QCEA speaks to fifty-seven governments
QCEA director asked to speak at international conference about hate speech
The director of Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) was asked to speak at an international conference about hate speech on the internet last month. Friend Andrew Lane addressed fifty-seven governments online and almost 300 participants about QCEA’s research into the issue. This included a 2018 report on ‘anti-migrant hate speech’; a ‘Choose Respect’ social media campaign, built for the 2019 European Parliament elections; and a multi-day ‘quiet diplomacy meeting’ at Quaker House.
Writing on the QCEA blog, Andrew Lane said: ‘We encouraged policymakers to take time to understand where hate speech comes from. We pointed to evidence that it sometimes reflects proxy concerns, such as unemployment or poor public services. And of course, some political actors seek electoral advantage by deflecting these deeper societal problems onto an “other’”.’
Andrew Lane also explored the concern of some leaders that acting to hinder hate speech is a curtailment of freedom of expression.
‘Hate speech is not a broad and diffuse concept encompassing many things that might be offensive,’ he writes. ‘Definitions of hate speech from European Court of Human Rights to Twitter are consistently narrow, concerning language that incites violence or language which is dehumanising (i.e. comparing people to animals).’
This dehumanisation, he says, ‘is rooted in ideas that were created long ago in Europe to justify the slave trade and colonialism… Meaningful progress on hate speech is not about deleting individual comments on social media, but addressing prejudice and dealing with the past’.
