etc to control the hate speech. Anyways, nowadays peoples are more likely to show interest in activities related to trolling individuals or groups, roasting and mocking. Not only this generation, that’s the real nature of humans. Doesn’t matter if they are engaged in such activities or not, but users used to watch those contents mostly for their entertainment. In my perspective, people watches such things just for fun and humor.

 

 These posts may be posted  emotionally or intentionally. But those incidents will badly affect the victim’s confidence, reputation, personality and sometimes life too in a negative way.

There are many accusations against these Tech giants that, these platforms are promoting/don’t care about hate speech. Is this really true?

 

Here I have attached the percentage of Hate Speech content removed my the major social media platforms. So it’s clear that nothing can be 100% efficient.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But still there are some loopholes in these policy. For an example, creators can abuse someone vulgarly in the name of “Profanity”. Profanity is a socially offensive use of language, which may also be called cursing, cussing or swearing, cuss words.

In some worst cases some creators or institutions uses this loophole to spread hate among individuals or a group of peoples.

For an example, Someone can criticize or make fun of his Homo – Sexual friend according to his sexual orientation in YouTube in the name of “Ribbing”. And that creator is so safe from “YouTube’s Hate speech policy”. So, some individuals and groups took this loophole as an advantage and uses these platforms to express and spread their hate content all over the world. An astonishing thing about this hate speech is, you can scold anyone. Literally anyone. Even YouTube has no exception. YouTube earned a lot more hate after this pride month(2021), that they didn’t supported LGBT community in anyways.

The platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook are growing vigorously. For every moving years their revenue graph is moving in a “J” shape. So, will they really strike all of the troll and roast channels that brings billions of views? Will they think of inverting their revenue?

Even if they decided to strike every trolling channels out, will investors those who have invested billions of dollars accept this?

Many peoples can argue that trolling made for correcting wrong peoples. Is it really true? For an example, by comparing someone into an animal, bug, python or anything else according to her/his physical appearance can change that person’s life in a better way?

Can praising your favorite singer, player, actor, musicians, political leader and trolling their oppositions, competitors and their followers make them sing better, play better, act better, music better, serve better respectively?

So that “Trolling made for correcting wrong peoples” statement is still questionable.

And specially these social media networks are far different from other traditional medias (Newspapers, Registered News Websites, Registered News TV Channels). There should be an expert in those traditional medias who proofread all of the contents which going to be publish in that media next day or next hour. For an example, in newspaper companies, one collects all the relevant information with all required proofs and have to submit them to a higher officials. They’ll proofread it and publish it next day. But social medias are not like that. They have no enough employees to proofread all the contents that has been published in social media platforms. It’s really impossible too. Because not like other traditional medias like BBC, CNN that these social medias have billions of users posting something for every millisecond.

That’s why these social media platforms implemented many machine learning based Artificial Intelligents to moderated everything uploaded into their server. Sometimes, these machine moderators can be backfired.

In some instances, these bots cannot separate critical criticisms and hate speech. There are many instances where AIs suffer to filter hate speech from criticism and remove the non-violence content from the site.

Some examples are,

✔   On this year, India ran out of Oxygen cylinders and peoples started to accuse government for being irresponsible. It’s their right. But Twitter algorithm started to erase many tweets regarding this.

✔   In the same year, many Srilankan Tamils accused past Srilankan government for implementing genocide in Srilankan Civil war. But many of the Tweets have been deleted by Twitter algorithm. People were mad at government that, people thought Srilankan government deleted all of their Tweets. But truly, they were deleted by Twitter algorithm.

✔   Nigeria's government said it was suspending Twitter indefinitely in Africa's most populous nation, a day after the company deleted a controversial tweet President Muhammadu Buhari made about a secessionist movement.

So, there are many instances where these AI bots mess up with these Tweets.

 

Another problem is Non-English hate speech. This should be considered seriously. Here I have attached the graph which depicts the monitoization of hate speech in their native language of India.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because 36.29 % of the total internet users cannot speak English. That means, they post/share everything in their native language. So, there is a great chance for the hate speech to enter into the Internet without any barriers. Facebook has implemented filters for many languages other than English. But those AIs don’t have enough data about the language to conclude whether it’s offensive or not.

This is the reason why peoples affected by cyberbullying often in these days.

Surprisingly, one of the major internet giant of nowadays “TikTok” have not implemented any kinds of bots to control the hate speech in other languages except English. This is the reason why TikTok is know as the homeland of cyberbulling. It’s very essential for them to take action against hate speech.

 

🔴What’s the solution?

⚫  Expressing an individual’s own opinions is the right of every citizens of the world. Not like our darker pasts, these social networks really made everyone in a same level. People used to educate themselves with the help of the social networks about their rights. Social networks are really played a major role women ism, independent, crossing the educational barriers, casts, racism, homophobia and numerous economic and social problems. As usual there are disadvantages too. That doesn’t mean hate speech just popped into existence after the entry of social networks. Truth is we just got the chance to know about them more after the internet.

The biggest social networks are trying their best to offer a platform for peoples to express themselves and to connect safely while controlling hate speech, immoral stuffs,  murder talks, drug usage and drug trading etc. Anyhow, unfortunately some errors may occur due to the technical errors and in the name of profanity.

So, everything we need to do is, to educate ourselves. Educating our children about how important these social medias are and how to handle them will give a better result in decreasing hate speech. Just ignoring the hate/immoral speech is a better way to avoid unhealthy arguments. And these social networks also has the responsibility to educate their users to “Block or Report” the phase which contain the offensive languages. It’s everyone’s duty to report immoral stuffs, because most of the wars, race filterization has been started with a single hate speech. Social sites are the place for everyone. Trolling someone for a humour based content is acceptable(even that’s humour for the victim). But as an internet user we should respect everybody openions even if we are not agree with them. And expressing  our openions without offending anyone is the good internet practice.

 

If liberty means anything at all,

it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

- George Orwell