Borderless cyberspace
But other experts are not as convinced about the wisdom of France’s more aggressive approach, nor about whether it will ultimately pay off.
“Other countries have already adopted very restrictive measures, some really go to the limits of what is acceptable in terms of freedom of expression,” noted Bridget O’Loughlin, the coordinator of the Strasbourg-based No Hate Speech Movement, a campaign funded by the Council of Europe.
O’Loughlin said what her campaign and others are finding is that, while pushing governments toward uncharted legal terrain, repressive measures are extremely difficult to implement because of the anonymity of web users and the borderless nature of cyberspace.
“There are real limits on what legislation can do,” she said.
French officials are aware of their own limits. While championing tougher online hate speech legislation at home, they have also embarked on a campaign abroad to bring other governments into the fight.
Harlem Désir, France’s state secretary for European affairs, urged world leaders gathered at the UN in late January to support the international regulation of social networks in order to crack down on racist and anti-Semitic propaganda.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve last week took a rare trip outside the country to Silicon Valley, where he reportedly urged the heads of Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Google to help his government identify and block online content defending acts of terrorism and hate speech.
Wake-up call
It is unclear whether France will get what it wants from other countries and the Internet giants, with whom it has clashed in the past. In the meantime, it has launched an Internet site where citizens canreport worrying content to police, and launched a multimedia campaign to expose the recruitingmethods and myths used by jihadists.
Samuels and O’Loughlin agree that more also needs to be done on the education front.
Parents in both Jewish and Muslim communities need to be better informed about the kind of content children are encountering on the Internet, and be encouraged to have frank – even uncomfortable – discussions with them about what they see, said Samuels.
O’Laughlin said people who have become blasé about the vitriol they encounter regularly on the web need to be woken from that stupor and given the tools to identify and report online hate speech.
“Our methods of education and research focus on young people, between the ages of 13 and 30,” she said. “But what we keep hearing is that we need to be talking to kids who are even younger than that.”
